Yet again, Nox ignored her. Her face heated. If Nox was after a history lesson, she would gladly give it to them. If only to refocus this conversation on what she wanted to know. “After Queen Daephinia sundered the realm in three and the Shattering took both her and the dark sorcerer Malakar from this world, the celestials?—”
“Not you,” Nox interrupted, their crimson eyes flashing between her and Cedric. “Him.”
“Why?” Elyria asked sharply.
Finally, Nox deigned to reply to her. “Because I have a hunch, and I like to see if my hunches play out. Take a seat and listen, Revenant. You just might learn something too.”
Elyria groaned but fell into a chair next to Thraigg, pulling one knee up in front of her and wrapping her arms around it. She looked expectantly at Cedric and Nox, her chin tilted up, head cocked to one side—the picture of impatience.
Cedric sighed and scrubbed his hands down his face. “Fine. How far back do you want me to start, exactly?”
Nox smiled, their teeth glinting in the light flickering from sconces dotted about the chamber. “Start where all stories should,” they said. “At the beginning.”
46
ORIGINS
CEDRIC
With a nodand another clearing of his throat he’d hoped would nudge some of the nervousness from his body—even though he didn’t quite know what he was nervous about—Cedric began.
“As Elyria said, after the Shattering?—”
“Ah-ah, I said to start at thebeginning,” Nox interrupted.
“This is the beginning—what led to the creation of the Arcane Crucible.”
“Not just the beginning of the Crucible.”
“You want an, ‘In the beginning...’ type of tale here? Don’t you think there are better things to be doing with our time?”
“I don’t see anyone coming to rush us out of here, do you? We have nowhere to go, no one to see. Not until theCrucible shows us what comes next, or we all go mad—whichever comes first.”
Cedric sucked in a breath, tempted to roll his eyes at the nocterrian. But alas, they weren’t wrong. In the hours that had passed since the confrontation with Evander, the Sanctum had been eerily quiet. Until the next chime blared or glowing doorway appeared, they were stuck.
“In the beginning,” Cedric affected a deep, booming baritone, eliciting a chuckle from Elyria that pulled a smile from him, “there were the Five. Solaris, the Sun Goddess, Lunara, the Time Keeper, Noctis, Warden of Shadows, Earth Mother Gaia, and Aurelia, Guardian of Balance.”
At the mention of Aurelia, both Thraigg and Elyria huffed in unison. Cedric ignored them.
“Through the celestials, Arcanis flourished. Though they had taken oaths never to interfere directly with the affairs of the mortals that populated their world, their benevolence”—another huff from Elyria—“led the peoples of Arcanis, human and Arcanian alike, to prosper. There were periods of unrest, disputes that arose between races, to be sure. But for the most part, we all lived our separate lives on our separate sides of the continent. Until, eventually, came the rise of the fae queen, Daephinia. And with her marriage to the human king, Juno, the disparate realms were connected, made into one.”
“And here is where I suspect the accounts written in your history books may differ from Arcanian ones,” Nox mused.
“Why is that?” Cedric arched a brow. “Do the Arcanian texts paint prettily over the misery that humankind went on to suffer under Queen Daephinia’s ironfisted rule?”
“Ain’t a damn thing wrong with being an Ironfist,” muttered Thraigg, at the same time Elyria said, “What suffering?”
Cedric answered Thraigg first with a sidelong look. “You know very well I meant nothing to do with your surname.” He then turned to a bemused Elyria, equal confusion on his own face. “Surely you are not serious.”
“Queen Daephinia and King Juno’s rule was star-blessed,” she said, brow furrowing. “Arcanis prospered, cities sprouted, and the birth of the princess heralded the arrival of many other babes born.”
“Mixedborn babes,” Thraigg corrected sullenly, “and look how well that all turned out.”
All four of them fell silent for several moments, and Cedric couldn’t keep his mind from conjuring a memory of that human woman, pregnant with a mixedborn child, wailing as if her life was ending while Cedric and his fellow knights hauled away the fae father. Perhaps her life did end that day. Perhaps she refused to allow her baby to be taken from her after it was born, as all mixedborn babies were upon discovery.
Perhaps she shared her child’s fate.
“Yes, well.” Cedric cleared his throat again. “I wouldn’t expect any of you—any Arcanian—to think otherwise. But even with a human king ruling at Daephinia’s side, it was hardly rainbows and roses for us. Humans may outnumber Arcanians, but with your magic, your physical advantages, and a fae queen ruling over all, we were never going to come out on top.”
