Page 7 of The Legacy of Ophelia
They were slain.
Wings flapped through my mind. Bloodstained feathers and dying screams.
Open your eyes, Phel.Fight.
Something tugged deep down within me, and I reached for it. I wanted to grab on, but everything hurt so damn much. Every twitch ricocheted through me like a shattering explosion trapped in a cave.
The fire returned to my veins, incinerating from my heart outward. Flames licked along the interior of my muscles, turning everything I was to ash. And in their wake, ice frosted those delicate flakes.
Harness an Angel’s light.
Seraphs could harness an Angel’s light. Where had that come from?
That incessant tug pulled again, and wings continued to pound with demanding power, striking at my mind like they were beating down a thousand feathered dreams, crushing an army’s futile hope and everlasting vows. Light flashed with everypulse, constellations crashing, and my heart racing in time with their drum.
Ophelia can access them all.
And the rhythm inside of me crescendoed onthe tails of those words. The heat flamed, and screams elongated, wings fluttered until every feather shed, coating the murky gray plane in dusty white, and my heartbeat sped into one ceaseless beat.
Over it, those words drummed.
Ophelia can access them all.
I could access the might and magic of every Angel. Their power wasmineto brandish.
Mine to dominate.
Mine to ruin.
And in that fact, determined vengeance inked itself on my heart, sealing a destructive will.
Power flared along my veins, devouring the fire and ice to forge something new. Something hungry and desirous. Something that had been slain many millennia ago.
The power of myths and legends, of seraphs lost and bridges broken.
An instinct sprouted in my gut, endless possibilities sharpening in the shape of ravenous claws and merciless teeth. A cruelty of legends rose within me, one I held at the end of my blade, poised to slice its yearning heart.
Because if I was condemned to this seraph fate—to a threat of the gods on my head and the heaviness of lost legends on my shoulders—I would master it and use it to bend them all to my will.
Power thrummed through me,more unabating than it had ever been, and I peeled my eyes open. The might of the seraph magic beat beneath my skin, the myth alive within me.
And I wanted toknowit. To control it and use it, as I had been so used and worn.
“Ophelia?” Malakai’s voice was hesitant.
I rolled my head to the side, taking in him and the room around us. My suite. We were inmy suitein the Revered’s Palace. We were home, but it wasn’t quite home.
Everything was sharper—the green of Malakai’s eyes, the angle of the morning sun slicing through the windows, the shattered glass of one pane, and the scratches across another. The breeze rifling the curtains smelled crisper than ever, filtering into my tight lungs and unknotting a drop of the tension stored there.
My mountains. They were still my mountains. The air still smelled of wildflowers and freedom and renewal.
Malakai’s heart thudded loud enough to hear as he waited for me to answer. I pulled my attention back to those forest green eyes and curled my fingers into the sheets—even those were softer. Silky, despite my sweat coating them. But Malakai’s stare was laden with a concern that pierced me.
“How long?” I croaked.
“Six days.”
Six days.
