My stomach sank. This was always how they’d planned for it to go. This was always how the curse would be “broken.” Galen had based his entire hope, his entirefuture…on a lie. Atechnicality.
And now he was dead.
My forehead pinched. “You…you’re supposed to be the Fates. The overseers of our world, the ones people pray to in their darkest hours.” I shook my head in disgust. “You’re nothing but cruel. Preying on desperation and weaknesses.”
Anger boiled inside of me as I thought about the past weeks and all we had worked for.Everythingwas for this. I may not have respected him as a ruler in the end, but Galen didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t deserve to have one shining millisecond of freedom before his life was snuffed from him.
I clenched my jaw. “You’re no better than the tyrants of this world. Do you get off on weaving your little webs and watching us all get caught in them? Does it make you feelpowerful?”
“Careful, Clarissa Aris,” one of them warned.
“Or what, you’re going to curse my bloodline too?” I bit down on the inside of my cheek, wondering if I’d finally crossed a line. For as much as I’d learned to control my tongue over the years, my anger still got the best of me.
“Do you know the truth of what happened that night with Nyses Grimaldi?” the third voice boomed.
I swallowed back a retort. “I know he asked for magic out of jealousy for what you gave the Veridians after the war, and you granted it to him. But it wasn’t magic like we have—it wasdevastating.” I thought back to what Thorne told me at the hedge maze, how each descendant had a different brutal power. Seeing spirits, inflicting pain, forced to become a beast. “It was a curse.”
A myriad of hums echoed around me. “It seems the Grimaldis have concealed things as well,” the first one said.
“What do you mean?”
There was a pause, a rustle in the air. And then?—
“Let us show you, little Empress.”
A cold, invisible hand gripped my wrist. I let out a strangled gasp as my body was thrown backward into the stone wall.
The cell disappeared.
I was standing before a burning temple in the dead of night. Smoke and bright orange flames attacked the building, rising like a warning against the dark blue sky. Dozens of men and women in long white robes rushed around the blaze. Some carried buckets of water, while others tucked leather-bound books and old scrolls under their robes as they fled the scene. A particularly terrifying wail caught my attention, and I looked to the right to see a young man—barely out of adolescence—flailing on the ground, flames consuming his legs.
My eyes widened as he screamed himself hoarse, his flesh bubbling beneath the fire traveling higher and higher up his body. I tried to run forward, but my limbs wouldn’t move.
“There is nothing you can do but watch,” the third voice of the Fates murmured in my ear, and for once, it didn’t sound cruel. It sounded pained. Remorseful.
My breath quickened, a whimper escaping me as the inferno overtook the boy.
His mangled cries stopped, leaving behind a scorched body.
A thunderous crash came from the front of the temple. One of the statues resting above the entrance cracked in half. My eyes flicked to the ground where an elderly woman struggled to carry a bag overflowing with scrolls away from the building. I sucked in a breath and again tried to lurch toward her, only to be stopped by the same force.
The statue tipped.
I let out a silent scream as it tumbled through the air and crashed on top of the woman. She crumbled under its weight, not even having time to call out before she was dead. A pool of blood trickled from her head and over the grass, mingling with the ash and dirt.
Tears now tracked down my cheeks. I took in the chaos, the hordes of people running for their lives as flames continued to wreck the temple.
Horse hooves pounded on the ground behind me. I turned to see a large man in a mahogany cloak barreling forward on his horse, the crest of Mysthelm adorned on the saddle. Those familiar four branches with a sword and sickle. A priest rushed to him as he dismounted.
“My King!” the elderly man called out.
Nyses Grimaldi. Galen’s ancestor. I could see the resemblance as I squinted—the same golden-brown skin, the dark hair, the chiseled features.
Was this the night the curse began?
I blinked, and my body jerked forward as the temple vanished. In my next breath, I was inside what I assumed was the same building—a high ceiling with marble columns surrounded by burning wood, a raised dais with the king standing at its center. There was a dagger in his grip. Blood streamed from his hand to the stone altar beneath.
The voices of the Fates rang out around me. But they weren’t the ones who had spoken to me—they were speaking tohim.
