Page 46 of Bound and Tide

Pacing slightly, the priest continued to peruse the letters. “Hopefully we can resolve this without any of the people you love, yourself included, dying.”

“I don’t love any—” Xander snapped his teeth so quickly he caught his tongue, biting down and grunting with the pain. Blood tainted his mouth, but it was followed by the taste of Evangeline, her lips, her body, and then he could see her in his mind’s eye and knew he would annihilate everything in her name, himself included. “Oh, fuck.”

The priest flipped over the page he was reading. “I’m going to pretend the demon made you say that.”

“I assure you, she didn’t,” Xander mumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face then glaring at the sun symbol over the holy man’s shoulder.

“It says here this other blood mage didn’t destroy himself, so I don’t believe you will need to either, but it seems you will need to go to the source of your troubles and sever your connection.”

“You mean I have to…go see her?” Xander’s entire being shuddered, and his throat went tight. “No, no, I can’t possibly. Opening a rift to the layer of the infernal plane that she’s stuck on is exactly what she wants, not that I’m capable of doing that right now. And even if I could somehow cross over, I’d have to close the door behind me, and then I’d be stuck there. With her.” She wouldn’t kill him, of that he was sure, but she’d make him wish he were dead.

“It sounds like you need a place to parlay. A place where the veil is thinnest, where historically arcana has…” He ran fingers over one of the letters, eyes following the words as his voice trailed off. Then he snapped the book shut and hustled to the shelf to grab another. “Have you ever been to the Denonfy Oracle?”

“I don’t consider the word of some god telling me what’s going to happen to be particularly useful,” he muttered, and then tipped his head upward. “No offense, Val.”

“I assume he takes none, or at least little enough to not smite you.” Father Theodore flipped through the pages of the new tome, shaking his head until he finally stopped with a grunt. “There—the two sisters.”

“Sisters?”

“Sister villages,” he went on, sitting once again, nose still turned down to the book. “They exist at the edge of the Kvesari Wood on either side of Crystal Basin. You may not believe in prophecies, but you are perhaps about to fulfill one.”

Xander did not like the sound of that.

“Have you heard of a place called Ironwood Hollow?”

Xander liked the sound of that even less. A voice came back to him then, but this one wasn’t horrible or nasty or any of the things he was trying desperately to avoid. This voice trembled when it spoke and it had a lot to say—a lot he should have probably paid better attention to. I could go for a tea cake right now.

“I can tell by your face that you are familiar with the village—that or the demon’s taking over.”

Xander shook his head. “I knew a woman who lived there. Sort of.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” The priest’s sincerity was grave but a waste—Tea Cakes wasn’t dead, at least Xander hoped not, but this man didn’t need to know about her or her sister’s hand in the village’s fate. “You are aware, I assume, that Ironwood Hollow was once held and protected by Osurehm’s followers until…the event.”

“The priests were meddling in dark arcana,” Xander said, brows waggling.

The Valcordian priest’s brows also waggled but decidedly more frustratedly. “Osurehm’s priests are rather tight-lipped about the whole thing, but they were not so secretive about the divine prediction that one with infernal blood would return to cleanse the place.”

“One doesn’t need theological training to know that infernal blood and cleanse do not go together.”

“Indeed, I originally believed the prophecy was just the high priests’ way of saying they wouldn’t be cleaning up their mess because their god ordained someone else would. As you can imagine, we almost never run into beings with infernal blood, certainly not ones who are willing to do Empyrean god worshipers any favors, yet here you are.”

Xander clicked his tongue and tipped his head. It was perhaps a little appealing, being the center of some weighty and ordained words, and Xander did enjoy being important. But not exactly the kind of important that got one killed. “Well, I did not, in fact, come here to do you any favors—I came here looking for a favor done.”

“But why here, my son?”

Because it’s your job, would have come pouring out if Father Theodore hadn’t laid his book down flat on the desk at that moment. Instead, Xander blinked many times, sure he wasn’t seeing right. “That book—so many pages have been torn out.”

The priest eyed him. “That is its purpose.”

“But the parchment is very fine.”

“This is eucal bark, dried under one hundred dawns and blessed to never fade or be blotted by moisture regardless of the ink used.” The priest flipped to the front where only ripped edges of the uniquely colored parchment remained. “We use these books to record valuable information and then pass the pages along as needed.”

“Only prophecy though, yes?”

He shook his head. “We record many things for ourselves and for anyone who might come in and request an entertaining tale to be transcribed or a letter to be sent someplace inhospitable.”

Xander did not have to reach into his satchel to reveal the pristine parchment folded there—he already knew the letter from his father that told him of Bendcrest would match. It hadn’t been his arcana that had preserved the page he’d kept folded beneath a cobble in the basement of the Chthonic Tower for decades, and looking back it made so much sense—he’d only been nine when he received it, not skilled enough then. It had been the magic of this place, this very temple, that had preserved the words. And it was that same arcana that had indeed brought him here.

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