Something hummed through Tristan’s veins. Like every choice he’d made had led him to this moment.
Ione parted her feathers and reappeared before him as he did the same. She plucked a dagger—regular steel not Typhon—from her waist and grabbed his hand, raising a questioning eyebrow.
Tristan nodded his permission, then tried not to close his palm against the sting of the blade. A line of blood bubbled up from where she’d sliced across his Turning scar.
Her eyes darted toward his, glistening with regret, and though he couldn’t remember the last time they’d done this—his memories of the Turning ceremony had been pulled by Shrouded Sisters before he was exiled—he wondered if Ione did.
She lifted his palm toward the door and pressed it against the Teles symbol. His blood seeped into the carving, and a faint rainbow pulsed through it before the door swept backward, then rumbled aside.
Ione glanced up at him, holding her breath.
“After you, Prince,” was all she said before Tristan stepped into the chamber.
Not a chamber.
It was a chapel.
Though it looked very different from any other house of worship Tristan had ever visited.
He supposed technically hehadvisited this one before, though his memory of it was hazy.
The chapel was crafted entirely from the same opalescent stone as the door. Columns ringed the outer edges of the room and the soaring ceiling above showcased faded frescoes—pastoral scenes of various Fae sub-species cavorting with humans. The ceiling’s center panel had been scrubbed raw, though faint traces of paint signaled there’d been a fresco there as well. Along the edge of the ceiling, just under where the dome began to curve, symbols were carved into the stone in a repeating pattern: an upright triangle, an inverted triangle, a lightning bolt, and a wavy line. Symbols of the elemental powers Adelphinae had bestowed upon her creations.
Ione dashed away a tear as she walked toward the center of the chapel. Tristan followed.
Concentric circular benches rose from the floor, and four aisles at north, south, east, and west flowed toward an obelisk carved with Teles symbols. And next to the obelisk was a single stone pedestal, atop which sat a book.
Thebook.
The Compendium of Creation.
He wondered why neither his father nor Eamon had destroyed it—the book or the chapel. They’d decimated the art, but had left this sacred space intact. He could almost hear chanting voices, could imagine the Fae gathered around a priestess of Adelphinae, who would have been on the same level as the congregation rather than up at a pulpit preaching downward. A difference in the Goddess’s principles, versus the hierarchies imposed by the religion of the High Gods.
As they approached the pedestal, he couldn’t help thinking that the book looked soordinary. And small. Tristan didn’t recognize the words embossed on the cover—an ancient dialect from the days of the Fallen Goddess, no doubt. When Eamonhad shown Tristan the book in their youth, he hadn’t known how to read the language either. They’d figured out the Turning ceremony thanks to crude drawings that represented the process.
Ione’s hand hovered over the book, afraid to touch it lest it crumble to dust. “I… It doesn’t feel real. How can so much knowledge be captured in such a tiny package?”
“What language is that?”
“Senskrish,” Ione answered, her mouth wrapping confidently around the word. “An ancient dialect of Aramaelish.”
“You can read it?”
“I can speak it, too. I’ve been studying it. Some of the older Teles Chrysos members who were alive before the war had texts written in it.”
Holding her breath, she plucked up the small book, then nestled it in her sack. She glanced to the cuff on her wrist.
“These won’t work within the palace,” she said. “We need to return to the boat and clear the shield around the Imperial island before we’re able to?—”
A boom cut off her speech.
The chamber door had shut.
Sealing them within the chapel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Tristan and Ione scrambled down the aisle, Tristan reaching for the dagger sheathed at her hip. She stilled his wrist. “It won’t work from this side.” She gestured to the smooth stone. “There are no carvings.”
