Page 75 of A Fate Everlasting

For a fraction of a second, something flickered across his face, too quick to trace. Then, he turned away.

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My limbs felt numb as I stumbled back to my room, Dante’s voice echoing in my mind. I curled into the sheets, blood seeping through the bandages. I probably needed a nurse. I was too weak and tired to care.

I dreamt of falling. Not the kind with wind in your ears or weightlessness in your gut. This was worse, tendrils looped around my wrists and throat, dragging me down.

I woke freezing. The dormitory was thick with silence, the rain tapping against the windowpanes like restless fingers. The first rays of cherry-red light were beginning to seep through the bottom of the curtains, warping through the stained glass and casting patterns on the floor. My sheets were damp with sweat, my body trembling, but I barely noticed.

Because in the quiet, in the stillness, something had changed. My fingers brushed against my collarbone.The Lumen.

I bolted upright, hands flying to my throat, as if expecting the chain to dissolve like smoke between my fingers. But it was there, solid and impossibly real. The pendant gleamed in thepale slant of morning light, the chain unbroken as if it had never left me at all.

For a second, I was sure I was hallucinating, that the fever breaking across my forehead had twisted reality. I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them. Still there. It wasdefinitelystill there. I pressed the cool of the pendant into my palm, hard.

I clutched it, head spinning. Dante? No. He wasn’t finished with me. He’d have made me beg first, dragged it out like every cruel game he played. But who?

I turned toward the door, my gaze trailing to the sliver of shadow pooling beneath the frame. Someone had been here. Someone had slipped into my room unseen, to leave it for me. The thought curled in my chest. I had prayed to her only the night before asking for help.Her.My mother.

If Hugo could return in death, lingering like an echo, then why not her? The thought sent a shiver curling down my spine.

I tightened my grip around the Lumen, feeling the metal warm beneath my fingers, grounding me.I was safe.My wounds already felt less sore. Impossible things happened at Evermore every day. This wasn’t so implausible.

I had the Lumen. Now I had to focus on the cards. I fumbled beneath the corner of the mattress, pulling free the weathered, crumpled card I had been trying to forget.

The Fool.I ran my thumb over the blinking eyes, the delicate etchings in the ink. It was the first hope I’d allowed myself to feel in days. If the Lumen had been returned to me. If someone—my mother, fate, thesaints themselves—had decided I deserved to have it back, then maybe I was worth saving. Maybe I could fix this.

I wanted to fix it for Hugo. For Ruby. For my mother. For the girl I used to be, the one who thought she could survive this place.

For the first time since I’d arrived at Evermore, I felt compelled to pray.

My footsteps echoed off the stone floor as I approached the chapel pulpit, clenching and unclenching my fists. I pictured my mother kneeling where I now did, hands upturned, reaching for answers that never came. A tremor passed through me. She’d been just as alone as I was now, her prayers swallowed by the same silence.

I reached into my pocket.The Foolpulsed against my fingertips, warm as a heartbeat. I exhaled, pressing my palm flat to the marble floor in offering.

The Crucible flickered overhead, light spilling across the stone floor and refracting against the windows that bore the painted faces of long forgotten saints. Their eyes were hollow, their expressions stark.

The stillness felt heavy.Expectant.I swallowed, closing my fingers tighter around the card, hands clasped in prayer.

“Please help me. Show me the truth of all of this.”

The words barely left my lips before something shifted. A brush of movement, a disturbance like a ripple through still water. Then, it stilled, the silence closing in.

The words slipped from my lips again, stronger this time.“Show me the truth.”

The torchlight guttered, and a pulse of heat tore through my veins. I gasped, jerking back. The surface of the card gleamed, the golden ink lifting, peeling from the parchment in delicate veins of light.

A sound echoed through the chapel, low and resonant, a crack that vibrated through my bones. A jagged seam split the air above the pulpit, golden light bleeding through reality.

He entered through it. Not a man, nor a god, but something in-between. His form pulsed, his edges blurring as if his presence was too divine for this world to contain it, or straining against something.

His face flickered, so nearly human. But with every blink, the features warped, never the same. Never staying still. Then, he spoke. “You should not exist.”

The words were not an accusation, but I could tell by the way he spoke them that they were a fact. I had heard them before. I had also felt them in the way Evermore refused to let me go, in the way the Thread twisted through my bones. In that same way, I knew exactly who this apparition was.

“Who are you?” I stammered. “Are you an Archangel?”

He nodded.Yes. “You must listen.”The voice did not come from his lips, it was omnipresent.“We do not have much time.”

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