Page 111 of Revels on an Angel’s Grave

It hungered for more, her skin sensitive.

“Let’s keep going,” she said.

Roremar fell into step with her as they took turns at the insistence of her magic. His wariness burrowed into her spine with every tunnel they ventured down, but he didn’t ask her to stop, didn’t cage her power.

The air was damp and stale. If Emmeline had to guess, no one had been down here in centuries. Stone peeked through the moss covering the walls. On some paths, jagged veins glimmered, like lightning bolts cutting through the rock. On others they swirled like cresting waves.

“We have to have traveled at least a mile,” Roremar speculated aloud. “How far do you think these tunnels go?”

“I don’t know,” Emmeline answered. “The ones I followed before could have led anywhere.”

“Did they feel like these?”

She nodded, every thought rushed and dizzying. “This is more powerful, but my magic was insistent down there, too. Like the Fates were louder underground.” She eyed Roremar. “Still hear nothing?”

“Nothing,” he said, his jaw popping as they took one final turn⁠—

And emerged into a towering cavern, a glass-carved dome stretching impossibly high with a crack running through one side.

“Woah,” Roremar breathed, awe deepening his voice. “How far beneath the city are we?”

“I don’t know.”

Emmeline slowly ventured forward beneath the domed ceiling. A mosaic sat at the peak, a silver telescope surrounded by swirling blue and purple patterns that resembled star-dusted cosmos. The designs stretched all the way around the circular walls, reaching to the floor, veins of silver embedded throughout.

Around the room, archways framed hollowed out alcoves in the walls, holding statues and artifacts. Vases and busts in an array of marble and silver, dusty but retaining the kind of beauty only historic antiques bore.

Two tunnels stretched in the opposite direction of the one they’d taken, and around the telescope in the center of the ceiling, markings were carved into the glass.

No, not markings.

Words. In Endasi.

Emmeline’s skin prickled at the language of the Angels, the same one in the scroll she’d been gifted.

And she knew, by Fates or by fortune, she’d been meant to find this place.

Emmeline took slow, uncertain steps toward the center of the room, each strike of her heels against the veined silver floor echoing around them. When she stood in the heart below the telescope, Emmeline lifted her gaze to the sky, and a reading slammed into her.

She had a foot in each realm, both fully visible and real. As real as Serchus had been the other day.

In the reading, she stood in the center of this very cavern, saw all the same things before her now, but…

It wasn’t her.

She was within someone else’s mind, seeing through their eyes. An unfamiliar power hummed around her, rippling off her fingertips, and something pulled heavily at her back.

Emmeline looked over her shoulder, finding white feathered wings.

“Valyrie,” she gasped.

“Huntress?” Panic pitched Roremar’s voice outside the reading. Hands gripped her shoulders. Squeezed her wrists. “Talk to me, Huntress.”

“She was here. I’m…I’m in Valyrie’s mind. I’m seeing what she sees, but…” The cavern was so much newer, more cared for. The tiles on the telescope mosaic shone, a few of the alcoves empty like the perfect art pieces hadn’t been selected yet, and there was no crack down the wall. “I think I’m seeing the past.”

Typically, the Fates showed Starsearchers future fortunes, but Emmeline had long since stopped believing her sessions followed any predetermined rules.

She recalled all the readings that had shown her feathers recently. Was this why? They wanted to send her here, to imply some connection with Valyrie?