Page 107 of Foresyth Conservatory
“They have strayed,” she continued, her expression darkening, and the warmth around her turned sharp. “They do not worship me. They worship a false God—the demiurge.” Her features twisted into a grimace, and her rage erupted in silver streaks of light, radiating outward in jagged, chaotic waves. It was beautiful and terrifying.
“The worker I created to shape the material world,” she spat, her voice trembling with fury, “he is the one who fed Khorvyn false lies and createdTheBook of Skorn. He is the one who demands blood. Not me.”
The demiurge.The lion with the serpent’s tail, the symbol onTheBook of Skorn. The creature my father had become in my nightmares.
I nodded, though I barely understood, but somewhere deep inside, the answers had been buried within me all along, waiting to be unearthed.
Sophia wasn’t the God they worshiped, it was the demiurge.
“The knowledge I offer,” she said, her voice softening to something almost tender, “does not lie in books. It lies withinyou.” She raised a hand, her fingers as delicate as threads of light, and pressed a single finger to my chest. The Universal Truths, represented by the cards, accessed through our subconscious.
A searing pulse radiated through me, igniting something dormant within. Heat bloomed in my core, spreading outward, filling every corner of my being. For the briefest moment, I felt whole—truly, unimaginably whole.
And then the light vanished.
I was falling again, the warmth replaced by the cold rush of reality slamming back into me. Darkness claimed me, but her words burned in my mind, bright as stars.
“Dahlia,” my father’s voice sang in my ear. “You haven’t figured out the trick yet.” He shook a jar of dirt in front of my face. “Think. Your mind is your greatest resource.”
I was ten years old, back in my father’s laboratory, sitting on his metal stool, heels digging into the spindle. “I don’t know, Father,” I said. It was me, but it wasn’t—it was like I was both observing and living as the little girl. “I don’t like this game.”
“The primacy of fact should prevail over the caprices of feeling—fact, not feeling, Dahlia,” he said. “What could make the stone disappear?” His face was angled toward me, close enough that I could almost reach out and touch him. My heart lurched with grief. I saw it in him then—the matte of his eyes, the depth of his sorrow—mirroring mine.
The trick of the disappearing rock. It hadn’t been Sophia, after all.No, it was . . .
Suddenly, my body became lighter, and I started to float. I drifted out of the lab and reappeared in my bookshop. There I huddled over the front desk, working on the ledger. It had been a grim day with very few sales. My father stood across the store.
“We didn’t make much today,” I said, defeated.
He puffed his pipe in great clouds, pinching his beard with his forefingers. “They’ll come. When word gets out, they’ll come.”
“What word?” I asked in frustration.
“That all the knowledge in the world is here,” he said, pattering his fingers across the spines of endless books. Something stirred within me then, but I only recognized it now, as I hovered above, watching.
I haddisagreedwith him.
Some knowledge, I thought, couldn’t be found in books.
I watched myself running out of ink on the ledger and opening the bottom drawer—the drawer no one had touched in years. Inside, I found the pen, and beneath it, a deck of Tarot cards waiting for me.
When I touched the deck, I transformed again, this time to a point above the room. It was my father’s office. He entered, wearing a wet overcoat and hat, as if he’d just returned from a rainy day on a case. The falling cards surrounded him, but he brushed them off like raindrops. He approached a painting ofTheDestruction of Pompeiand opened it on hidden hinges, revealing a lockbox. He entered the combination, and a loud click followed.
I knew what should have been behind that safe.
I watched his last moments through his eyes. He stood there, staring at the open, empty space. He realized Julian had taken it.
I screamed at him. I knew it was futile, but I tried anyway, anything to stop what he was about to do. When he reached into his desk for the revolver, my heart could have burst. The cards continued to fall around him, rising to his ankles.
He must have known.
He must have known Julian had stolen the Book.
Blood of my blood.
Which meant he thought he had corrupted his own son withTheBook of Skorn.
“But what about me?” I wanted to shout. “I did everything to be just like you. Why didn’t you leave me anything?” The anger caught in my throat, and I tried to swallow it. I was beside him now, my arms desperately reaching for him, only to pass through air.
