Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Shadowbound Prophecy.
It must be. This has to be the Shadowbound Prophecy, the one that was stricken by magic from every record that we could find, the one that they murdered Queen Julia and King Leander for, the one that binds us together, that has bound us together from the beginning.
It isn’t the gift of some extraordinary power that we can use to save the kingdom.
It’s the end of the fucking world.
I turn to Ronan, my shoulders shaking, my legs going weak. I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe.
“Sylvie!”
He catches me as I collapse to the ground. He’s confused. He doesn’t realize; he doesn’t understand—
“What is it?”
“The world shall end! We’re going to end the world.”
Ronan shakes his head as he strokes my hair.
“That’s just what the people who made this place thought.
I can’t tell if they were trying to make it happen or trying to prevent it from happening by hiding it all here.
Maybe both. Maybe they guarded the secret here, hoping that when the next people like us who could fulfill the prophecy came along, they could pass the tests to prove themselves worthy of the gift.
Or maybe they thought by hiding it they’d make it come true. I don’t know.”
I’m sobbing without tears, my body too exhausted and defeated to cry. “I don’t understand,” I say through gasps. “Why aren’t you upset?”
He shrugs. “The way I see it, either it’s a prophecy that must be fulfilled, and whatever we do to try to fight it won’t matter.
The world will end either way. Or we can make a choice to fulfill it or not, and we’ll just choose not to.
There were a number of conditions. I bet if we don’t meet them all, nothing will happen. ”
His face is so perfectly composed it seems unreal.
“But what about the visions?”
He chuckles darkly. “I’ll admit I enjoyed that last one quite a bit.
It makes some sense, doesn’t it? If Vayla and Vahlo were truly lovers, not twins, and the apocrypha were removed from the Codex to keep them and those of us descended from them apart, then our ‘joining’ might be the answer to everything.
Gods, it might be worth it to end the world if that’s the way we do it. ”
I don’t laugh. I don’t feel anything except numb, numb and sad in a way I can’t articulate, like I’ve already lost him and my mind hasn’t caught up to it yet.
“I know you don’t put much stock in religion, but the power we have.
It feels like something beyond us, something beyond this world.
What if this is true? What if we are the gods reborn somehow, and this is their power? ”
“Then we’ll use it to remake the world. Don’t you see?
If it really is as you say, then the gods must have chosen us for a reason.
Maybe they chose Julia and Leander the same way, only something stopped them.
Julia was a reformer like me, remember. She healed Selara after the first civil war.
She gave common folk and shadow-born new rights; she tried to end slavery over a hundred years before it happened.
If the gods chose us, it’s for a reason.
We have the chance to do what she couldn’t, to wield this power to fix this world. ”
I wish I could be so certain. I wish I could be certain at all, but when I close my eyes, all I see is a sky filled with fire.
“Sylvie,” Ronan says, his voice turning serious as he senses my doubt. “Sylvie, tell me this hasn’t changed anything for you. It hasn’t changed anything for me.”
I’m silent for a long moment, unsure of what to say.
“Sylvie.” Ronan holds my face in his hands, his voice raising in pitch. “Sylvie, I love you more than this entire world. I would watch it burn one thousand times over before I even thought of letting you go.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I say softly. “You say that now, but I know what the world matters to you. What Selara matters to you. It’s part of why I love you, Ronan. You care about something more than yourself.”
“More than myself, yes. But not more than you. Nothing more than you.”
My heart shatters at his words. He’ll never walk away from me willingly, not even if it means dooming the entire world. He can’t.
And I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do it either. I want to believe that he’s right, that we can use the enormous power between us to fix things rather than ruin them.
But I’m terrified that he’s wrong. And if the world is doomed, it doesn’t just mean an end to Selara and the countries beyond. It may mean an end to everything and everyone. Seth, Quinn, Larus, Taran, everyone we know and love and care about dead.
And we could die too. We’re part of the world, aren’t we?
Would I walk away from Ronan to spare the world?
I don’t know.
But would I walk away from Ronan to spare him and the world?
“Let’s find the others,” says Ronan. “We got what we came for.” He reaches out with the new power, the boundless power, finding them where they wait for us in the middle of the fire traps.
Gods, I can feel them too. I can feel everything that he feels now, even other people. Even while exhausted.
No one should have this much power.
“Let me get the ink and paper. I want to write it down,” I say, heading to the stairs to fetch the satchel, which I dropped at some point during my fight with my other self.
Ronan nods, reluctantly letting me go.
The air above the chamber is strange, the red light of the braziers casting the same distorted shadows as before, their figures twisted and monstrous. I want to believe Ronan, but I can’t shake my sense of unease. This place feels wrong. It feels like the underworld clawing its way to the surface.
It feels like death.
I find the satchel just beyond the pillars, the ink bottle shattered and spilling onto the ground. “Never mind,” I call back to Ronan. “We’ll have to memorize it. The ink is gone—”
The second I step off the platform to grab the satchel, the braziers go out.
“Sylvie?”
The ground rumbles, and there’s a loud, crashing sound in the distance as something collapses.
Then a chunk of rock falls from overhead.
“Oh gods. It’s falling down. Run!” I scream.
Ronan flies up the steps to me, grabbing my hand and heading for the ramp up. A boulder shatters in front of us, narrowly missing us as we frantically climb the narrow path, the ground shaking and flinging me off the side.
“Ronan!”
I’m flying forward, my feet off the ground, my arms grasping at nothing, when Ronan reaches me with the new power, the light and shadow tendrils pulling me back to him.
“We’ve got to get Seth and Quinn,” I say once I’m back on solid ground. I reach out to them, finding them running down the hall towards us, the flame traps broken by the earthquake.
“Stay there!” shouts Ronan, his voice echoing towards them as they appear in the doorway.
“It’s blocked!” yells Quinn. “The way ahead is blocked.”
“Fuck!”
We race to the top of the ramp to join them, the four of us looking frantically for an exit. Several chunks of rock have fallen from above, but there’s only a single narrow shaft of light visible near the roof. It’s dozens of feet in the air from us, completely unreachable.
“There’s nothing down there? No way out?” asks Seth, pointing down to the platform.
“No,” says Ronan. “No way out.”
“What about that extraordinary power you were supposed to get? Did you get it?” asks Quinn.
“Yes, but it’s…I don’t know.” I have no idea what it can do. It’s our powers combined, but it’s also something beyond that. I’m just not sure exactly what.
Ronan’s eyebrows furrow. “If the prophecy is true, if there’s no way to prevent it, then we don’t die here. We can’t die here. We’ve already seen the future.”
“Excuse me. What?” says Quinn.
Seth whispers quietly to me, “What the fuck was down there?”
“Not now.”
Ronan closes his eyes and reaches out into the space with the new power, a pulse of light and shadow flowing outward in a circle. “There,” he says, leading us down the ramp a short way to a crack in one of the side walls. “Help me, Sylvie.”
I reach out with the power and understand what he means. The wall is thin here. If we punch through it, we’ll be in a chamber that leads outside.
It feels strange to know that. It sounds like something Larus would say. It’s almost like having earth magic, but that can’t be right.
Ronan forces the power into the crack, and I join him with mine. The rock shudders, chipping and shaking until finally shattering, opening a hole large enough to climb through.
“What the fuck,” says Quinn.
“Go,” says Ronan, pointing to Seth. “Help Quinn through, and then we’ll join you.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the shadow of a rock falling right where Seth is heading.
I stop it with the power, flinging it harmlessly below.
Holy fuck.
This power, the way it feels, the way I feel, the way we feel.
It feels unstoppable. Inevitable.
It feels like the end of the world.
So much so that when we race through the side cavern and emerge onto the hillside above Avaris, I expect the sky to be red and filled with fire.
But it isn’t, not all of it at least. The part of it directly to the west is going red as the sun slips behind the mountains, but to the east the sky is a cloudless blue.
The ground beneath us shakes.
“What the fuck was all of that? What did you find down there?” says Quinn, leaning on her cane for support.
“When we get back,” says Ronan, his eyes meeting mine, his feelings searching to see if I’ve changed my perspective at all on our situation.
I don’t know what to think, but it seems like I don’t have to decide right now. The altar from our vision should be just behind us, but I see nothing on the flat surface where the temple once stood, nothing but the same dusty ground we walked months ago when we first came here.
Ronan whistles loudly once, and the griffins fly to meet us.