Leagues of winged beings, those with skin that swirled like galaxies, and others who carried themselves with the might of a god, rings on their hands and chains around their necks.
Bridges wove tapestries across starry skies.
A realm bedecked in darkness, another crackling with lost lightning.
And this realm—Ambrisk—was soaked in shining crimson blood, the mist of the Warrior God cleansing and tainting as itswept across Gallantia. Among the wreckage lay the bodies of my friends. Of our alliance armies and mythical beasts—gryphons and sphinxes and pegasus alike. Fates, even a pair of severed feathered wings.
And Echnid reclaimed an empty world, set to repopulate it with subjects bowing to him. He ripped a tear between realms—a bridge reopened—and they flocked through.
I gasped, eyes snapping open.
But I wasn’t in my room back in Xenovia. I knelt upon a glimmering marble floor, pristine white and shimmering with silver. The smallest speckles of deep sapphires and amethysts littered the solid slab beneath my knees, the same shades in billowing curtains draping across the windows.
And before me stood two women I’d revered all my life: Moirenna, the Goddess of Fate and Celestial Movements, and Valyrie, the Starsearcher Prime Warrior. I bowed before the Angel, waiting to speak until she commanded me to rise.
When she did, I angled my chin up to her companion. “How are you here?” I asked the goddess. The now-dead goddess. “Did Echnid truly…”
Moirenna nodded gently, an amethyst amulet around her neck dipping with the movement. It caught the starfire burning in sconces around us but didn’t glimmer, like it winked out as her existence had.
Needing a moment to gather the weight of a god being slain, I searched the space we were in. I couldn’t see beyond the thin curtains, but power tugged at my skin. It hummed, much louder than my nine Fate ties.
“I thought he was only going to banish you, not…How is this even possible?” I muttered, still watching those curtains waver. No glass lined the floor to ceiling windows they covered. From the glimpses between the pillars, it was empty air. Like a world had been swallowed whole beyond these bounds.
My attention snapped to Moirenna again, the Angel hovering quietly at her side.
“What will happen to Ambrisk now? To the Fates?” I asked.
Moirenna lowered herself to the ground, kneeling before me as if we were equals. “Child, the Fates are imperative to realms beyond your own. Everything I sacrificed matters beyond Ambrisk. And it was a choice I proudly made.”
“A choice…you knew this would happen?”
Of course, she did. She was not a mere Starsearcher, seeing the fortunes the Fates passed. She was the one who commanded them, who wrote them into star maps in the inky sky. While legends said Valyrie controlled the Fates, the goddess penned their messages. Or, she had.
“I knew that eventually, I would fall to my brother’s hand. I did not know which brother or when, but it was always where my path led.” There wasn’t an ounce of regret in her voice. “There may be a way for me to weigh the other possibilities, other realms I will dance in. Forms I can take. But for now, this is my end.”
I shook my head, my hands clasped tightly in my lap, and my voice was barely a whisper. “How did he do it?”
“There is magic alive on Ambrisk that has not been seen in…” A heavy pause. “Since the stars were forged. It brings once impossible feats to life.”
“What will happen now?” I whispered.
“The Fates persist,” Moirenna confirmed. “As does your Angel to rule over your warrior clan.” My gaze flickered to Valyrie, lilac ether unspooling around her wings as powerful as ever. “But you, my sweet girl”—Moirenna cupped my cheek, and I jumped at the contact—“are so much more now.”
“Wh-what?” I stuttered, the goddess’s touch chilling my skin. My magic pulled toward her. The Fates grew even more insistent, humming through my mind.
My palms tingled with it, and when my gaze slipped down, I lurched back. Starlight glistened at the tips of my fingers, burning white and fiery.
Moirenna kept her palm on my cheek, directing my attention back up. In a motherly gesture I hadn’t felt in over twenty years, she swept a thumb across my cheekbone. “Sweet girl, do not be afraid,” she soothed.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“You are the Fatecatcher,” she whispered. “I was able to sacrifice myself against Echnid unlike my brothers and sisters because I had you to uphold my power. You are born to wield the Fates upon the death of the goddess. Your future has been foretold—for eons. As long as I have existed.”
“I saw it in my final reading,” Valyrie confirmed. My harried eyes met her calm navy ones, and I remembered—the scrolls. Titus had given us a scroll that recorded the Angel’s final reading. We’d assumed it had been about the Angel’s death, but it wasMoirenna’s. And it had used the termFatecatcher, though we hadn’t known what it meant. We’d glossed right over it.
When the Angel dipped her chin, it was such a human movement that I steadied my breathing, collecting my thoughts.
“Why am I the Fatecatcher? Why not Valyrie?”
