Vaasa stared wide-eyed at the stone in the center of the necklace. It was a strangely alluring gem, the onyx color so black it swallowed all the light around it. Despite herself, Vaasa reached for the necklace again, hissing when she touched thechain. She quickly undid the clasp and pulled the necklace from her mother’s body.
The moment she did, color crept from the top of Vena’s head, glittering black, coating her face and neck and shoulders. Right before Vaasa’s eyes, Vena Kozár turned to…
Stone.
What Vaasa stared down at was stone.
She reeled backward, panic cinching her chest as her hands covered her mouth to prevent a horrified scream. Still, Vena’s body hardened to glittering onyx, veins of gold and silver running along what used to be skin. It was uncanny, the resemblance. The immediate connection to…
The statues in the greenhouse.
Vaasa’s magic roared around her, released in a whipping wind as fear shot down the cords that bound her to Ozik. Cords that had felt distant these past two days, perhaps because they had been coated in her magic instead of his oily power. Vaasa approached the sarcophagus with bile churning in her stomach, her hand still on her mouth. She closed the lid, nausea climbing up the back of her throat.
Her other hand clutched the raw black gemstone of the necklace.
Something shifted in her body.
The cords that bound her to Ozik twisted and tightened, and the energy from the pendant shot up her finger and arm. It filled her entire body with a power that was both familiar and new, a whisper of her own magic wrapped around Ozik’s, her shadows and his oil mixing into something Vaasa had never felt before.
And then a story wrapped around her and pulled, plunging Vaasa into another vision, but this time…
She saw the world through Ozik’s eyes.
CHAPTER
32
Two days before Ozik’s Evocation, he crept through the thick forest outside the walls of the city of Wrultho, light on his feet, careful not to make a sound. He took one step. Two. Three.
A small squeal emanated from the sage green bush in front of him, and then Ellena sprinted out from behind it. Ozik cut to the right and chased her, careful to always be a step behind, until she burst through a wall of branches into their small, sacred clearing, marked in the center by a towering olive tree—the tallest in the area.
Ellena threw her small body against it, spreading her arms over the long trunk and squealing in delight.
“You are far too fast,” Ozik told her as he feigned exhaustion, placing his hands on his knees and taking exaggerated deep breaths. Then he approached, running his hand upon his daughter’s inky black hair, braided around her head in a coronet.
From their left, Ellena’s mother Julianna emerged through a small path between trees, holding her shimmering black bow in her delicate fingers. With the other hand she clutched a rabbit, a small red stain upon its underbelly, a product of the arrows that Julianna had surely conjured. Her midnight hair fell from its containment in messy strands around her face, her cheeks blushed the same color he’d memorized from the first moment he met her. He wanted to make her blush like that again, to be the reason warmth coated her cheeks. Wrapped in a turquoise-blue dress, Julianna’s bare feet were stained from the forest floor, and though that same dirt smeared along the side of her leg and even a small streak across her face, she was still the most beautiful woman Ozik had ever laid eyes on.
At her side, a slinking fox made of the same wisps of shadows as her bow curled around her legs, darting in and out of the tree line in playful gestures. The bow in her hands scattered to just licks of smoke on her wrists while Julianna’s fox leapt into the air, dissipating on the wind into glimmering streaks of black.
Dark magic ran through Julianna’s veins, one of shadows and smoke that could suffocate the very light out of a room. Because though she was sunshine, Julianna had always been eclipsed. She was born to the goddess Veragi, just as Ozik had been born to Zetyr.
Others called Julianna a curse, but to Ozik, she was a summoning.
He stepped toward her, but as he did, her eyes registered the movement. She stepped back. This was his plight: to love a woman greater than he’d ever known before, to be the father of her child, and still not have her.
Ellena ran to Julianna, and as she did, the rest of the world slipped into irrelevance. Ozik had known women all his life, but never in the way he’d known his daughter. Before he’d laid eyes on the tiny creature with his same liquid-gold eyes, he had known only one thing with certainty: The world was his for the taking. But upon knowing his child, the axis of that world shifted.
It was no longer his to take, but rather his to give.
Together, they sat beneath the olive tree while Ellena braided strands of wild grass with vivid pink flowers. Ozik fiddled mindlessly with the black stone embedded in his ring—an anchor to his Zetyr bloodline, the only surviving bloodline for generations. Zetyr witches had been hunted to extinction. No one knew how Ozik’s father, Laus Vichardi—an imprisoned criminal, no less—had come to claim the magic. Laus had emerged from the catacombs beneath Wrultho with an anchor, a Zetyr talisman. Some said he’d made a deal with the devil, others said he had been chosen by the deities themselves. What they did know was that it was Ozik’s mother, a witch who hailed from Ohros, the goddess of fate and sight, who had given Laus the ultimate bargain: her magic, in exchange for a son. It had given him a well of raw sentimental magic to draw from, and with it, Laus had vanquished the reigning Zuheia coven and conquered the city of Wrultho.
Yet Ozik had long learned that thehowof things never mattered so much as thewhy.
And the why was simple: because of Ozik. For the Ohros witches had the gift of foresight, and his mother knew that to take this path was to deliver them all to greatness. It was on Ozik’s thirteenth birthday when the Ohros witches confirmed his mother’s vision and declared he would be the most powerful Zetyr witch in history. And on that day, his father had taken theenormous black stone anchor inlaid in his dagger and split it in three. One for him, one for his wife, and one for Ozik.
That was the first day he heard Zetyr’s voice in his mind. He had heard it every day since.
As they watched Ellena weave, Julianna was quiet. There were times like these, where she seemed lost in her own mind, and then her eyes lifted to his. Bright light shone from behind her irises, a sign that her own goddess spoke in her mind. They were the same, her and him.Divine, born into a power unlike any other, a mouthpiece for their deity. Just as Ozik had heard the voice of Zetyr since his father gifted him his anchor, Julianna heard the voice of Veragi. She convened with the goddess daily.
