The hall felt endless.This will drive me mad, I thought. These voices that weren’t quite voices whipping around us, echoes of thoughts that were no more than drifting winds. The mist tickled my skin, unsettling and invasive.
I could go mad in here.
The fear pounded at my mind until, finally, the fog parted ahead. And at the end of the hall, towering twice my height, was a stone sphinx.
“I guess the constellation didn’t only refer to the entrance,” I said.
The beast was carved of the same alabaster that made up the perimeter and the steps into the museum, like she’d been here as long as the Gates of Angeldust had existed.
The paws of her lion’s body were the size of my head, her face incredibly beautiful, even frozen in granite. With a strong, square jaw, broad planes, and a shrewdness to the stony eyes, she was powerful. Should they beat, the wings at her back likely would have been stronger than Damien’s, larger than Sapphire’s.
I looked into that statue’s face, and I swore she looked back.
Tearing my eyes away, I searched behind her. Nothing but a bare wall waited.
“It ends here?”
Jezebel and Erista had the same thought, peering around the statue. “Was anything else said about the Hall of Wandering Souls?” my sister asked her partner.
Erista didn’t meet our eyes, studying the sphinx. “Only rumors and myths.”
Myths…
Again, my eyes found those of stone. So many myths surrounded us. Our entire lives, they had, and Jezebel and I had never even known our existence was written in the stars.
A pair of formidable sisters, long before the warriors you stem from walked Ambrisk.
Imbued with the powers of life and death.
Those harsh stone eyes belonging to a legendary, mythical being bore into me.
One to raise the constellations, another to hold their leashes. A summoner of myths, and a destroyer of them.
“Jezzie,” I said, not looking away from that hard stare. “I think I have to use the magic.”
“The Angellight?”
“No,” I said, fear creeping in. “The part of my magic I haven’t been able to control, whatever thefel strella mythosgave us. It’s more than a connection to the pegasus and khrysaor, it’s part of why they’re here, and…”
“One to raise the constellations,” Jez echoed my thought.
“But isn’t that what attacked Jezebel in the inn?” Erista asked, watching us warily.
Disgust twisted my stomach. Repulsion at the magic I didn’t understand within me, at the possibility that it could hurt Jez if I used it.
Her choking breaths echoed in my memory, the sounds of corpses shrieking as they burned to ash.
I explained, “I’ve been thinking about the catacombs. Comparing how the magic reacted there to the Angellight. The latter always feels so…definitive. I can read it as tethered to a specific emblem or Angel. It’s mine, instilled in me, but it has a clear property.”
They both nodded, and Jez asked, “And the other magic?”
“The rest…” I thought back to the desperation flaring through me as we fled the corpses down in the catacombs, likealarm bells ringing in my head. I hadn’t known what I was casting out at them, I simplydid. “It’s burning and effervescent like the Angellight, but it’s alive in a way that magic isn’t. It was searching that night.”
One to raise the constellations.
The two magics were often so similar, I wondered how many times I’d had both powers at my fingertips and didn’t realize it.
“I think it was trying to instill life into the corpses, but for some reason it backfired, and singed them to the ground instead.”
