I wasn’t sure if I was on some sort of Fate plane or envisioning this. Some scholars believed sessions truly transported Starsearchers to a Fate Realm and only our bodies remained in our own, but if I closed my eyes, the marble floor of the room I was reading in chilled my knees. The window was open, and birds sung merrily on the grounds of Harlen’s home. My hands were folded upon my thighs, and the various incense I’d lit twined on the air.
I believed that the purpose of the scent was not only to trigger a Fate but to ground us back to that earthly realm, whether we left it or not, and I focused on those bodily sensations as I waited for Arenothos to seek out thehow.
How Echnid was going to separate godly ties to warriors.
How he was going to banish the gods from Ambrisk.
How.
Starfire swelled, trails stretching up and out. Sparking and sputtering. I squinted against it, searching the white-hot depths as night-bathed heat licked along my skin and sang to my magic.
Wrath and Redemption.
At the nearness of the Fate, the two feelings rose within me, purring to his influence. My blood boiled, teeth grinding, but a desperate hole opened in my chest, as if yearning for vindication. The conflicting desires intensified as he sought. Until, within the heart of the star, an image of Ophelia flickered to life.
As it had every time I tried to seek Echnid.
“I know they are tied together, but what do their entwined fortunes determine?” I asked.
“You have already seen this answer, Fatecatcher,” Arenothos said, voice rumbling like a stampeding legion.
“When?”
Arenothos dragged up an image that had haunted me. The future I’d first read of Ophelia. The one Titus had passed off as his own during the Rapture in Damenal, when all I’d seen was darkness, destruction, and her. And Titus had used it to throw Ophelia’s rule into question.
“This Fate I once showed you has come to pass,” Arenothos declared.
My body iced over. “What?”
“This is the future Ophelia Alabath has condemned the world to in freeing the Warrior God. On the current path, destruction will rain upon Ambrisk, and you will all bow to his mercy.”
“No,” I gasped. Ophelia had only been doing what we all wanted her to do. She’d been doing what the Angels had instructed. “Show me the way to fix it, please.”
“I do not have the answer to that,” Arenothos said. “You know you cannot change fortune, Fatecatcher.”
And before I could scream my fury at the Fate of Wrath and Redemption, I tore myself from the reading. Panting, I landed on all fours in the center of my room.
There had to be some other answer. Perhaps he could only see that future because it surrounded his properties. Theoretically, all Fates could access a number of different scenarios that made up fortune, woven together like the silky strands of a spider’s web.
The Fate of Cruelty and Adoration could reach the same conclusions as Wrath and Redemption because cruelty was often born of wrath. The way they presented the paths, though…that was where variations lay. A hundred Starsearchers could see the same reading and interpret it differently due to their Fate’s whims at that moment.
But I would take anything they offered to help us out of this.
As I watched the wavering lines of gray in the white marble flooring, I considered my options. Perhaps I’d wait for the Fate of Fertility and Betrayal to speak. We did not have a Fate of Death, but fertility dealt with all manners of lifespans, stretching all the way to endings.
The clock on the mantle let out a loudding, and my head snapped up.
“Oh, Valyrie’s tits!” I sprang up and dashed from the room.
“Running late as always,”Harlen teased when I sped into the foyer where he, Cyren, and Jezebel were waiting. The tall glass doors were thrown open, dull sunshine falling across the dark wooden floors and beams lining the vaulted ceiling. Abstract cerulean stained-glass windows stood on either side of the entryway, calming the morning light.
“I was never late a day in our young lives, Harls, and you know it.” I looked at the grandfather clock to confirm, then atJezebel, clad in one of her brown-leather Mystique dresses with a sword strapped to her back. “Not flying back?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to stay around for a few days. I’ll return to report to Cyph when we feel there’s something to share.” I didn’t remind her that we could simply write to Cypherion should the need arise.
Angels, even thinking his name sent twisting emotions through me. Anger that he wasn’t going after Ophelia and Malakai, doubt that he didn’t wantmeto, yearning for this distress between us to be relieved, concern that something awful would happen in Xenovia while I was in Valyn.
“Vale?” Harlen asked, piercing that storm cloud. I blinked away the mist in my eyes, and my oldest friend laughed. “Daydreaming again?”
