“What’s up with those two?”
“They’re heartmates,” I replied, walking under the arched doorway. I felt his surprise. “Careful. The vines are all over the floor in here.”
There was no avoiding them as we approached the double doors to the Great Hall. They hissed as we crushed them under our boots. I stopped and snapped off some vines hanging limply from the gold trim.
Facing my father, I took a deep breath. “No one but Attes is inside,” I told him. He’d been aware of the Primal god’s presence. But beyond that? I didn’t know. “He’s—”
“I know who Attes is,” my father cut in, those few words heavy with meaning. “And I know who Valyn was to him.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. My father seemed to know everything.
I exhaled, glancing back at the doors. “You need to prepare yourself. Cas…he won’t be as you remember.”
My father’s gaze met mine. “I’m ready.”
I didn’t think he was, but I reached for the handles and pulled. There was resistance. Because, of course, there was. I had to grit my teeth and pull harder, only for the resistance to disappear without warning. Catching myself with a curse, I ignored the dark, smoky chuckle that echoed from the depths of the Great Hall.
Cas…yeah, he was in his asshole era.
I threw open the doors and stepped inside. A tall figure leaning against one of the columns straightened. It was Attes. He wasn’t bleeding. Which was a surprise.
My father stepped in behind me, but I knew he wasn’t even aware of Attes yet. How could he be with everything else going on?
Ravens flew between the thick, jagged icicles hanging from the domed ceiling, unaffected by the brutal cold of the chamber.Ice coated the tangled vines traveling across the floor, climbing pillars, and filling the alcoves. They were thicker in here and seemed more…alive, a glossy dark network of veins with a white sheen that stretched all the way to the dais and up its sides, then across the floor. They pulsed at Cas’s feet, surrounded by tendrils of deep-gray-and-crimson mist.
He sat on a throne crafted by a dark rage.
It loomed like an omen, its frame sculpted from the remains of those I suspected had served Kolis. After all, he had gone to Pensdurth. Each bone was fused together by the black vines that wove through ribs and spiraled through the eye sockets of the skulls that made up the back.
And what sat on the throne was a being I barely recognized and couldn’t connect to through thenotam. Couldn’t even get a read on it. It wore his clothes, and the fingers that idly tapped on an armrest constructed from what I guessed were the bones of actual arms moved like his. But what sat there wasn’t the man I’d known my whole life and loved deeper than a bond forged in blood.
I heard the breath leave my father the moment he saw Cas—saw the face that was part shadow and part silver bone and flesh. Saw the golden eyes pierced by strands of dark crimson.
In the days following Kolis’s attack, I had time—in between dealing with Cas—to think. That’s how I knew that what was before us was what the prophecy had foretold. The truth of what the Ancients had dreamed had been right in front of us the whole time. Inside us, but always a part of him.
Poppy was the Harbinger, just as we’d believed. And Kolis was the Great Conspirator. But the death and destruction Poppy would bring to the realms was not what Kolis would unleash.
It was the choices and actions of Kolis and of old gods long forgotten. Of the three of us. The Ancients had seen this but hadn’t understood.
It could never be clearer than it was now.
What the prophecy had foretold…
What it had always warned would come…
It had never been Poppy. Or even Kolis. It had always been him.
Casteel.
The wings were not visible, but a crown the color of the darkest night and shaped like jagged bone antlers rested upon his head. He sat upon the remnants of ruin and wrath, a throne of bone and ash.
The Primal God of Death and Destruction.
