I turned back to the altar, feeling a new reality pressing in around me from all sides, both harsh and exhilarating in its clarity. The old certainties were gone, burned away like morning mist, but in their place was something I'd never had before. Choice. Real, terrifying, liberating choice.
Together, moving with synchronized purpose born of years of training and friendship, Ellie and I gathered the scrolls and books from the altar, handling each one with reverent care. We were determined to take these fragments of hidden history with us, to protect them from destruction and to use them as weapons against the deception that had ruled our lives. Knowledge, Master Theron had always taught me, was the most powerful tool in existence. And now I held an arsenal in my arms.
I'd spent my whole life as a Keeper, wearing that title like armor, letting it define every aspect of my existence. It had meant silence when I wanted to speak, obedience when I wanted to question, sacrifice of every personal desire on the altar of duty, a reliance purely on prescribed rules and rituals to keep me steadied and shielded from uncomfortable truths.
Now my guardianship would change, would transform into something the Order had never intended or imagined.
Now I would protect truth itself, no matter where it led.
Even if that truth destroyed everything else I'd ever believed in.
Even if it meant becoming the very thing the prophecies foretold, the daughter who would choose love over law, connection over containment, freedom over safety.
Even if it meant the end of the world as I knew it.
FIFTEEN
Aria
The night pulled me under like dark water, consciousness dissolving between one breath and the next. I'd barely made it to my quarters after hiding the forbidden texts, exhaustion from discovery and grief making my limbs heavy as stone. The moment my head touched the pillow, sleep claimed me with unusual force, dragging me down into dreams that felt more real than waking.
The dreamscape bloomed around me in colors that had no names.
Not the forest clearing where Thane had offered comfort, nor the structured chaos of the Threshold. This was something else entirely.
A garden that existed between moments, where time moved like honey and light had texture you could touch. Flowers swayed in breezes that carried music instead of air. Trees bore fruit that glowed from within.
And through it all, threading between impossible beauty like smoke given form, moved Elias.
The phoenix prince didn't walk so much as flow, his copper hair shifting through shades of flame, gold to crimson to white-hot blue and back again. His turquoise eyes held too much, centuries of witnessed futures and remembered pasts layered until looking at him felt like staring into eternity itself. When he smiled at me, it carried the weight of prophecy.
"You found the truth." His voice sang more than spoke, each word containing harmonies that shouldn't exist. "Or rather, the truth found you. As it always would. As it always must."
"Master Theron died for it." The words came out raw, edged with grief I hadn't let myself fully feel yet.
"He died choosing." Elias drifted closer, and I noticed his feet didn't quite touch the ground, as if gravity was merely a suggestion he politely declined. "After decades of knowing but not acting, he finally chose. That's more than most ever manage."
The garden shifted around us, colors bleeding into new configurations. Suddenly we stood in what looked like a palace courtyard, but one that defied architecture. Columns twisted upward in helical spirals, supporting a sky that might have been ceiling or might have been infinite space. Water flowed upward in fountains, splitting into droplets that hung suspended like diamonds before reforming into streams that sang.
"This is what they told you was monstrous."
His words carried weight beyond sound, and the garden responded. The scene solidified, became more real, more present. I could smell it now, honey and cinnamon, rain on marble, that particular sweetness of air that had been breathed by gods.
"This was Olympus. Before." He gestured, and the palace filled with movement. Figures in robes that seemed woven from light itself moved through the spaces, their laughter like temple bells. "Before fear made mortals cruel. Before greed made them grasping. Before they decided that taking was easier than accepting what was freely offered."
I watched, transfixed, as the vision showed me truth the chronicles had buried. The Olympians hadn't been conquerors. They'd been artists, scholars, healers. A woman with silver hair taught mortal children to sing, their voices harmonizing in ways that made flowers bloom. A man whose skin held constellations showed farmers how to read the seasons in star patterns, ensuring harvests that would feed thousands.
"They came to help," I whispered.
"We came to love." Elias corrected gently. "That was our first mistake, perhaps. We didn't understand that mortal love could be weaponized. That it could be used as leverage, as chains stronger than any metal."
The vision shifted, and suddenly I stood in a different room. Smaller, more intimate. A woman sat at a mirror, brushing hair so dark it seemed to swallow light. Her face?—
My breath caught. It could have been my reflection, if I were slightly older, slightly sadder. The resemblance was uncanny, unsettling.
"Pandora." The name fell from my lips like a prayer.
"Your ancestor. Your beginning. Your warning." Elias appeared beside her in the vision, though she didn't react to his presence. This was memory, not reality. "Watch."
