Crystal Storm (Falling Kingdoms #5)(25)
“All this time . . .” she murmured, trying to contain the shaking frustration growing within her at not having all the answers she needed readily available to her. “All this time, I thought your vague hints and enigmatic riddles were meant to annoy me, to toy with me while you waited for the exact right moment to strike. But now I see why you couldn’t tell me anything real. You really don’t have all the answers.”
“Far fewer than I’d like to have,” he gritted out.
“We’re in great trouble, aren’t we?”
He glanced at her next to him. “Yes, we are. Like you believed of me, I believed that you might be the one who knew how to stop this magic that threatens to destroy us all. That Eva’s vast knowledge had somehow made its way into your stubborn mortal mind.”
Timotheus had a great talent for making nearly everything he said sound like an insult. Lucia chose to ignore this one. “It didn’t. At least, not yet.”
He nodded. “I know your ring is powerful. Eva used it when dealing with the Kindred, and she was never corrupted by them.”
“Corrupted . . . like Cleiona and Valoria. I have my own vision and I saw it—I think I saw what happened. They touched the orbs and . . . the magic”—she shook her head, trying to understand—“it . . .”
“Possessed them,” Timotheus finished for her, nodding. “Changed them, and cast them away from our world forevermore. After the great battle a thousand years ago, the Kindred were lost between worlds. And lost they remained all these centuries—until you entered the time line. Melenia too was corrupted, but in a different way. For all her claims of power and intelligence, when she touched the amber orb, the being who now calls himself Kyan was able to communicate with her. He manipulated her into doing his bidding.”
She could barely believe his words, but after getting to know the fire god, they made a sickening kind of sense. “She claimed she loved him, that she’d waited for him for all these centuries. But when they were reunited, he cast her away like she was nothing to him.”
“I’m not at all surprised. Fire can’t love; it can only consume.” He considered her for a silent moment. “Because of your ring, Kyan will be in a weakened state. You must find his amber orb before he regains his strength.”
“I never saw the orb in the first place.”
“Still, I would guess he would keep something so important like that with him. That orb is one of his few weaknesses, and to allow it into anyone else’s hands would be to open the opportunity for imprisonment. Therefore, you must find it. The first place to search would be the site of your battle.”
She nodded stiffly. “Are you certain about all this?”
“There are no certainties in situations like this, I’m afraid,” he admitted.
“So I’m learning. Especially about Melenia.” She refused to feel any sympathy for the heartbroken immortal, but she now understood her on a deeper level. She hadn’t become a goddess like Cleiona and Valoria. Her corruption had resulted in an addiction to Kyan, making her into a tool for him to use and manipulate and, when he no longer needed her, to cast away like rubbish.
Alexius hadn’t cast Lucia away, but she knew very well what it felt like to be used and manipulated.
“Melenia was smart and resourceful before her corruption, long before she turned against Eva,” Timotheus said. “She was one of the few left who knew the secret I must keep about this world. The secret that keeps me trapped here.”
“What secret?”
“The leaves,” he said. He drew one from the folds of his cloak, a single brown leaf, crumpled and dead. She took it from him, and it disintegrated with the slightest bit of pressure in her grasp.
She shrugged. “Dead leaves. It happens.”
“Not here. It’s a sign, a small one, that the magic is fading. Even with the Kindred found and scattered across Mytica, it’s too late to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“This world . . . what’s left of it . . .” He paused, and when Lucia was certain he wasn’t going to continue, she followed his gaze out toward the greenery beyond the city arches, hills, and valleys that seemed to go on forever.
“What’s left of it?” she repeated, not understanding. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“My fellow immortals panic at the sight of a dying leaf, all the while ignorant that it could be much, much worse.” He turned to her with a grim expression, and she met his gaze. “You need to know what could happen to your world. Look again at my beautiful Sanctuary.”
Lucia blinked, then turned once again to survey the pristine view. Only now, beyond the city, the greenery she’d admired didn’t stretch as far as before. A mile, perhaps two, beyond the city gates, the land turned to scorched and blackened earth. And, like a jagged cliffside, it then dropped away entirely. The blue sky had turned to a sheet of solid darkness, no stars to be seen.
The Sanctuary consisted of the city and perhaps a mile of greenery before all beyond it was destroyed.
“What happened?” she choked out.
“An immortal named Damen was created at the same time as Eva, but with the power to kill. He acted only out of a fiery need to destroy, just as the fire Kindred does. The only difference is that Kyan has no real choice over what he is and what he wants. Damen had a choice, and he chose to hurt us. To try to end us. And finally, so many years after his attack, there isn’t enough magic left here to sustain the little that remains of this dying world. Without the Kindred to replenish the life of this realm, the Sanctuary has wasted away to this mere shard, with only a fraction of my kind still in existence. I use my magic to conceal the truth from the others and to try to hold what remains of this world together for as long as I can.”