“The world is falling apart at the seams,” said the Ala.
Echo paused, a doughnut halfway to her mouth. She didn’t know what kind and generous soul had delivered the box of assorted doughnuts to the library at Avalon, but she knew that she loved them and would gladly take a bullet for them if need be. She, Rowan, and Caius were the only ones eating. Ivy and Helios were still rattled from what they’d seen while waiting for the train the day before. Dorian was too stoic to enjoy the miracle of fried dough covered in eight kinds of sugar. And Jasper didn’t like eating things that were messy. His loss.
“Come again?” Echo said. Ivy wrapped her arm around Echo’s and rested her head on Echo’s shoulder. Ivy was shaking like a leaf. Echo brushed off the powdered sugar that had landed on Ivy’s feathers when Echo had reached over her for a doughnut. At least the sugar blended in with her feathers.
“The rift Ivy and Helios witnessed open on the subway tracks,” the Ala said. “The mysterious seals Caius saw that Tanith used his power to help break open. The increasing instability of the in-between. They’re all connected.”
“What exactly are the seals?” Rowan asked.
The Ala pulled books off her shelves so quickly that Echo doubted she’d stopped to give the titles even a cursory glance. Most of them were bound in earth-toned leather that was worn with age and use, dark in places from oil from readers’ skin. These were well-loved books. Well-read books. The Ala probably knew every groove and indentation in their spines. “The seals have existed for as long as anyone can remember,” the Ala said.
“Kind of like the war that has raged for as long as anyone can remember?” Echo was beginning to tire of things older than memory.
“They are even older than that. Little is known about their creation.” The Ala scanned the pages of one book before snorting in disgust and tossing it over her shoulder. Echo winced as it hit the ground, covers spread like wings, spine cracked. “Most of it has been lost to time. What we do know we’ve managed to glean from fragments of memory passed down through generations, though it’s been considerably gilded by myth over the years. The seals are as much legend as the firebird was.”
Echo spread her arms wide, jostling Ivy. “And yet here I am.”
That earned her a tight smile. The Ala began arranging the books on her desk in an order that made sense only to her. “Indeed. And as the firebird is every bit as real as you, the seals are every bit as real. And from what the young prince told me, centuries – no, millennia – of neglect have rendered them disastrously vulnerable.”
“Well,” Rowan said, “what do we know?”
The Ala sighed. Her feathers shivered with the rise and fall of her chest. “We know that they were created thousands upon thousands of years ago by a tribe that predates our modern notions of Avicen and Drakharin.”
Echo recalled the Oracle she had met in that cave hidden deep within the Black Forest. The feathers that had adorned her arms. The scales that had graced the back of her hands, dusted across her knuckles. She had not been one or the other; she had been both and neither. The Oracle had been something ancient and almost forgotten. A link to their past that had been cruelly severed before Echo had even begun to scratch the surface of her mysteries. Like the seals, the Oracle predated the division that had torn their ancestors asunder. Perhaps she had been the sole survivor of a time when hatred and mistrust had not so clearly delineated the battle lines. But since Tanith had brought the ancient creature’s long life to an end, they would never know. All they had was supposition.
“There are several variations of the story of how that one tribe split into two,” the Ala continued. “But there are a few consistencies that crop up in different tellings of the tale, which leads me to believe there is a kernel of truth hiding in them.”
“The Drakharin claim the war began when the Avicen stole their magic,” said Caius, brushing the powdered sugar off his hands. He was still ravenous. “I never put much stock in the story myself. It always seemed like a convenient tale to pass down to perpetuate the cycle of hate and mistrust. But perhaps there’s something to it, as much as I am loath to admit it.”
The Ala nodded thoughtfully, considering his words. “It is possible,” she mused. “But I think there is more to the story than that. Far more.” She pulled another book off the shelf and flipped through it with speedy efficiency. “The seals Tanith used Caius’s power to break were part of a vast network of structures all over the globe that stabilize the in-between and fortify the barrier separating the world in which we live from the abyss. It’s how we’re able to travel through it without being lost to the void or torn apart by its magic. I visited one or two a few centuries ago, but they were never of particular interest to me, so I never pursued a study of them. But now I find them fascinating. Their creation would have consumed a great deal of power. Infinitely more than any one mage could wield, or even a group of mages working in tandem. A magical working like that would drain their reserves of energy, leaving them nothing more than lifeless husks once it was through. And even then, that amount of magic would hardly be enough for a spell of that magnitude. To maintain the spell, to keep it in place long after its original caster, or casters, had died would require something more permanent, a lasting solution that would survive the passage of time.”
“Our magic,” said Caius. He pushed away from his seat by the window wearing the expression Echo had come to know as his thinking face. “They used it to lock the seals.” He started pacing, engulfed by the enormity of such a revelation. “It makes sense, when you consider it. Magic is generational. It’s genetic, passed from mother to child through the ages. They must have found a way to isolate it and then to harness it for some greater purpose. The level of skill that would have taken is tremendous.”
The Ala nodded. “It’s possible Tanith can undo this magic – which should not be able to be undone – because the kuçedra is linked to it. The seals held back the dark from this world and the kuçedra is a creature born of that darkness. It has fed on conflict and pain and woe for millennia and that has made it strong, but it originated long before we ever took up arms and started hacking away at each other. Its evolution into the being we’ve encountered – and the ritual employed to lock it away forever – was the catalyst for the war that made it grow fat on our pain.”
Echo rested her cheek on Ivy’s head. All that suffering. All that hatred. The only thing it had accomplished was creating more suffering, more hatred. “Is there anything we can do about the seals?” Echo asked. “Is there some kind of magical tape we can smack on them to hold things together until we find a permanent solution?”
“I’ll send a team of mages to one of the seals we know is broken.” The Ala turned to Caius. “Do you think you would be able to locate the places Tanith brought you to?”
With a chagrined expression, Caius shook his head. “I can try, but I was blindfolded and mostly unconscious during transport.”
“Any details you remember will be helpful: whether you were underground or aboveground, the color of the stone or the smell of the soil.” The Ala began sorting through her papers again. She pulled out a slender leather-bound notebook. “I have noticed a pattern of irregularities in the natural ebb and flow of magical energies —”
“Is that Seer-speak?” Echo asked.
The Ala looked at her as if it was unreasonable that she didn’t know all about the natural ebb and flow of magical energies. “Yes.” With that out of the way, the Ala continued. “With your help, Caius, I believe we can locate the specific seals Tanith has already compromised.”
“I’ll do everything I can to help,” said Caius. “My sister wouldn’t have been able to break them without me. I can’t help but feel at least somewhat responsible.”
“It’s not your fault, Caius,” said Echo. She doubted he would believe her, but it merited mentioning regardless. He had that look about him, the one that told her he was so deep into self-abasement that there was little chance of her pulling him out of it with a few kind words.
His black moods are never so easily dispelled, Rose whispered.
“Oh my god, shut up.” Echo hadn’t realized she had spoken aloud until she noticed every pair of eyes in the room on her.
The Ala must have realized who Echo was speaking to. A heavy tome slid from her hands and landed on the table with a loud thunk, drawing all those inquisitive gazes away from Echo. She mouthed a silent Thank you at the Ala, who acknowledged it with a wink. “Oh, how clumsy of me,” said the Ala, who in all the years Echo had known her had not been prone to clumsiness.
The only person who had not fallen for the Ala’s distraction was Caius. That green gaze remained on Echo, so intently she felt her skin itch. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question, but she responded with only a very slight shake of her head. Not now, she tried to telegraph. And not ever. He was the last person she wanted to confide in on this particular point. It would make things exceptionally awkward if he knew that his long-dead lover was sharing personal insights into his character with Echo.
The conversation continued without Echo’s active participation. She heard fragments of it: the Ala would work through the night, helping Caius recover his memories and craft a map by morning to lead them to the broken seals; the mages would concoct a spell to help close the seals. Echo let the familiar sound of her friends’ voices wash over her. The bubble of elation that followed Caius’s rescue hadn’t taken long to pop. She had known it would be a short-lived joy, but had hoped, foolishly, that it would last longer than this.
But now the enormity of what they were facing threatened to overwhelm her. The very fabric of the world was beginning to unravel, and few beyond the walls of Avalon Castle even knew it was happening.