Page 61 of The Myths of Ophelia
“Yes,” Ophelia answered, bitterness staining her voice. My attention snapped up to those magenta eyes burning with vulnerability. I brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, silently telling her to give me a thought.
“Not abird,” Lancaster interjected. “A phoenix.”
A beat of silence passed as Rina continued wrapping Jez’s wrist and Mora disinfected her brother’s wounds so he could stitch them with his own healing magic. But Ophelia and Lancaster only glared at each other.
“Not possible,” Cypherion claimed.
“No, Cyph,” Ophelia said, her voice somewhere between tired and frustrated. “He’s right. We’ve all seen renditions of them from storybooks and legends.” She bit her lip, and I swore the fire of the bird’s feathers flamed in her eyes. “It was a phoenix.”
This time, the stunned silence was laden with fear.
“What in the everlasting Angel fuck?” I finally blurted.
Lyria echoed, “My question exactly.”
“Thatis why I had to kill it,” Lancaster ground out, slicing another chunk off his apple and eating it off the blade.
“Why?” Ophelia’s voice was laced with venom, heaving with the pressure of yet another question.
Lancaster simply answered, “Because phoenixes are not meant to be alive.”
“Are you going to kill Sapphire next, then? The khrysaor?” Ophelia growled, lurching forward and ripping open her wound again. Fucking Spirits, this woman.
“You lay a hand on them,” Jezebel said, voice as cold as death, “and our Queen of Bounties won’t be the only one hunting faeries.” She hissed as Santorina set her arm in a sling, butthe vicious look didn’t leave her eyes. Rina wisely allowed the Bounty reference to slide this time.
“It does raise questions,” Mora chimed in, her voice thoughtful as if oblivious to the tension thickening the air. Or pointedly ignoring it.
“Such as?” I asked.
“First the pegasus and khrysaor return,” she said. “Now a phoenix. Why?”
Ophelia swallowed her anger. “You mentioned during the battle against Kakias that you’ve seen the khrysaor,” she said to Mora, and she seemed to be teetering on some kind of nervous edge. “Do you know where they came from?”
Mora considered. The only sounds piercing the air were Rina’s bustling about and the ice clinking in my sister’s glass. When the female finally offered a response, the words rolled off her tongue with the heaviness of legends and magic. “Does thefel strella mythosmean anything to you?”
Angellight shimmered along Ophelia’s palms, but she looked around the room, waiting for any of us to interject before saying, “It doesn’t.”
“That’s an old folktale,” Lancaster dismissed.
“Until recently,” his sister retorted, gesturing toward the door. “It’s a story—likely lost in the shorter warrior lifetimes—about brother constellations. Twins. An ancient being of the heavens was desperate for a babe, but her womb was barren, so she plucked the charted stars from the sky and breathed life into them. Pegasus was the first,” she said, and Ophelia’s spine straightened, glowing at the mention, “then his brother, Khrysaor.”
Jezebel perked up.
“There were as many of them as there are common horses now. The pegasus with manes all colors of the rainbow andwings white as snow. The khrysaor gleaming the darkest night and silver.
“The accounts differ of what happened to the creatures after that. Some say they ruled the skies with a vengeful wrath; some say they were monsters of both peace and protection. And some swear they fought in the oldest wars, at the very head of their armies, with ferocious female warriors at their backs.”
“The books I’ve found all speak of constellations,” Jez said, “but I didn’t know they meant so literally.”
“It aligns with what we saw in the Spirit Realm,” Ophelia said.
“During the battle, it was the arrival of the khrysaor that caused your pegasus to emerge.” Mora shot her brother a victorious glare. “Only a folktale?”
Lancaster’s scowl deepened.
“Can you think of why that may have happened?” I pushed, brushing my fingers over the back of Ophelia’s neck absently as she bounced in her seat.
Mora considered. “A shed of power is the only trigger I can imagine.”
