38. Syneca #2
“One of my more clever accounts,” the old woman said.
“Now. There is a truth about nymph and lycan blood that neither council had ever had cause to learn, because the two races had spent so long despising each other over land, the question had never arisen.” She paused to eat, unhurried, and I waited.
“Nymphs bear only daughters. Lycan sire only sons. This is simply what they are, what they have always been. They mate with the scorched, the shifters, the witches.” She set her spoon down.
“But when their blood combines, and the child is born beneath a full moon, something else entirely arrives in the world.”
“There’s another race in Fuerlis?” I asked.
A hint of an ancient accent curled around her words as she continued, ignoring me entirely.
“Children who could shift on command and drain life essence in the same breath. Who carried the full inheritance of two lineages that had never been meant to meet.” She folded her hands.
“The Matriarch discovered she was carrying twins. A boy and a girl. Born under a full moon, both of them magnificent and terrible before they were old enough to hold their own heads up.”
The fire crackled. Outside, distantly, the falls seemed to pause.
“When the councils found out, betrayed by none other than the Matriarch’s own lady,” she continued, “the nymphs called it contamination. The lycan called it weakness. Both of them called for the children’s deaths.
” She said it plainly, without drama, which made it worse.
“The Matriarch and the High Alpha ran to neutral ground, the only place neither council could claim jurisdiction. Here.”
“Staren Falls,” Pip whispered from behind us. I hadn’t even realized she never returned to her seat.
“Three days later, hunter forces arrived. Shifters who should not have known the location. Nymph assassins sent by the betrayer, Morgana. Even the lycan berserkers. Everyone died.”
The table was silent for a moment, but it truly made no difference what happened between those races all that time ago. I needed to know what happened to Lyric. How he was connected. “Was there a dragon there?”
“Perhaps one or two.” Her gaze shifted between Dez and Silas with an attention that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “But a dragon should not be your concern. Especially when you’ve brought demons to my table.”
My heart dropped straight through the floor. I kept my face completely still as Silas’s hand moved to the blade at his place setting.
The Keeper smiled. “I wouldn’t have set your place and provided you with a weapon if I wasn’t prepared for you, Silas.” She paused. “The Abandoned.”
Something moved through the bond. Fast and tightly controlled, locking down before I could read anything but my own shock and confusion.
His face was a masterpiece of nothing. Not a flicker of concern darkening those blue eyes.
Not a whisper of the tension I’d felt ripple mere seconds ago.
He might have been carved from the same darkness he hid in, beautiful and utterly, infuriatingly unreadable.
But the bond didn’t lie the way his face could.
Something had bled through. Not fear of her, nor calculation.
Something that felt, absurdly, like the urge to put himself between me and a word.
“We came to learn about the dragon,” Silas said, his voice the unhurried purr of someone who had never once been anything but inconvenienced.
“I’ve drawn no weapons. Nor have I asked for anything more than a story.
” His gaze didn’t move to me. Didn’t need to.
That steady presence of him simply settled at my back like a shadow. “I am not a threat to you.”
“Then hear me now, your concern should not rest with a dragon’s sad fate. You should be worried about the prophecy that inspired the massacre, one so dangerous it’s been eradicated from the Hollows Aureth left behind.”
“You have my full attention,” he said, gesturing for her to go on.
“When thirteen Moonborn gather, the flame that binds the exiled shall yield.”
The flame that binds the exiled…
The Erelith. There was only one place where the flames didn’t just burn in scattered deposits. They formed a complete and unbroken ring.
Around Dyssara.
The Keeper nodded as if she could see my mind had worked out her meaning. I looked at Silas.“Evanoch.”
Calder jumped in. “Every demon he’s holding in that city will descend.”
“And what,” the Keeper asked, her eyes fixed on Silas, “is Evanoch’s ultimate goal, Abandoned One?”
Silas stared at her. Something shifted in his face. “Who are you really?”
“I am the Keeper of Stories.”
“No.” He leaned forward. “You’re not.”
She rose from her seat, gnarled hands gripping the table as she leaned forward.
“Evanoch will kill the Furies. And when he does that, the veil falls. The Underworld will take every drop of power this world holds. This world was reborn of magic. Its Burnings consecrate that power back into the ground, back into the bones of it, keeping it alive. When the demons take, they will take it all. There will be nothing left to burn back. This world will simply stop.”
That should have rooted me to the chair.
The end of everything, laid out over stew.
And some part of me did feel the weight of it settle, vast and cold.
But a smaller, more selfish part, the part that had been near death in the Underworld, kept circling the same stubborn thought.
The world ending was a problem for a woman who’d live to see it.
I had a debt written into my bones that would kill me long before any veil fell, and the only thing that paid it was a dragon this woman kept refusing to discuss.