Page 69 of The Book of Legends
Inside, it’s cooler than I expected. The air tastes scorched. Timeless. My footsteps echo down corridors lined with charred tapestries and glass-strewn floors. The foyer is dominated by a half-melted piano, strings exposed like sinew.
This place remembers fire.
It remembers her.
The woman in my vision at the Fae court.
I shouldn't remember her—but I do. In flashes. The curve of her smile, wet with blood. Her fingers trembling in my hair. Her last look before?—
The stairs groan beneath my weight. The light above is strange—not natural. Like moonlight filtered through smoke.
A door at the end of the hall is warped and split, slightly ajar. Inside, the room is small. Simple. On the floor, a circle is burned into the wood—dark as obsidian. Long-dead candles ring its edges, runes long since scorched away.
I smell burnt jasmine.
Kainen’s voice breaks the silence.
“You shouldn't look into her eyes.”
I turn.
He stands in the doorway, shadowed and worn. The ash from battle still dusts his cloak. His eyes are storm-swollen. Ancient.
“I had to see it,” I say. “I needed to know.”
He doesn’t move. “This place is a wound. Hers. Mine. Don’t open it unless you’re ready to bleed.”
Something in his voice sends a chill through my bones.
He steps inside. The runes at our feet pulse faintly beneath his boots. There’s almost no light—only the echo of something long dead, refusing to rest.
“She summoned something here,” I whisper.
He nods. “Something she couldn’t control.”
“Was it Therion?”
“No,” he says, voice dark. “It was worse.”
I move toward him. The weight of the room presses against my ribs like a vice.
“Why didn’t you tell me your mother was a witch?”
His jaw flexes. “Because if I told you, you’d start wondering what else I inherited.”
My heart races. “And what if I already am?”
He turns to face me.
And it happens.
The air between us tightens, electric. The runes flare. The circle burns.
“You feel it too,” I whisper. “You feel what I’m becoming.”
His lips find mine—suddenly. Fiercely.
This kiss is not like before.
