“They’re to protect us against ourselves,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
That was why they chose the heirs as they had. It had never been just about bloodline or strength. It was about trust. About a unity strong enough to resistthe lure of limitless power. Strong enough to bring the stones togetheronlywhen desperation demanded it.
Which meant…Reve had been right when he said worth had nothing to do with it. In Selvarra, obedience was what earned a crown.
But if balance required six, why did the memory only show one?
Something cold slithered under my skin. Ronan felt it through the bond, his eyes snapping to mine.
In the wrong hands, the stones wouldn’t defend the kingdoms—
They would unmake them.
“If Obrann controlled the stones, he wouldn’t just rule Selvarra.” My stare scanned the room, catching on the panic heightening through everyone’s eyes. “He would reshape it.”
And it would be catastrophic.
He needed the heirs to stop the Bale from wiping our world off the map. But he also needed the stones to kill them all afterward. To drown Luamis from its light, burn Nyctom’s darkness to ash. To scour every dragon from the sky. Perhaps even to awaken what slept beneath.
“That power is too holy for Obrann to be able to command alone,” Inessa stated. “It would rip him apart.”
The raven’s throat warbled as Nezra reached her arm out, allowing it to walk and perch back on her shoulder. “There is no such thing as holy power when those unworthy of it try to wield it.”
Inessa slammed her dagger into the table beside her, wood splintering.
Elva flinched, Ford clutching his chest. “You can’t just—stars above—warn a man!”
“Nyctom’s heirloom vanished with its heir, didn’t it?” Elva asked.
Ronan crossed his arms. “That’s the rumor.”
Gently, she pressed, “Does anyone remember what its stones were? Or at the very least, what relics they were forged into?”
Nezra ignored them all, looking directly at me.
“Oh! I know this one.” Ford cleared his throat, shuffling toward the center of us. “Amethyst was one. Forged into a glass orb that King Kairos always kept on him.” His eyes fell, brows drawing together before he looked toward my hip. “The other…was—”
“Ruby.” I cut in.
It had bothered me since the day he gave it to me. And the more I turned it over in my mind, the more the cracks in Callum’s story about how he found the stone for my dagger split wide open.
He had said his mission took him into the caves near the mountain. But it hadn’t. He’d gone west to the shore that day. And in the library, when Elva and I had been scouring over numerous books, I studied every stone Luamis could forge.
White marble was not one of them.
Which meant there was no way he had found that marbled stone in any cave. No way Wells had forged my dagger from it.
The weapon pulsed once against my hip, my hand dropping from the book to the gem at its hilt.
Ruby—the color of a gift to the night domain when the kingdoms were built.
Callum had given me Nyctom’s heirloom, knowing Obrann would burn the realms to get to it.
Unknowing that Nezra had already shown me that it was a fake.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Ronan
