Her tears condense into another opal just as they did before. She stares at the jewel where it rests in the ruffles of her skirts, and her horror is a cold mist in the air. Shakily, she takes hold of it and lifts it to the light. It’s beautiful and yet hard to look at, the power in it searing in its strength.
“Weakened myself…” she whispers. Her face contorts with sorrow. “You know nothing of what it is to be a god, Nocturn.”
I snap back into my body and let out a strangled sound. I’ve fallen to the deck, and Anassa stands over me protectively. She nudges me with her snout, and I focus on her touch because it helps convince me that I’m not still drowning in Lumina’s suffering.
Lucien is on his knees, next to me. “You saw that?” he asks, seeking confirmation, looking at me intently.
“Yes.”
Nocturn.He trapped Lumina in that tower.
His voiceis the one I’ve been hearing, I’m certain of it now. Nocturn must have been the one to set up that twisted test for us and the one who brought me back after I plunged that knife into my chest.
All along, it’s been him—his shadows haunting my dreams, making me think I was going mad back in Sturmfrost.
“It was never madness,” I breathe out. “Not for me, and not for my mother. It wasalwayshistory. She was telling us our history.”
Lucien looks at me, nonplussed.
“I thought it was nothing. Just… mindless scribbling. But now… wait here.” I scramble to my feet and race down to my bunk belowdecks to grab my mother’s journals. Saela, wise Saela; she was right that I would need them with me.
I flip to the page I was thinking of, the one that shows those three names again and again. Lumina, Nocturn, Astreon. The linejoinsinstances of the three names. It moves through Lumina’s name, Nocturn’s, Astreon’s and back again. An eternal joining. It looks chaotic because there are so many recurrences of their names, but it’s no accident.
“But who is Astreon?” I say slowly.
Lucien purses his lips and gazes up toward the sky. “Fine! Fine, I’ll tell you about the first vision I saw. If you’ll do the same.”
I roll my eyes. “I take it that means you saw someone named Astreon in yours?”
“Yes,” Lucien admits. “I think he may have been an ancestor. And… possibly Lumina, too. But then”—his voice grows in confidence—“I always knew I had the looks of a god.”
“Get over yourself for a single minute and focus,” I retort. “I saw a god in my vision, too. Nocturn. I think he may have beenmyancestor. So Lumina was in romantic relationships with both Nocturn and Astreon. And that’s why Nocturn locked her away. For being unfaithful?”
I leave out the part where Nocturn’s been speaking to me in my dreams. I don’t need to share all my secrets.
Turning back to my mother’s journal, I scan it for any other clues that might lead us to the final Tear.
I skip through pages and pages of writing, Nocturn and Lumina and Astreon written over and over in tiny script.
Some of the pages are illegible, her handwriting too shaky to decipher. Some of them are wrinkled and washed out, maybe waterlogged at some point so that the ink ran in every direction.
I flip to a faded sketch that dominates the entire page.
The journal is full of sketches of this unearthly woman: the goddess Lumina, as I now know it to be. But something about this drawing feels more specific. More real.
“Stark.” I beckon him over. “Does this remind you of anything?”
He gazes down at the page, then up at me.
“The statue of the Faceless Goddess in Linsfall.”
Exactly. The one I saw when I traveled with Stark, when an inexplicable pull drew me to her likeness.
The one with the mysteriously warm hands. As if she were alive and holding me.
I snap the book shut. “I know where we’ll find the final Tear.”
52
