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I loved being able to touch her, feel her skin against mine. She leaned into me, her eyes glazing for several seconds before she seemed to shake herself and focused on the binder again. While she sorted through the first half of the entries, I looked through the second, focusing on any reference to either the kingdom or the wyvern shifters.

My gaze caught multiple times on my mother’s name. There were at least fifty records in this portion of the catalogue alone. I hadn’t known just how many visions and dreams she had had across her time in the Temple of Perysnthia. One caught my attention, the record notated under the keyword “salvation”. I wrote down the shelf location and eased to my feet. Amethyst glanced up.

“I think I found something,” I murmured.

She nodded and returned to the catalogue, writing down the location of one that interested her. She’d noted five or six.

The shelves were dark, nearly claustrophobic. I took one of the smaller sealed jars and coaxed a flame to life inside it, holding it out enough to read the small location markers on the shelves. The papers were as worn as the one given to us by the disciple. I carefully pulled the proper one from the box, reading it before even getting back to the table. It held the mark for those the Diviner self-identified as a waking vision rather than a dream. The longer prophecy held the same identifying mark. Then my gaze caught on the year written beside her name.

984 PE.

She would have been younger than Amethyst, then. Nearly the same age as Amaria, in fact. I hadn’t realized she’d been receiving words form the Goddesses at only twenty-two.

Amethyst glanced up, tapping the fountain pen against her lip, as I stood across from her, forgoing my seat due to the nerves ripping through my body.

“What drew you to it?”

“It’s one of my mother’s.” My voice, for some reason, was hoarse. It would have been recorded in Embercrest, so I knew there was no Recall Orb here for it. Still, the ache to hear her voice burned in my stomach, something I had not felt in nearly a decade now. “She was only twenty-two when it was recorded, long before I was born. I… I think it might be what that woman was quoting when we arrived.”

She seemed to understand everything I wasn’t saying, the mess of emotions that were too tangled to try and sort through. She stood from her seat and circled the table, easing onto beside me, holding the edge in a light grip. The sight had me remembering the library, and my cock gave an eager twitch I did my best to ignore. Even if I were gauche enough to bring her pleasure in the Atheneum, I wouldn’t dare disrespect Medea in her actual temple.

“Can you read it for me?”

“A child blessed of the old magic. A kingdom destroyed by the ancient grudge. A crown soaked with blood. A second son salvation to the weary.”

She hummed. “Old magic? What could that mean?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never heard magic referred to as any kind of age. It just is.”

She nodded, fidgeting with the lapis pendant, her head tilted in thought. Her lips pursed, she pulled a piece of paper from the book she’d brought, reading over it.

“Who do we think Addis is?”

The emotions tripped over themselves as my stomach pitched. I hadn’t told her?

“That’s my last name.”

Her eyes shot to me, so wide I could see the whites all the way around.

“What?” she breathed.

“It’s the last name of the monarchy. It has been for about a hundred years, when my father’s grandfather took the throne. The king at the time had no living children, but his sister had had a son. The magic of the throne passed to him.”

“I think it’s pretty lame it’s always a male heir,” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s not. It’s just happened that the firstborn children have been male for a long time. If something catastrophic were to happen, my sister would be able to take the magic.”

She only blinked at me. “You have a sister?”

I palmed the nape of her neck and pulled her to me, kissing the indignation off her face.

“She’s been married for three years. She lives in Brosia, in the Far Lands. Otherwise you would have met her already. She manly liked to spend her time in Starguard.”

“So this war it references has to be something coming then, doesn’t it? If it’s in the time of Addis that whatever was messed up becomes fixed. There hasn’t been a war since this became the last name of the monarchy.”

“It would seem a logical conclusion to make. Though prophecies aren’t also arranged linearly. It’s possible that war has already happened and what will need to transpire to right the wrong is the portion we don’t have. Unless we are able to hear the Diviner’s own words, it’s difficult to know the structure of the dream or vision.”

She bit her lip and then looked at the book she’d brought. With a deep breath, she opened it to a page already bookmarked and held it out to me. I soaked in the illustration of the Life Cathedral in Althea, reading over the bit of information on the page across from it.