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My snort turned into a puff of frozen steam. “I’ve already heard that song and dance. I mean…what do you truly want? Control of this world? Revenge on the Fae for killingmy ancestor?” I took a halting step toward that awful darkness, my entire body fighting against the proximity.
“Because that’s the truth. These areourancestors who are dead. You and your sister survived. I would think you’d be happy about that. More power for the two of you to share. Unless neither of you are good at sharing.”
“She said you were talkative.” I sketched a bow, scanning the dark edges of the cave, looking for an exit. “We will not be sharing power after all, it seems,” he said stiffly.
“Oh, why not? She seems like such the sharing type.”
“I saw what you did in the forest. Does my sister know the magic answers to you now instead of her?” I stopped breathing when his silky laugh rolled over me. “I see…She does not. That is good. Her ignorance will buy us more time to negotiate, little thief.”
“I’m not sure what you can offer me, since you’re stuck here all alone.”
Nothing but silence greeted that statement. Only cold shadows reaching out of the darkness, smelling faintly of rot.
“I never asked for the magic, so if the Oracle wants to be angry about her plan failing, she should be pissed at herself.” I eyed the floor, the inlaid emblems, the pile of crushed bones. We’d thought there were only seven Old Gods, but we’d been wrong. There were more. A lot more.
“What is this place?”
“The Hammer, your people call this, in the northernmost part of the Taranth Mountains. A place very few have ever seen, and none live to talk about.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“We were created here when this world was young and magic plentiful. We lived here for many years before we ventured out from the mountains to the lands you call Valarian. From the day of our birth, the world began dying. Every millennium, the magic grows weaker.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because magic feeds on death and blood. And this world will offer up only so much of those. For centuries, we fan the flames of war to keep the cycle going. When the magic has diminished to nothing, we make one final, mighty offering. A sacrifice of blood and death to coax the magic to return. Every ten thousand years, these sigils reappear. All we needed to do was bring the right bloodlines together. Fate does the rest.”
I lifted my hand and stars fell between my fingers like sand. He was lying about the magic craving death and blood.
This power—this world—wanted none of those things.
As if in answer, the magic paused inside me, as if whispering,look, watch, listen.
“What do these symbols mean?” I asked instead, sweeping my foot across the floor. “What are they signs of?”
“Death and War, as you already know.” The two on my left glowed brightly for a moment—one of them Tavion’s dagger and diamond symbol—before they faded. “Conquest and wrath.”
Light rippled through the tree beneath my feet. “And then there’s you, Anaria. Life, in the truest sense of the word. The nucleus of everything.”
I refrained from touching my arm again, knowing somehow that would be showing my vulnerability to this monster. But I wondered about the lightning strike down my side. Why was I marked twice when none of the others were?
“Life?” I murmured, looking at my hands, the light glowing within. Terrible power, with terrible consequences, but maybe…Torin’s warning came back to me.
“Life is the only part of the magic that gives, not takes.”
What if it was how Ichoseto use the magic, not the power itself, that shaped everything? Intention, not chance, that determined the outcome?
There was something comforting in knowing I still had a choice in all of this, no matter how small.
“The magic is a double-edged sword. Everyone wants it, but few have the courage to claim it. Even fewer learn how to wield such power. And there are only a handful who did not allow it to consume them.”
My father wasn’t one of the latter, and neither was the Oracle. I just prayed the five of us escaped that fate, because we all saw the results, and none of us wanted to end up like them.
“There are ten markings but only seven are glowing.” I counted them again, trying to hold all the images in my head at once. “What do the others stand for?”
“Chaos and corruption.” His dry laugh skated over me. “But you’ve already met my sister and myself. As for the other three, they no longer matter. Old gods for prayers that no longer exist.”
“So when you were created, there were ten gods, but now there are only seven?”
