Page 33 of Owned By Four Alphas

It had to work. Her efforts to control her magic had only gotten worse. At the merest attempt to wrestle with it, it would unfurl and lash against her, a wild animal snapping and twisting in her grasp.

It was utterly exhausting.

“Hang on,” Castien leaned forward suddenly, his eyes brightening, his pointed ears flicking. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! I think I’ve found something!”

“What! Let me see, let me see!” She tried to push his shoulder out of the way, but he was unmovable, his eyes flicking between the books as his lips moved, forming the words.

“Castien, what does it say? You’re driving me crazy!”

“It says,” he said slowly, his brow furrowing, his finger tapping against the ancient paper. “It says…I think it says…no, no. Wait, maybe?”

“Castien, I swear to all the gods, if you don’t tell me what it says then I’m going to feed you to Malek!”

He huffed at her, pushing away her grabbing hands.

“Okay. I think I’ve got it. It’s a prophecy, a very old one.”

“Well yes, I could guess that, it is a book of prophecy! What does it actually say?”

“It’s talking about the Forest God, about his power waning, about him giving it away.”

“What?”

“Look here, this translates to ‘bleeding out,’ and this word here means to plant, as in a seed, but I don’t think it’s literal. I think it means he bled out his magic, so to speak, in order to water a planted seed.”

“Or father a child!” Selena gasped, the pieces falling into place.

“Precisely. It talks of him seeing an oncoming storm, and knowing the only way to avert it is to father a child and give over his magic.”

Selena looked closer at the text. The letters were strange and blotchy, hard to read against a swirling pattern of light green that covered the page. Something tugged at the back of her mind, and she looked closer at the swirling lines. One in particular, bold and curving, struck her as being remarkably similar to the river that ran through the First Realm.

She cried out, jabbing her finger against it, “I think this is a map!”

“What?”

“Look here! Doesn’t this look like the river? And these markings here, they’re slightly sharper than the rest, they could be the northern volcanoes!”

Castien’s eyes widened, “And there’s the borderline. Selena, I think you’ve got it! This doesn’t just predict what the Forest God was to do, it’s showing us where he was to do it!”

Her eyes raked over the map. “Where? I don’t see it!”

“It’s clear as day! Look here, the only direct reference to the Forest God’s name, rather than this pronoun that seems to refer to deities in general, is here to the north! What if this is where the Forest God gave you his magic?”

Her heart was in her throat, her hands trembling with a sudden onslaught of emotion, “Do you really think…I mean…could it really be?”

Castien nodded, his mouth curved in a grin. “Yes, I mean, nothing else makes sense, if you look at…”

He suddenly trailed off, his eyes narrowing, his finger grazing the text.

“What, what is it? What have you seen?”

He was silent a while as he translated, his face growing pale, his brow furrowing.

After a while, he swallowed, his hand trembling. “There’s more to the prophecy,” he said, his voice catching slightly.

“What more? Where? What does it say?”

“Selena, I don’t think—”

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