Heir of Prophecy

Prologue

Seven hundred dresses rustle across the rose-marbled floor of the Temple of Echoes as the Sight-Blessed priestesses prepare to battle the world’s end.

Pronounced clavicles peek above the moth-eaten fabric of their dusky vestments.

Bony wrists extend from scalloped cuffs to press flaring match to eager wick.

The Desolate Winter had reached year twenty-nine, each subsequent year whittling the priestesses’ hope like the carver’s blade, until there was no faith left to alleviate their hunger.

During the first one hundred years of Fresh Winter, the most revered sect of all Zenaidan priestesses, the Chorus of Echoes, fasted with fervent joy—hope sustenance enough.

But now, with Desolate Winter having stretched into months, then years, and eventually decades, conviction had long since been devoured by desolation.

The Echoes were ravenous; their hunger bloomed like black-spored mold beneath their ribs, and they waged a constant battle between faith and despair.

It was all they could do to resist the urge to gnaw at their own flesh, to resist feasting on their own crimson blood.

One drop of blood, one morsel of meat, even the flesh of fruit, well, it would spoil their fast, ruin their divine calling.

Echo priestess Nyrah Autumnborn’s fingers trembled as she cast aside another broken match.

She was frail; she hadn’t the dexterity it took to ignite the head.

If she did not manage this task, their downfall would be assured.

Seven hundred priestesses to light seven thousand candles. She must do her part.

The lives of every living being depended on it.

The unlit wicks on the dais seemed to mock her as patches of light bloomed throughout the dim chamber, candle after candle taking to flame. Nyrah blinked back tears as her eyes began to sting from smoke and the sharp scent of sulfur.

If only she still possessed magic.

When she had been little, and the Season Cycle was still blessed, bathed by the sweetness of Autumn Tide, she could light every candle in this room with only will and a carefully drawn incra—no need for these spindly matches. Yet as winter dragged on, so too had magic dwindled.

Nyrah suppressed a blasphemous curse as another match splintered against her thumb. She flicked the jagged stick away and stilled her shivering form, closing her eyes to impart a prayer to Valric, the deity of sun and summer.

It had been Nyrah who had Seen the first of three comets in the sky. She was the one who dreamed of it, whose eyes had been seared by its light, though they’d been closed in slumber.

And, the following day, when a comet lit the Zenaidan sky, proving her vision true, the Chorus of Echoes knew their prayers had been answered.

Over a century of fasting had not been in vain.

A fervor ensued as holy messengers were summoned, and word sent to every temple in the Veridian Realm.

When the third comet cast its light over the High Temple, the unprecedented and unbearable horror of an extended winter season would draw to a close.

An omen that the Heir of Prophecy, the Most Cherished, the Salvation of All, the Queen, King, or Monarch of Spring, would be found.

Finally, Spring that was Promised would unfold, healing the earth. Magic would revive the land. Magic would spill from her sisters’ lips like ripe, blushing fruit upon a tree.

Hope rekindled, Nyrah inhaled through her nose, relishing, now, the sting of smoke, and picked up the box of matchsticks. The next match ignited, and when she lit the wick protruding from the precious beeswax candle, Nyrah couldn’t help but smile, though the flesh on her lips cracked and bled.

She was the last to light all her candles and, thus, the last of seven hundred to lift her voice in prayer.

The Temple of Echoes had been erected 4,800 years before, and yet the acoustics were as pure as the day the first notes had been sung.

Nyrah was just one of thousands of priestesses, but her order was special; one must be born with the Sight to join her sisters in this song.

To be in this room was an experience most would kill for; to kneel before the gods and raise one’s voice to join the enduring Chorus of Echoes was the highest honor.

Though it had been over twenty years since she’d last raised her voice in song, and five hundred years before that when the canticles of predecessor priestesses sang—the temple was spelled with formidable incras inscribed during the peak of Summer Heights, and thus the Hymn of the Chorus of Echoes never wavered, echoing through the chamber, eternal.

Nyrah tilted her head backward, ignoring the slip of her hood and letting her braids escape and cascade down her shoulders to brush against the stone floor as she bared her face to the gods, opened herself to the hymn.

The prayer enveloped her, until it felt as though she sang not just with her voice, but the voices of the thousands of predecessors who had kneeled before her to sing this hymn.

This would be the last time it would be sung in her lifetime. The next Desolate Winter would be brought to an end by priestesses yet to be born.

She prayed that those priestesses would not have to endure an extended winter, that their prophecy bearer would be found at birth as they had always been until now.

As was right. The hymn would do for them what it failed to do for Nyrah’s order.

The Heir would be located as an infant and brought to the temple to be raised here by loving sisters.

The future priestesses’ Desolate Winter would end as usual and bring upon the season of Fresh Spring.

Bitterness soiled Nyrah’s prayer for a moment.

It should have been her. She had been the most powerful seer in her class of novices, and everyone believed it would be she who dreamed of the Heir’s birth.

Her visions that would lead them to the newborn—be it cottage or castle, it mattered not.

The babe would’ve been brought to the temple, bundled in her arms.

Nyrah should have been the one to care for the Heir, to nourish them, wipe away their tears, sing the little one to sleep, to make the prophecy bearer laugh with joy as they grew and were taught to control their dark magic, to harness the power for good and not evil.

Nyrah would have done a wonderful job; she’d had so much love to give.

Tears spilled down her sunken cheeks, stinging her cracked lips, as bitterness turned to grief for what would have been the most rewarding and honored path a priestess of Echoes could hope for.

But it had all gone wrong.

Neither she nor her sisters ever dreamed of the baby. They’d fasted for one hundred years, praying fervently day after day, to prepare their bodies to be the worthy vessel of the only vision that truly mattered. And then, they had gathered in the temple, lit their candles, and sung the hymn.

Only, the vision had never come.

Days stretched to weeks, stretched to months, and it became clear that not only had that vision not come to pass, but no others had either.

Be they priestesses whose Sight granted them no more knowledge than which side a coin would land or whether or not it would rain the following day, or priestesses with such power they had grown used to foreseeing the death of every person they met or the outcome of wars that would not begin until long after they died, all their visions ceased, as though stolen by some vindictive god.

Then, their fast, which should have ended with a feast upon the commencement of the welcoming ritual, stretched on.

Twenty-three years had passed since the fast was due to end.

Indigo light flashed behind Nyrah’s eyelids, but she did not open them nor falter in her chorus as the final comet passed in the sky above them, just as Nyrah had seen in her vision, the first in two decades.

The indigo light faded, night bled into day, and still, she sang.

A few sisters fell, slumped, their eyes never to open again, the last of their strength spent. Still, those who remained prayed, the volume unchanged. For their voices had joined the thousands who came before them, and they echoed back, endless.

Finally, when the last candle, Nyrah’s candle, burned itself out, a cry arose as a vision took hold, engulfing the minds of every priestess left to witness it.

This vision, the waking dream playing behind their closed lids, was not of the future, but the past.

Twenty-three years ago, the Heir Promised, the world’s salvation, had been born to restart the Season Cycle.

But the babe was born wrong.

She had no pointed ears. There were no traces of that dark magic the baby should have possessed.

The Heir’s birthmother should have perished the moment the babe belted its first cry.

For the Heir was different from all other babes.

It possessed magic, as many did, but this magic was not one that brought visions, nor did it grant the child the power to craft incras that could coax life from the frozen earth, or stretch a handful of water to quench the thirst of an entire family …

The baby’s magic was utterly singular, for only the Heir of Prophecy possessed the power of Death itself.

It was rotten, vile, the antithesis of every other living thing.

And until the child learned to control its dark power, it would be destined to kill all it loved.

The birthmother ought to have been drained of life, and yet, she clutched the babe to her breast fiercely. The baby’s powerless cries were hushed until the only sounds in the vision were a whispered lullaby and the noises of a rooting, suckling infant.

For, though every Heir before this had only ever known death upon its birth, this one could not access its magic.

The Heir of Prophecy had been born in the cursed human realm, the Vacant Realm, where magic could not exist.