“She cannot tell you,” the sphinx said, cruelty painting her voice. “No Soulguider may share this deepest secret. But I can.”
My sister’s eyes flicked nervously between her partner and the half-feline, once-stone beast.
“What is it?” I asked.
The sphinx tutted. “My kind does not reveal secrets so easily, Ophelia. That would be careless.”
Everything she had said thus far was not the point of this tale, not if she’d been able to offer it up. Nothing about the Ascension or how she came to be was the true mystery.
I groaned internally. Of course, I had to prove myself. Being chosen by the Angels was not enough for anything—except offering them my cursed blood. I was growing so tired of this, the frustration heating my veins, but I mustered up all the strength held within my title and asked, “What must I do?”
Was this the trial for the Soulguider emblem? My hand drifted to Starfire’s hilt, but the sphinx shook her head at the movement.
Where all dead and riddled secrets lie…
And sphinxes were not known for their physical feats.
I dropped my hand from my sword and quirked a brow. “What is the riddle?”
The sphinx lifted her head proudly. When she spoke, her words drifted through the mists, obscuring those wandering spirit voices and coating the marble walls, voice like a song:
“Older than the stars,
and more powerful than the mists.
A rarity of crimson crowns,
guide by starlight and tides,
rule of death and fate,
veins of renown ebb rarely through the world.
Gifted to the Angel guiding souls
by a womb of pure intention.
What am I?”
The final note rang along the marble walls, and the sphinx settled into her position.
My mind was blank. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I expected. A riddle of the sphinx was surely meant to be difficult.
“Choose wisely, Alabath sisters,” the sphinx said with a smile that could only be called sinister. “For if you provide the wrong answer, you become my prey.”
My stomach bottomed out. All the rumors about the sphinxes were true, then.
“And if we don’t answer?” Jezebel asked.
My head whipped toward her. “What?”
She gave me an incredulous look. “If we aren’t certain, we shouldn’t try. We’ll find another way to get whatever information she has.”
But there wouldn’t be another way.
I may not have been certain what the sphinx knew—whether she was simply guarding the emblem or something else—but whatever it was, Damien and Valyrie had told me to come here. To find the secrets in the Lendelli Hills.
Whatever those secrets were, we needed them.
