I left them hidden in Maleia’s garden.
The wards hummed louder, as though mocking me.
“No…” My voice cracked. My hands shook against the coral. “No, no, no.”
I slumped against the wall, magic smothered, skin still stinging where silver had burned me. The silence pressed heavy—thick as silt. I let my eyes close.
Let the hum lull me into something dangerously close to surrender.
58
Nerina
Thalassia
The water shifted—a ripple stirring the chamber.
My eyes snapped open, pulse jerking sharp and fast. My vision blurred, the glow of my mark guttering like a dying star.
A figure drifted closer, her cloak unraveling like smoke. Too slight to be Meris. Too steady to be Maleia. And not a Tidekeeper—their presence always choked the current with cold.
This was different. The hood fell back.
Silvered strands caught in the faint light, eyes cloudy yet piercing—moonstone with a flame still burning inside. A face lined with time but not weakened by it, the kind of beauty carved by storms.
The Oracle.
She regarded me with that blind, unblinking gaze. Beneath it was something that made my skin prickle, like standing too close to an eel.
When she spoke, it was soft and resonant, carrying the weight of tides and years.
“If you do not learn what you are meant to become, child,” she said. “You will always find yourself back here.”
Part of me wanted to ask what she meant. The rest wanted to scream until the glass shattered. Instead, my voice scraped, raw and trembling. “I’m not really in the mood for cryptic riddles right now.”
I thought she might vanish like a vision. But her lips curved. “You’ve changed,” the Oracle murmured. Her voice was smoke and surf, gentle yet cutting. “Not the girl who once trembled at the Choir’s altar. No—there is fire in you now.”
She stepped closer and pressed her palm to the coral glass. Nothing happened at first. The wards hummed louder, the runes flaring bright in resistance, the cage tightening. Then the Oracle spoke again. Not louder. Deeper. Her voice slipped through the water like a current cutting stone. The sigils screamed—light flaring so bright I felt it in my teeth. The chamber shuddered, the wards resisting, tightening— The light collapsed inward with a sound like breath ripped from a chest. Cracks raced across the glass in jagged lines, the seams groaning under the strain.
“Hurry,” she murmured. The cage split. Not cleanly. Not completely. But enough.
I staggered through, cold current washing over me. My skin still burned where the net had seared me, my chest still heaved with fury and grief—
The Oracle remained where she stood, steady as a reef in a storm.
“Why?” My voice scraped raw, trembling between anger and something far more dangerous.
Her head tilted, the faintest smile touching her lips, though sorrow still lined her face. “The path exists only after a step is taken.”
Her answer sank into me heavy and strange, like a language I almost understood but not quite.
My fists were clenched. “What do you want from me?”
She stepped closer, hand slipping into the folds of her cloak. “Nothing,” she said. “Only for you to carry what is yours.”
She drew a tattered bag and pressed it into my trembling hands.
I loosened the mouth of the bag. Light spilled out. Three shards of quartz lay inside—fractured pieces of the Crescent—each one humming with a resonance that thrummed against my bones.
