“Oh, my gods, Damien,” Amma groused, her patience all eaten up by the ache in her belly, much worse upon waking and discovering the ease with which female blood mages probably functioned.
But he didn’t even react, “—and it’s not terribly often that evilwins, but they certainly try.”
Amma pursed her lips, thinking of Fryn and her suggestion that evil didn’t even like winning all that much.
“The oracle told us that the pendant is going to lead to my destruction, which I know is probably the right thing, in the grand scheme, but I’ve a feeling I won’t throw it in the pit when the time comes because I’ll think I can somehow supersede fate with my exceptional prowess or what have you, and then things will go sideways, and I won’t even avoid the inevitable. I know it is a lot to ask, but I need you to keep me…honest? Good? I don’t know, just don’t let me let thatthingbreak its way into our world.”
“Damien, do you hear yourself?” She grabbed his arm and pulled him to a stop on a flat ledge. “You’re asking me to make sure you don’t do a bad thing, and in the same breath calling yourself bad. You don’t want to allow E’nloc to be summoned, right?”
“Right,” he said with a heaviness she could feel, staring out at the valley below them.
“Thenhoware you evil?”
Damien squinted, then slapped his hands over his face. “I don’t know!”
“Yeah, me neither!” She shook him by the elbow, and when he peeked through his fingers, he might have been grinning. “And also, what do you mean the oracle told us the pendant would lead to your destruction?”
“The hallowed son,” Damien mumbled and pointed to himself. “It’s a whole thing.”
“From the prophecy? The one who’s supposed to release the Harbinger of Destruction? You think that’s you?”
His eyes narrowed, all the sheepishness falling away from his face. “What did you do?”
“I went into the oracle’s prophecy cave, found the one you refuse to tell me about, and I read it. You can be angry with meabout that later.” She swept a hand through the air, ignoring his sudden shift at an attempt at terror—nothing was as terrible as the twisting in her guts, and she just didn’t have the patience for his foolishness. “Doesn’t hallowed mean holy? I know I keep saying you’re not evil, but your dad is a demon, not a dominion.”
“What are demons and dominions if not the servants of the gods, dark or light?”
Amma tapped a finger to her lips. That was perhaps troubling and not something she had thought of. She looked to Vanders on her shoulder, and the vaxin was worrying his tail in his paws. Amma took to pacing along the ledge. “Okay, but the prophecy says the hallowed son will release the Harbinger of Destruction on earth. I thought your father was the numbered lord of temper tantrums or something?”
“Zagadoth the Tempestuous.” He gave her a withering look. “Ninth Lord of the Infernal Darkness and Abyssal Tyrant of the Sanguine Throne.”
“Sure, that.” She paced a little faster, hands rolling over one another as she spoke. “And none of that is about destruction or harbingery. So, when he was here before, because the prophecy does sayagain, did your dad destroy a lot of stuff?”
Damien’s eyes snapped to the cliff beside them. “I don’t believe so. After The Brotherhood summoned him, he spent all his time in Aszath Koth protecting the city until he went to Eirengaard, but he does always complain that he hasn’t done anything to be imprisoned.”
Amma felt her mind work, turning swiftly and pacing across the small ledge again as she spoke with a quickness. “So, if your father isn’t this harbinger fellow, and you aren’t the hallowed son, then throwing the pendant into the pit won’t lead toyourdoom. It could all be about somebody else even though it was given to you—you just might have something tangential to do with it because I was able to read that prophecy too, but I’m notmentioned in it at all, so—”
Amma’s feet went out from under her, and the ground came at her fast, Vanders poofing away as she fell. Damien was at her side in a heartbeat, pulling her back to her feet and away from the ledge as he dusted her off. He was touching her again, all over too, and she went a little stupid standing there, unable to even insist nothing hurt, he was being silly, she had only clumsily tripped and—
There was a rumble. It was small, minuscule really, barely able to be heard, but then it grew.
A not-insignificantly-sized rock began to roll. Amma’s foot had dislodged a pebble wedged just beneath it in her stumble, and that had been all it needed. Too big to stop, not that either was quick enough to, the rock went right off the edge of the cliff, crumbling and rumbling its way down, and landing with a colossal thud somewhere below.
They remained still for a long moment, waiting, but nothing else came. Amma bit down on an already chewed-to-the-Abyss nail. “That was close,” she mumbled around it.
Damien glanced over the ridge. “Actually, it was dead on.”
Not liking whatever that could have possibly meant, she hurried to the edge of the cliff and fell to her knees. Some forty feet below lay the rock in a newly-made dent, around it a spattering of what one could optimistically just call liquid if one ignored the color.
“Oh, no,” she whispered into her hand. “Did I…did I do that?”
“Um, well?” Damien tipped his head, still looking down at the accident. “Technically the rock did.”
“Oh, gods.” She scrambled over to where the edge of the mountain sloped a bit less intensely, lowering herself down.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking,” she said, sliding backward to the next ledge,using thin branches that grew out of the rock face for balance.
