Chapter 39 #3
The madness of believing in a prophecy that declares her to be the Hope of Cedre.
She spent most of her life believing in the Sundial, in the possibility of another world. What’s one more impossible thing, really?
Her heart speeds up.
“The augur told Rava to keep me from going through that doorway. And she told me, at the beginning—-that I was mentioned in a prophecy,” he says, a kind of hysteria rising in his voice.
“That I was a . . . signpost. On Rava’s path to victory.
And she would know me because she would be in—-love with me. ”
He leans his face into his hands.
Elegy has wondered quite a few times what questions Rava Vidar asked the augurs, and what they said in response.
She assumed that given how different she and Rava were, they would ask about different things, receive different guidance.
How unsettling, then, to hear that they asked the same thing . . . and received the same answer.
“This is why—-all of it,” he says, his voice muffled. “This is why she . . . pursued me to begin with.”
Elegy thinks this isn’t quite what people imagine when they long for their suffering to mean something.
There’s something especially cruel about finding out that your tormentor isn’t random, that they selected you, that they designed the shape of your pain in order to fit you into their destiny.
Randomness, and chaos, and the indifferent universe . . . they would all be easier to bear.
Rava, the orchestrator of his fate.
Rava, chasing the destiny that Elegy refuses to acknowledge: She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome.
Elegy feels like she’s standing at the mouth of a cave.
She doesn’t know what she’ll find if she walks into it.
She only knows that if she stays where she is, life will be what it’s always been.
Elegy Ahn. The Sword’s spare daughter, for emergencies only.
A soldier with too much rage to get promoted, until Shir helped her heal from it.
And even after—-grieving, a haze of Scout missions, the struggle to put one foot in front of the other. It’s familiar. It’s safe.
But in this darkness, there’s prophecy. A fate too huge to bear.
The great lever with the Cedrae on one side and the Talusar on the other.
And the problem from the start: that if she believed she was the Hope of Cedre, she had to also believe that she would love a man who wasn’t Shir.
She would have to accept her own inconstant heart.
And while she can’t imagine being the person who controls the outcome—-
When she looks into Theren Forint’s dark, focused eyes, she realizes the alternative is handing that control over to Rava Vidar.
Is handing him over to Rava Vidar, in one way or another.
And she may not know what he is to her, not yet . . . but she knows she won’t do that.
She stands, and moves toward Theren, careful of his bare feet. She covers his hands with hers, and tugs them away from his face.
“I need you to read me. Okay?” she says, bending closer.
He laces his fingers with hers, so their palms are pressed together. He looks up at her, waiting.
“When the augurs summoned me to the Cenobium, they also summoned Rava,” she says. “They told us that one of us would triumph over the other. That the questions we asked them that day, and the answers we received, would set things in motion that couldn’t be stopped.”
She’s only ever told Hela and Shir that Rava was there, at the Cenobium, when she heard the prophecy. Her mother insisted it would cause mass panic. It’s making Elegy panic, now.
Elegy doesn’t want her suffering to mean that much.
“The augurs . . . they told me what to look for, but I didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t know what to do.
And after Shir died, I stopped believing in purpose, in meaning, in prophecy,” she says.
“But Rava just made a huge mistake: she told you exactly what to do.” Elegy thinks of the young augur touching the points of the triangle in the dirt.
The trio of the fulcrum, the three voices in harmony.
What did the augur say to Theren? Something about past, present, and future.
About the three of them—-augur, epocha, and Theren—-being sufficient.
“She told us who we need,” Elegy says, and she shivers with the awareness of it. Past, present, and future. One will bear the Vidari name. One knows the taste of Cenobium salt. One . . .
She forces herself to focus. “She gave us a clear mission. If that augur said she has to keep you from going through that doorway in the stars? Well, that’s exactly where you’re going to go.”
She feels the memory of standing in the Cenobium on the scrying mirror close at hand, like if she just reaches out and touches it, it will come flooding back to her. But when she allows herself to brush against it, it’s not the augurs’ voices she hears.
It’s the Sword’s. Trust that you will be what you’re required to be, in this role you didn’t choose.
She leans in closer, speaking against his mouth in a harsh whisper.
“And I will get you there,” she says. “Because I’m the goddamn Hope of Cedre.”
His room is dark, now, the sun disappeared beneath the horizon. His eyes look black. Endless.
“Am I lying?” she asks him, and she’s afraid to hear the answer.
He turns her hand, and kisses her knuckles, slowly, his eyes still on hers. She can’t tell if he does it because he wants to touch her or if he does it like a vassal showing reverence for a queen.
Her hands are trembling. Her breaths are quaking, too.
“No, Elegy.” She thinks it might be the first time he’s ever called her by her name. “You’re not lying.”
She’s relieved. She’s horrified. Because the only thing worse than believing that Rava Vidar is fated to lead the Talusar to triumph . . . is believing that the faltering of her heart was written in the stars.