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The Oracle stares at me, unblinking, and my certainty wavers.

“Stories dull their teeth when told too often. This one has had its edges sanded smooth.” She gestures, and faint luminescence crawls across the tapestry’s sky, catching on a lattice of nearly invisible stitches spanning the kneeling figures. “But at its heart, there lies truth. They came as fugitives. Outrunning someone who would not let them go.”

A shiver trembles down my spine.

“A captor,” I breathe. “The Keeper? But that was a story.”

“Daughter of the Tempest,” Sphinx purrs. “Don’t you know better by now?”

The pool’s light shivers in the wake of her words. I swallow hard, tearing my gaze from the tapestry and fixing it on her. Suddenly, what Master Leto told me feels less like a story and more like a warning I was too oblivious to hear.

“You were there. In the tale, you escaped with them.”

Sphinx dips her head in acknowledgment, her gold-black wings shifting.

“Who is the Keeper?” I press, irritation prickling beneath my skin. “And what does this have to do with me?”

“Some things are not meant for knowing, lest it affect how you choose in the end,” the Oracle says.

“And did my mother know what would happen when she left?”

The Oracle drops her gaze to the pool, and the tension in the room thickens as I wait for her response. Beneath my skin, something stirs—alive, uncoiling like a storm trapped inside me.

When she finally lifts her gaze, her tone is steady but tinged with something close to sorrow. “She made her choice.”

Her words sharpen the ache in my chest, and heat licks up my throat, bright and bitter.

“You knew she would die, and you said nothing?”

“Beware the truths you chase. They cut deeper than lies,” the Oracle says, soft as a lullaby, as if gentleness can blunt the blade she’s put in my ribs.

Something in me snaps.

I push myself to my feet. “I’m done with your riddles, and I will not let them force me down whatever path you think you see. My mother did that and now she’s dead.”

Without another word, I turn sharply and march toward the entrance.

But the Oracle’s voice chases me, shifting into something melodic, eternal.

“When the winds gather, Daughter of the Tempest, you must decide what breaks—and what endures.”

The cavern exhales me into the world like a breath held too long.

My steps falter as the wind rushes to meet me. It tugs at my hair, lifts strands from my shoulders, teasing my cloak into motion.

Lyxander stands at the edge of the stone outcropping, his silver eyes searching my face.

Words rise in my chest like water, suffocating me from within. My mother’s name lingers, reverberating in my skull. Nephelle. And the prophecy is like a second shadow, stretching and twisting in quiet mockery.

But I can’t speak.

I can’t breathe.

My hands fly to my ribs, fingers digging into the fabric of my tunic.

But before they can find purchase, warm hands clasp my own and pull them away. My gaze wrenches from the ground, slipping past the stone, the twisting wind, until it anchors onto his stare. The sharp, familiar steel of his eyes.

“Breathe,” he says as he moves one hand to my chest and lays the other against his sternum. “Breathe with me.”