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After she muddled her way through the part he’d read again, she came to those strange lines on the bottom of the parchment. Loops and swirls, straight dashes and angular shapes. If she didn’t look directly at them, forced her vision to the side so they were only in the corner of her eye, they almost resolved into symbols, but other than that, she couldn’t make any sense of them.
Break the glass. I want to see it better.
Nyxara, ending Her silence after nearly an hour. Her voice sounded fainter tonight, and Lore took that as a good sign. If reading the parchment strained the bonds that kept the goddess from speaking clearly about Apollius, it meant they were headed in the right direction.
The glass dome was firmly attached to the lectern beneath it; when Lore pushed, it didn’t budge. “Think you could use some of your newfound firepower to get this thing open?”
Gabe’s brow rose, but he came to stand by her side, his arms crossed over his chest as he scowled down at the prophecy. “You do realize parchment is flammable?”
“Extremely, yes.”
“And that I am fairly new to the whole fire-god thing?”
It was surreal, the way they were able to joke about this. Whatever helped them cope. “I believe in you. It can’t be that much harder than turning things into stone with Mortem. Just…” She waved her hand at the glass. “Point fire at the edges and melt it down, or something.”
His eye rolled nearly into the back of his head, but Gabe bent to study the place where the glass was fused to the stone, pushing up his long black sleeves. “I haven’t tried anything like this,” he warned. “I’ve tried to avoid using it entirely, in fact.”
Lore was fairly certain it was too late for that, but she didn’t say it.
One blue eye closed. Gabe took a deep breath in through his nose, let it out through his mouth. Gently, he laid his fingers right at the seam of stone and glass.
Nothing, at first. Then a whoosh.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—flames spouting from Gabe’s fingertips, maybe. What she saw, instead, were threads of glowing orange, flaring with ember-crackle, seeping along the glass dome’s edge.
Earlier, when Alie crooked a finger and called the wind, Lore had paid more attention to what she felt than what she’d seen. Maybe if she’d been more observant, she would’ve seen other threads, shimmering gossamer-thin as they shaped the air. Like Mortem and Spiritum, but thinner. Less visceral.
A soft sizzling sound, a pop, the glass cracking at the onslaught of heat after so long in the underground chill.
Gabe pulled up his hands quickly, closing them to fists. The threads of fire fizzled out.
“Damn.” Lore’s eyes were wide, her wondering gaze fixed on his fingers.
Gabe flexed his hands back and forth, warily eyeing the now-broken glass and the prophecy beneath it, like he expected the parchment to burst into delayed flames at any moment. “We shouldn’t be messing with these powers if we can help it,” he said, as if rebuking himself. “We should be doing everything we can to stave them off.”
“Hopefully this can tell us how to do that,” Lore murmured, reaching carefully through the broken dome to gingerly pick up the parchment. Belatedly, she wished for a pair of Malcolm’s manuscript-handling gloves. “Hopefully this will tell us how to make the gods back off for another few centuries.”
“Or indefinitely,” he murmured.
The pain in his voice sliced at her. Lore’s life hadn’t left the hollows necessary for easy faith to grow. But Gabe’s had. Gabe had made faith his everything, and now they were working against the one thing he’d been taught to anticipate, taught to hope for.
What was left, when your faith burned up? Did it leave the kind of ash that could encourage new growth, or only wasteland?
The prophecy didn’t disintegrate in her hands. Tiny glass shards rained to the ground as she pulled the parchment free, glittering in the light of Gabe’s torch. Lore held the parchment in front of her eyes and waited for the gibberish scribbles at the bottom to resolve into something she could read.
They didn’t.
Am I doing this right? she asked the goddess in her head.
When Nyxara’s answer came, it was hushed. Let Me.
Only two words, but they swept Lore’s nervous system like a poison, too much meaning packed into scant syllables. Let Her come forward. Let Her be in control.
“No.” Lore didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Gabe’s head swung toward her, blue eye narrowed, his hand on the hilt of the dagger in his chest harness. She pressed her lips together so the rest of the words were only in her mind, not wanting to scare him. You said You were different. You said You didn’t want what Apollius did—
I don’t, Lore. She sounded so weary. I don’t want to take you over. But that script is ancient and I’m the only one of the four of Us who can read it.
The four of Us. Her, Nyxara, Gabe, and Hestraon, somewhere in Gabe’s head. Lore swallowed. Is Hestraon like You? Does He speak?
