She stares at me for a long, long moment. Her eyes go to the parchment, then back up to me again. Her gaze changes while I watch, her dark eyes quickening like smoldering coals—realization spreads like a wildfire.
I don’t know if I believe her prophecies. I don’t know if I believe in her gods or her destiny. I don’t know if I believe in any of this.
But I believe inher.
Because ifshecan interpret what we’re seeing, that can only mean one thing to her and her people.
Sheis the Lightbringer.
TWENTY-SEVEN
NIMH
The words squirm and crawl up at me in the pale blue light from North’s bracelet. They burrow into my eyes, into my mind, a slow and inexorable torrent. I cannot pull my eyes away—each time I think I have reached the limits of what I can see there in the knotted lines and curls of ink, some new phrase or symbol grabs my eye and hauls me back into the prophecy.
North brings me food. He tries to get me to stop and eat. I feel him lingering like a distant distraction. The bindle cat makes an attempt to walk onto the surface of the object that has interested me so much, and I pull him back so quickly that he hisses in surprise and betrayal—later I feel him crouching, warm, by my leg, rumbling with an anxious purr.
The stars move overhead. Dust blows past in the canyon below. The Lovers have set, and give no light, but I have no need of them, for I have a relic of the ancients, a gift from the gods who left us. Light brought to the Lightbringer.
Dimly, I am aware of North speaking—he wants me to stop. To sleep. To rest my eyes and my mind. It has been hours, he says. He tries to leave, pulling his arm and the light away, but when I cry out a wordless objection and look up, he freezes as he sees my face. Silently, he pulls the bracelet off his wrist and sets it down by the scroll.
Just now I cannot read his expression, cannot parse the emotion written there, for I can read only these words spread out before me. What I see in his face makes no sense—for what reason would North have to look at me with fear?
I grab the bracelet, and after a time, my ears detect the sound of his footsteps moving away. I say nothing—I can’t, for my mind is already wrapped once more in the depths of the page beneath my eyes.
My entire life—everything I have been, everything Ihaven’tbeen—has been for this moment. All those years of uncertainty—all of it was for a purpose. This purpose.
Mypurpose.
My aspect, manifested finally after all this time.
Lightbringer.
The words are written in layers. The oldest are in the crisp, angular text of North’s people, the ancients, while the newest are less than a century old. I recognize at the edges the light, meandering handwriting of Lorateon, the god before Jezara.
And I see the others there too. I see Minyara, the goddess of the night sky, who mapped the heavens and studied the movements of celestial bodies and foretold the coming of Minyara’s Flame, a heavenly visitor that hung like a pale spirit in the night sky for a week a hundred years before I was born—and more than three centuries after she died. She speaks to me now in the same handwriting I know from my own studies of her charts; she tells me of the Last Star, whose light would show the Lightbringer who she was—North’s light. His blood, his presence, are why I am reading these words. Minyara tells me that this vision is but the beginning of my journey.
And there is Vesseon, god of exploration, who predicted the existence of an ancient waterway to the north that would, eighty years later, become vital for the passage of ships from the eastern sea to the western, sparing our sailors and merchants the violent seas ringing the southern cape of the world. He saved countless lives when explorers finally discovered that passageway, and I read his journals as though they were epic tales, devouring one after the other. And now he writes to me, as directly and intimately as if he were writing a letter to an old, dear friend. He tells me of a place remembered in his time but lost in mine—a place beyond the end of the world, a place of beginnings and endings, where I must go to fulfill my destiny.
Alteon, whose aspect was poetry, sings me a song in his hasty scrawl of loneliness and heartache, and of choices to come that will test my devotion and my faith. Emsara, whose time campaigning as the goddess of war brought us into the peace our countries know today, tells me that blood will be shed, that bloodhasbeen shed, but that the shedding of blood has shaped the world, and not to be afraid. Elinix, who was without gender and who manifested the aspect of love itself, whispers to me that we who are the living gods are human still, and are so for a reason—that our humanity is as vital as our divinity, even for the one who will end this world.
Especiallyfor her.
Alone, the phrases and pieces of words make little sense—only when read together, mixing the newest additions with words left here a thousand years ago, does meaning come to me.
There are fragments of writing I do not recognize—older sections, closer to the time of the ancestors North and I share. Words that come to me from a time before even our oldest texts, from divines whose names have been lost to that desperate era when writing itself was a luxury denied those trying to survive.
My trembling fingers hover just above the page.
This is older than anything anyone alive has ever read.
And only I—so desperate for my manifestation and so late to find it that my studies ran the full gamut of our history—could have read and understood it. Finally, I understand what none of my priests and tutors could ever tell me: this is what it feels like to discover my divine aspect.
To manifest, to have purpose.
Toknowmy destiny.
My mind, which had been soaking in the words like parched soil drinks in rain, is suddenly full—the words dribble in and away, my thirst slaked, my soil saturated. And still, I cannot take my eyes from the page, cannot stop reading. My eyes move faster and faster, my heart racing. The page blurs, for I cannot even pause to blink, but the words still make their way into my mind, bypassing sight entirely.
