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I couldn’t see who that voice belonged to, but I saw everything else with a clarity I wished I did not possess. Blindness would be better right now, because ignorance was a welcome shield between me and the truth that lay all around me.
And right now, I would give anything not to know what I did.
“Your sister?”
“My sister. You know her asthe Oracle, as she calls herself these days. She thinks the name gives her a sense of legitimacy.”
Fuck. I stepped away from the crushed pile of bones so fast I scraped my bare foot over the closest emblem glowing in the sparkling black floor. Bands of gold, finer than any I’d ever seen, were inlaid by a stone mason who knew his craft.
A perfect golden circle, bisected by two lines.
A twin to the mark branded on Zorander’s chest.
I swallowed down my fear. “War,” I said to myself, moving to the next, which was inert and unrecognizable. Then I cut across the room to the glowing circle with the arrow, Raziel’s mark. “Death.”
Across the room another mark glowed, a sword and diamond. Tavion’s mark.
My feet burned, I couldn’t feel my hands, but I stumbled back to the center of the room, where a tree of pure Cassiopian silver glimmered with flecks of mica, like the stardust in my magic.
I touched my arm, the matching symbol etched into my flesh, and swallowed down my horror. The tree’s branches pointed to the back of the cave, to the endless darkness lurking there, along with the owner of that dead, empty voice.
The Oracle’s brother.
There were two of them.Two Old Gods, not one.
Killing the Oracle would have been a stretch, but now that there were two…I didn’t allow myself to consider how bad our odds just became. If I survived this, then I’d worry about the fact there weretwo of them.
“In all my time, I have discovered one thing to be true. This world must be constantly fed in order for life to continue. My sister and I have been feeding that hunger for a long, long time.”
Such lazy entitlement to those words. As if this world was at their mercy, not the other way around. “You are but the latest iteration of a cycle that has, and will, repeat itself over and over again.”
I might never be as strong as these creatures, not when they’d existed…forever.
But I wouldn’t underestimate them.
My best defense was using my own weakness against them. Make this creature see I was not a threat, and maybe he’d let me go. Or maybe he’d let his guard down, and I’d get a chance to kill him.
The thing about immortality…it made you over-confident.
And I’d been underestimated my whole life.
A meek little slave, ducking her head and scurrying through the halls. But always watching. Always aware. Always ready.
And now…I wasn’t defenseless. I had power, I just had to figure out how and when to strike. To find a weakness wherever I could and exploit it.
“Since Carex killed his father?” I asked, because usually the best way to get the truth was to lead with a lie. The ruse worked remarkedly well with humans and Fae, maybe it would work with a god.
“Since before his ancestor killed the rest ofus.” His answer thrummed with repressed rage, and followed by the sulking quiet, I imagined he regretted his show of temper.
This…might not be the trap he and his sister intended.
If he was as arrogant as his sister, perhaps I could get the information we needed to destroy them both. This god was alone. Maybe he’d been alone for a long time. Cut off and, from the sounds of it,pissed off.
“I am so tired of games,” I said, wondering if I already had frostbite. I sent more magic spilling around my feet and, wonder of wonders, the stone warmed enough that maybe I wouldn’t freeze to death right away.
“Your sister has us fighting your wars and killing Reapers just to prove ourselves worthy. It’s becoming tiresome. Why don’t we cut to the chase? What do you expect to get out of all of this?”
“A new world.”
