Page 44 of The Oracle of Dusk

Theron raced from the corpse down the hall to the deepest part of the treasury. Smoke billowed out of the room in which he’d ordered the contents of the spire placed. Only the ashes of burnt scrolls remained of the precious documents he’d stolen. Every stone object had fractured into a thousand pieces and the metal devices had melted, their arcane symbols warped beyond recognition. He slammed the door shut and roared. Whatever device the acolyte had activated, it had destroyed his proof.

The high priestess had outplayed Theron once again.

Chapter 10

Thestinkofwethay and horse crawled up Aurora’s nose and expired there. Searing light from a bright, cloudless day and the rather jarring sway of the ground beneath her brought her out from a dark, dreamless place. She immediately regretted rousing. A sharp jolt of pain shot up from her leg, her sudden gasp alerting her to a new agony gripping her chest. She raised a hand to shield her eyes, only to gain another regret. Goddesses, she must be bruised from head to toe, or worse. What had happened?

She remembered the mountain, the museum, then the Colonnades, and then Drakon...

“Phaedra!” Aurora cried, sitting up, only to fall to her side when her injuries overwhelmed her.

Phaedra was gone. Obliterated. A sob ripped from her throat, and then another and another, until she hurt inside and out, body and soul. Phaedra had taken Aurora’s place—her fate—in a final act of selfless love.

Aurora’s magic writhed inside her, responding to her raw and wretched grief. It had exploded from her the moment Phaedra had died, feeding off her as it grew unstable. Unstable like the ground beneath her had been. She’d fallen. She should have joined Phaedra in death, their threads reunited in the Loom. But this was not the afterlife, unless her teachings had greatly misled her. Not unless the afterlife was a rickety cart filled with musty hay, lurching unpredictably on a muddy road.

A plump brunette woman in strange garb and a straw hat jogged to keep up with the cart, her tanned hand on the side railing as she looked up at Aurora with kindly brown eyes. What she could see of the woman appeared abnormally large, startling her from her grief.

“It’ll be alright, little one. The temple isn’t far, and the medics there will soothe your hurts.”

Aurora was stunned into silence. The juxtaposition of the woman’s rustic fashion and her fluent, almost melodic mastery of the ancient temple tongue took some time to process. Normally, only the priestesses and highly ranked scholars attained such a skill.

“You speak the ancient temple tongue? Are you a priestess?” Aurora asked.

If this woman was a priestess though, where in Trisia was she? She didn’t think she knew of any priestess who wore such simple, low-quality clothes unless they were partaking in some manual labour that would dirty their finer fabrics. Her fashion was also woefully, purposefully archaic. She looked like she had just come from a costume party, except the fabric looked worn—lived in.

“I’m speaking common, little one. And just how hard did you hit your head for you to think me a priestess?” the woman asked, brow raised.

“Where is this? I don’t recognise this place.” Aurora looked at the scenery, stunned by the abundance of plant life.

Not even Viridis during the height of blooming season was so lush. Fields of wheat stretched out further than the horizon, separated by flowering trees taller than any she’d seen. Beyond the smell of musty hay and her own sweat, the fragrance of a thousand blooms drifted on the breeze. The other surprise? Just how many birds flew overhead. Had she been transported to another world? Was this the magic of the artefact?

Aurora gasped.

“My artefact! Did you see a small, round device with metal bands around it?”

The woman pulled the small globe from a satchel at her side and handed it to Aurora, her hands engulfing Aurora’s own. Just how large was this stranger?

Relief coursed through her until she saw that the bands had been dented and warped. Even the glow of the blue stones had faded. It no longer called to her.

“It’s an odd trinket. Best keep it safe. Something that unusual is likely to catch the attention of thieves. We’re nearly to the gates of Boreas now, so find someplace to hide it.”

“Boreas? Then this is Viridis?” Aurora asked.

“Just so. For someone with such a strange accent, you seem to know of our queendom.”

“Queendom? Not empire?”

The woman laughed.

“An empire? Maybe one day. Queen Flora is an ambitious woman.”

Queen Flora? There hadn’t been a Flora on the Viridian throne in at least several hundred years. And there hadn’t been a queen, rather than an empress, for at least a thousand. Had she been transported not just in space, but in time? Dread crept up her spine. She swallowed.

“Which High Priestess Orithyia currently sits under Knowledge’s auspices?”

The woman’s brows knit with pity, and maybe a little alarm.

“High Priestess Orithyia XI, little one.”

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