Page 48 of Messenger of Death
“Oh, wow. That’sreallygood. What is that?”
“One of the many things our ancestors took when they had to leave Fairy. Saffron said you have a feeling the beings that destroyed Fairy are back. Tell me more. When the Morrigan has a feeling, one should always listen.”
“My familiar knows who they are, but is prevented from saying anything. All three of them have hinted as much as they can it’s related to Fairy. But no one knows what happened to Fairy and the reincarnation of Apollo had a prophecy that just called them the Forsaken Ones.”
“Then, you are dealing with the ones who destroyed Fairy and they will do the same to this realm unless you can figure out who they are and stop them.”
“Is thereanythingyou could tell us that could help?”
“Yes. This is a secret fairies have fought to bury specifically, so they didn’t get reincarnated. It starts with this realm. Gods are difficult to kill and they don’t always stay dead. Another god can swoop in and bring them back to life and then you have at least two gods seeking revenge.
“Gods are like everyone else. They are complicated and products of their time. Some of the behavior we’d call toxic now wasn’t necessarily considered bad back then. Then there are the gods who were associated with evil, but could also be considered protection against certain things. There’s a lot of those.
“Some were just evil and there was nothing good about them. You’d think the gods would come together and kill them since there’s power in numbers, but they didn’t always do that. There was one particular malevolent force one pantheon kept trying to banish instead of kill. The problem with banishment is that you have to send that evil entitysomewhereand one of them ended up in Fairy.”
Shit. So, I was right. I didn’t have all the pieces, and I was getting those, but thiswasrelated to the destruction of Fairy.
“Who was he?”
“That’s the problem. We stayed in our realm, so we only knew the name he gave us. We’ve tried to find that out. He called himself Harami when he was banished to Fairy, but we’ve never been able to find a god with that name. He gave a fake name andtried to reinvent himself while he worked out how to get back to this realm and get his revenge.”
Fuck me. That was going to make it harder. He had a known name that we could find before he was banished. If the fairies hadn’t connected them after this long, how were we supposed to before someone else died or disappeared?
“What about the other one? Alexios made it seem like there was more than one.”
“Yes. He took a mate. Not all the fairies wanted him gone. One of them wanted more power. More specifically, she wanted to be an original. Harami did something unholy and turned her into the most destructive original in the history of several realms.”
“The weird blackness power that’s killing nature and taking away people’s powers. What is it?”
“It’s not a blackness power. Harami gave his mate the destructive power of the void.”
Saffron gasped, but I didn’t know what that meant. It sounded bad. They saw the look I was giving them.
“The missing students,” Saffron said. “They’ve disappeared without a trace but they aren’t dead or you would have screamed and Khalid or Professor Gefn would have helped their souls cross.”
“You have to remember how I was raised. I wasn’t allowed to read about any of this. I heard about witches and demons, but in a bad way. I knew about vampires and werewolves because of some of my classmates, but if they got caught talking about that kind of thing, they got in trouble.”
“It’s justhardsometimes because I like you and you don’t act like you were raised in some religious cult.”
“She’s right,” Scorpia said. “There have been many religions since the fairies fled to this realm. People raised in devoutfamilies, no matter what the religion, tend to either embrace being a reincarnation and jump in with two feet or they fight it.”
I snorted.
“If the man who raised me found out he was the reincarnation of an ancient god, he’d be doing the exact same thing he’s doing now.”
Scorpia threw back her head and laughed.
“Yes, that happens, too, sometimes. Anyway, about the void. It’s nothing and a negative. Most of the time, it’s harmless unless someone manages to banish you there, which is actually very difficult and requires several strong magic users. Harami had to doterriblethings to the fairies he kidnapped to make an original who could harness it like that.
“His mate changed her name to Hemlock. It’s tradition to name fairies after the stars or things in nature, but never poisonous flora like that. It’s considered a bad omen to name a child like that.
“The void is a destroyer. If someone can concentrate it like Hemlock could, it sucks the magic out of everything and eventually the life.”
“The missing students,” I said. “But I would have screamed and Khalid or Professor Gefn would have known. I’m not sure I understand.”
“The void destroyseverything,even souls. You didn’t scream and Anubis and Freya couldn’t help them to the afterlife to wait to be reborn because they didn’t just die. Everything about them, including their soul, was consumed by the void and ceased to exist.”
“I don’t know how to fight that or stop it. What did your ancestors do?”
