Chapter 63 The Fifth Prophecy
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The Fifth Prophecy
It starts with an image.
Saffron Killoran sits atop the Vallish throne, an intricate fallowwolf-shaped crown nestled in her wild silver-blond curls, a weaverwick wand in her palm.
Her cloak falls in rich swathes of purple velvet and gold satin.
Her face is set with stony terror, her fingernails digging into the arm of the ancient seat.
The image widens.
By her side, on another throne, is Harrow Claver. He wears no crown, and though his cloak is the same unctuous purple velvet, it’s streaked with Foreseer bronze instead of Timeweaver gold. They wear matching engraved rings on their middle fingers, silver bands engraved with Ancient Sarthi.
Behind them in the throne room hangs a vast purple banner with an unfamiliar sigil, a white fallowwolf curled like a snake around a gold hourglass, its pupils spiraled like an Augur’s. Beneath the sigil, in formal letterplate, are the words: House Killaver.
The image widens again.
The throne room is carnage. A vast, opulent space hewn from pure ascenite—more ascenite than exists in the rest of the country, enough to dwarf even the Bloodmoon’s overflowing vaults.
Yet it has not been enough to save them.
Tapestries burn, and walls crumble, and the Palace echoes with the roars of violent battle.
Petrified guards stand with wands raised, preparing to die defending their monarchs.
The image widens, pans out.
Atherin is under siege.
The Great Wards have fallen, and three armies have breached the city walls: the green-cloaked Bellandrians, the coral-cloaked Joribali, and the gray-cloaked Nyr?thi.
The River Corven has been wielded like a weapon, lifted from its groove and washed through the city in a terrible bloody gush.
Buildings have crumbled, and the streets are flooded with crushed and drowned bodies: men, women, children, babies.
Piles of cloakless Ludders are stacked like sandbags fortifying a trench.
Debris of wands and coins and tiny infant shoes scatter the surface of the water, the flotsam and jetsam of a desolated magekind.
The image narrows all the way to its beginning.
Saffron turns to Harrow. She looks both older and ageless. “We have to unmake now, while we’re still surrounded by ascenite.”
“How far?” he murmurs, hoarse with existential terror. “We’ve unmade so much. It never ends differently, and reality is growing frayed. If you’re not precise, you’ll cleave the fabric of the world in two.”
“So let it cleave. The world is ending anyway.”
Saffron lifts her weaverwick wand, climbs to her feet, and closes her eyes. Reluctantly, Harrow stands beside her, lacing his fingers through hers. Their matching rings glow like iron on a forge.
When she utters the word, there’s an air of finality to it, of resignation, of fear and self-loathing and utter, utter despair.
“Tempavicissan.”
There’s an almighty tearing sound, and the world falls away, and there the prophecy ends.
Saffron reeled backward, stumbled, fell. It all slotted into terrible place.
Sarcane didn’t hide the prophecy because it foretold her saving the world from war, nor because she was going to redeem the Timeweavers from their terrible slaughter and rehabilitate them into public life.
No, the prophecy was hidden because she was going to end the world.
Saffron lay still in the snow for several moments, trying to process the magnitude of what she’d just seen. A thousand questions spiraled through her mind, as dark and terrible as the drowned corpses on the future streets of Atherin.
Why will Harrow sit the throne beside me?
What will happen to Levan?
Can we possibly prevent this devastating war?
Surely, surely, she could. She had already relegated one prophecy to another timeline—her killing of Levan, committed and then undone. Surely this could be undone too.
She had the Steel King’s letter. When she went back in time to save her parents, she would take it with her.
Make sure it was handed to the Silvercloaks, to the king himself if she could.
Give the Palace enough warning to prepare for a siege from the High North.
Prevent the battle before it ever became a seed in the Bloodmoon kingpin’s mind.
Then again…what if knowing an attack was coming wasn’t enough to stop it?
Frantically running back over the Fifth Prophecy in her head, she tried to remember whether there had been any scarlet cloaks among the foreign forces—especially among the gray-cloaked Nyr?thi—but the visuals were already fading in her mind. Was there a way to replay the scene?
Beneath the confusion and the fear, there was also a desolate kind of sorrow, a balloon of swollen hope suddenly pierced, deflated.
If the prophecy had foretold her saving the world, it could have led to the rehabilitation of Timeweavers, their historic pardoning.
Lorissa Rezaran could have been a Hand of the Saints, and Levan could have been a Healer, and everything could have been different.
Better. Now, if they were indeed successful in saving their parents…
the queenpin would still seek the throne, perhaps violently.
Everything in Saffron splintered and broke at the thought of telling Levan.
Can’t you understand the appeal of being six years old again?
Six years old, with a fresh field of snow in front of me?
One unsoaked in blood, untainted by addiction.
I would have no brand, both hands, nil ruinous cravings, and two parents who loved me.
Can’t you understand why I want that so desperately?
Panic rose and fell with her breath. There was so much to consider—and it took her several moments to realize she was not the only one considering it.
Her gaze found Harrow’s.
The King’s Prophet’s expression was like none she had ever seen before. Horror and awe and confusion. Hunger perhaps, and curiosity, and…validation? But mostly horror. Deep and dark and devastating horror.
Levan looked between Harrow and Saffron, waiting for someone to say something. When nobody did, he slung out, “You saw it too, Harrow. You saw the prophecy.”
Neither Saffron nor Harrow found the words. They could not confess that they were going to sit the throne, oversee the end of the world…and that Levan would not be part of it.
“Silver,” Levan murmured, desperation threaded through the word.
She shook her head violently, the kernel of despair swelling in her chest, pressing out against her ribs.
The Augurests had been right. The Timeweavers would unmake the world.
She would unmake the world.
Trying to save it, of course—but she would unmake it nonetheless.
“Harrow,” Levan said, but now all the emotion was scrubbed from his tone. It was simply a command, and whether or not it was imbued with compelling magic, Harrow heeded it.
Saffron dropped her face into her hands and listened as Harrow told the kingpin everything.
Once Harrow had finished, Levan stood to his feet, smoothing down the front of his sea-soaked robes. His face was set like stone, like he was no longer a living, breathing mage with hopes or fears or emotions. He scooped Miret into his arms and then spoke with a ghostly emptiness.
“I’m taking Miret back to Flarence. Follow me or don’t.”
Before he was finished talking, he was already a dozen yards away, a hundred, and neither of them followed, neither of them even breathed.
And then Saffron was alone on a frozen clifftop with the mage who would stand by her side as she destroyed all of reality.
For several moments, there was only the sound of waves crashing against the cliffs, of soft snow crunching as Harrow began to pace. Everything was too white, too bright, too loud, and too quiet. Unreal, otherworldly.
“This is going to sound like the most arrogant thing any mage living or dead has ever uttered,” Saffron said slowly. “But I think I can prevent this.”
Somehow Harrow’s auburn hair was still arranged in perfect waves around his face, but his bronze cloak was disheveled and rock-torn. “How?”
Saffron leaned back against a tree trunk, the ridges of her skull rolling against the knots in the wood.
A blackfox watched from a hundred yards away, head cocked.
“Back at the Academy, I touched a relic wand that foretold me kissing Levan—and then killing him. In the Havenwood, that came to pass. Exactly as the relic wand had shown. I kissed him for what I believed was the last time, and then I killed him.” This confession hung between them like a noose.
“But after that, a series of events went wrong, and I unmade that night, saved him. The death didn’t stick.
“So if I could override that prophecy, wrench us onto another timeline, who’s to say I can’t do the same with Sarcane’s vision? Maybe that’s what we saw at the end of the prophecy. Not me destroying the world, but pulling us onto a new timeline by force.”
Harrow stopped pacing, crossed to the edge of the cliff. Looked out over the slate-gray sea, the chalky sky above. “What if it isn’t?”
Saffron laid all her cards on the table.
“Do you know what brought Levan and me back together, after the Havenwood? Once I realized the depths of what I could do, I realized that I might be able to wind back twenty-odd years and save both of our parents. With enough ascenite—and Saints, there was more than enough ascenite in that throne room—I could do it, Harrow. Save his parents, save mine. And in doing so, lead us into a safer world. A world unravaged by war.”
Harrow voice was deathly quiet as he said, “No.”
Saffron didn’t know exactly what he was saying no to, but resolve was hardening inside her, iron forged into steel.
She stood, all the cold leaving her at once as she mentally charted a path.
“First, I need a weaverwick. Not just for the broader plan, but to make sure we have total control over how fate unfolds. So that we can undo any mistakes, keep bloodshed to a minimum. Levan destroyed his mother’s wand, and I’ve been unable to find another.
But we’re a stone’s throw from Nyr?th, where there might still be—”
“Stop.” Harrow turned to face her, and she was surprised to see that he was crying quite heavily, snow coating his lashes and then melting into the warm salt of his tears. “Stop. I can’t—I need time to…I can’t. I just found out I’m going to play a part in the world’s end.”
“Harrow—”
“King Quintan recently reestablished the death penalty for traitors.” His voice was clotted. “Did you know that? We could hang for this very conversation.”
Saffron did not know that.
The revelation sent a lightning bolt of fear through her, not only because of what the Fifth Prophecy had foretold, but because of what she was doing now. If she was caught while still inside the Bloodmoons, and she couldn’t prove her undercover status, she would lose her life.
But before she could respond, the King’s Prophet walked away—not in the direction of Flarence, where Levan was taking Miret, but deeper into the trees above the clifftop. The small forest into which Relar had run not half an hour earlier.
Saffron looked around, a sense of unreality washing the world into strange light.
Across the Cinereal Sea was Nyr?th, the brutal, pain-loving nation whose king had colluded with Lyrian Celadon to wage war against her homeland.
A hostile, unforgiving place, where she’d be in danger the moment she stepped over the border, and yet perhaps the best chance she had at securing a weaverwick wand.
Behind her was Flarence. Levan, frantically trying to save the last real family he had left. Levan sad, afraid, grieving. Levan angry and confused at the prophecy, Levan just a moment of weakness away from loxlure relapse, Levan, Levan, Levan.
After several moments of indecision, she closed her eyes, ignored all logic, all cause and effect, and asked her gut what she should do.
The answer was clear. She opened her eyes, pulled her sodden cloak tighter around herself, and set off through the clean white snow.