She stomped her foot, her hands fisting at her side.“We had an agreement.”
Raja’s expression darkened slightly.“Agreement.”The word tasted almost amusing.
Celise straightened defensively, her shoulders pulling back beneath the weight of the awning’s shadow.“I help you, and you let me live.”
“Yes.”
“You need me.”
Raja stopped directly in front of her, close enough now that she had to tilt her chin to meet his eyes.Rain slid silently from the edge of the awning, dripping in a steady line just past his shoulder.“No,” he said quietly.“I needed, past tense, a way in.Looks like I found another way.”
Understanding finally moved across Celise’s face.Too late.Always too late.The storm overhead intensified suddenly, thunder rolling hard enough to rattle the nearby windows in their frames.And beneath it all, another pulse.The foundations again.This time stronger.Raja went still.Silver light flashed briefly across his awareness once more.
The child.
The foundations weren’t merely reacting anymore.They were listening.For the first time in centuries, irritation sharpened fully into something else.Not fear, but possibility.
Creation had answered him with something new.Something untouched.The Great Luna had placed a hand directly onto the scales.How disappointing.
“How?”Celise whispered suddenly, staring at him now with genuine confusion.“How can something unborn affect power that old?”
Raja’s gaze drifted toward the dark horizon, past the broken skyline where the storm hung lowest.“Because fear is learned,” he answered softly.
Celise frowned.
“The living are born in harmony with creation.”His expression cooled further.“Then time teaches them division.Pride.Violence.Shame.Hunger.”His eyes narrowed slightly.“But something untouched by those things ...”
Celise closed her eyes.“No,” she whispered.
Raja smiled without humor.“Yes.”
The rain intensified, drumming harder against the awning above her head, splattering against the pavement at his back.Far away, beneath mountains and stone and the oldest roots of the realms themselves, the foundations trembled once more.
Raja felt the child again.Small.Bright.Dangerous, not because she was powerful, but because she was believed in.Hope.Such a fragile thing.And yet history had proven repeatedly how many wars the living were willing to wage for it.
Raja turned away from Celise and stepped back into the rain-soaked street, the water rising past the soles of his boots.
“What are you going to do?”she called after him.
He paused only briefly, one shoulder half-turned toward her without offering his face.“The same thing death has always done.”
The streetlights overhead flickered violently.
Shadows stretched unnaturally long across the pavement, reaching toward him as though they recognized their own.
Raja’s voice drifted softly through the storm.
“I will wait for love to make them vulnerable.In the meantime, I think I’ll have a little more fun.”He glanced back at her.“Find Felspar, he also owes me.If neither of you can be of any use to me, I’ll be done with you and find others.”
Then he stepped between two veils of falling rain, and the storm closed behind him as though he had never stood there at all.
CHAPTER19
“Sometimes the thing that breaks you is not the truth itself, but realizing how long you knew it and still pretended you didn’t.”~Myanin
Myanin stoodat the edge of a corridor that had not existed five breaths ago, her boots planted at the threshold where the floor changed from polished bone-tile to something that whispered when she shifted her weight.She stared into a darkness threaded with faint gold light, and the back of her neck prickled in that particular way it always did when something old was watching her think.
The walls on either side of her were made of layered parchment pressed so tightly together they resembled stone.Every now and then a page shifted beneath the surface, words rising briefly before sinking away again like something drowning.She watched a sentence surface near her shoulder, curl back on itself, and disappear before she could read it.
