“If you choose not to answer, I will open the door through the mists.” The sphinx waved a paw behind us, where that original archway had been. “But I must forewarn you, you will not be given a second chance.”
“Ophelia,” Jezebel whispered, a note of pleading in her voice.
I brushed a strand of her cropped hair behind her ear. “Let’s think for a moment, Jez.”
Think.
This riddle was not vastly different than the prophecies Damien had delivered. A varied motive, certainly, but the rhythmic cadence and ambiguity rang with the same haughtiness.
If Damien had delivered this, where would I have started?
“What words seem important to you?” I asked Jezebel. Erista stood silently at her side, avoiding our eyes.
Jezebel sighed, clearly still against this idea. “Something older than the stars,” she mused.
“That jumped out to me, too. And more powerful than mists,” I echoed.
“Angel of Souls…so it’s related to Xenique.”
“Makes sense.” I looked around us. “Given all of this.”
“Crimson…” Jez trailed off, and I nodded. “Crimson is not typically a clan color of the Soulguiders.”
“And veins and land,” I said, voice low.
Jezzie’s nose scrunched. “I didn’t want to think about that one.”
“It could be referring to the streams,” I suggested. “They cut through the dunes like veins.”
“Could be.” She nodded, more comfortable with that suggestion, but unless the answer was a reference to Xenique’s magic, I wasn’t sure what the veins would signify, and what could it possibly be about the Angel’s magic?
“More powerful than mists…” I repeated, looking at that haze crowding the ceiling. Mists couldn’t be the Spirits, though. That wouldn’t make sense.
“The Angels are more powerful than the Spirits,” Jezebel said, following my sightline.
“Crimson and veins,” I repeated. My gaze dropped down to my scarred hands, where my blood had been used too many times to count.
Angelblood?I didn’t want to voice it aloud lest the sphinx think it was a guess, but could the answer truly be so obvious?
Crimson…ran through veins…more powerful than mists…but?—
“Older than the stars,” I muttered.
The Angels were not older than the stars. To be older than the stars would be to be older than Ambrisk itself. Neither the Angels nor their blood stretched back those eons.
But…others did.
Stars and tides. Death and fate.
Crimson, veins.
My eyes sliced to Erista.
She’d mentioned it once. Only once, and so many months ago, it felt like another life entirely. There was no way she’d known this moment would come—that she had seen it in one of her visions. Because Soulguider visions only predicted death, and none of us would be dying here tonight.
The Soulguider met my stare, and hers dipped ever so slightly. An indication that when she mentioned this substance all those months ago, on a mission to the Southern Pass in the Mystique Mountains to head off an Engrossian host, she thought it was a piece of information we may one day need.
I turned back to the sphinx, knowing if I voiced the incorrect answer, my life would be sacrificed.
