The Myths of Ophelia (The Curse of Ophelia #4)

Chapter 56

Chapter Fifty-Six

Ophelia

The Hall of Wandering Souls called to me the moment the archway revealed itself in the marble. Dull, ghostly voices, like whispers through the trees, echoed down that hallway, the towering walls stretching impossibly high and deep.

As I stepped through with Jezebel and Erista, some untended part of me woke. Something wanting and lively.

Something powerful.

A groaning of marble had my head whipping back toward the atrium, catching the final slivers of mystlight as the door slid shut of its own accord.

I’ll be waiting at the end of wherever that damn hall takes you, Tolek had whispered to me before he’d stepped back.

It was only a corridor, I told myself. No cause to be afraid. But my blood pounded faster in my veins.

At the last glimpse of the atrium, I met Tolek’s eyes. I love you , I mouthed. But I didn’t get to see him say it back as the final crack in the doorway sealed over with a dull thud.

And with it, my heart rioted.

I straightened my spine, locking away the fear. The was no room for it tonight. We had a chance to find the seventh and final Angel emblem by venturing through this hall, and I would return to the Spirit Realm before I let it slip away.

Especially with Ritalia scheming somewhere off the shores of our continent.

Gripping Starfire’s hilt and siphoning off the strength only my weapons could provide, I stepped forward.

“What’s the haze from?” I asked Erista as we proceeded cautiously. Even the Soulguider was watching her steps, as if unsure what lay beyond.

“A side effect of so many lingering souls,” she explained.

Eyes on the thick mass of fog ahead, Jezebel asked. “It’s not their actual spirits, is it?”

Something within me writhed at the possibility of having to go through restless spirits. I thought back to the ones who had tested me during my Undertaking. There was a similar misty essence in the hall.

But Erista shook her head. “I don’t think so. Spirits would likely be in their bodily form still, not scattered.” She paused, walking a small circle as her gaze scoured the ceiling. The hooked sword at her hip glinted in the mystlights piercing the haze. “These are remnants of those lost.”

Grief twisted through me at that explanation.

“Can you hear them?” I asked Jez.

My sister shook her head, and in a voice cracking with sorrow, she said, “No.” Jezebel paused, listening more intently. “I think they’re too far gone, even for me.”

Lingering somewhere between.

Though that was devastating, a piece of me thanked the Angels or Artale or whoever planted these powers in Jezebel that she did not have to walk this stretch of hall with a myriad of wandering spirits shouting through her mind.

We continued on, entering the thickest of the fog. I could barely see Jezebel and Erista beside me. My sister slid her hand into mine, securing us together.

The hall felt endless. This will drive me mad , I thought. These voices that weren’t quite voices whipping around us, echoes of thoughts that were no more than drifting winds. The mist tickled my skin, unsettling and invasive.

I could go mad in here .

The fear pounded at my mind until, finally, the fog parted ahead. And at the end of the hall, towering twice my height, was a stone sphinx.

“I guess the constellation didn’t only refer to the entrance,” I said.

The beast was carved of the same alabaster that made up the perimeter and the steps into the museum, like she’d been here as long as the Gates of Angeldust had existed.

The paws of her lion’s body were the size of my head, her face incredibly beautiful, even frozen in granite. With a strong, square jaw, broad planes, and a shrewdness to the stony eyes, she was powerful. Should they beat, the wings at her back likely would have been stronger than Damien’s, larger than Sapphire’s.

I looked into that statue’s face, and I swore she looked back.

Tearing my eyes away, I searched behind her. Nothing but a bare wall waited.

“It ends here?”

Jezebel and Erista had the same thought, peering around the statue. “Was anything else said about the Hall of Wandering Souls?” my sister asked her partner.

Erista didn’t meet our eyes, studying the sphinx. “Only rumors and myths.”

Myths…

Again, my eyes found those of stone. So many myths surrounded us. Our entire lives, they had, and Jezebel and I had never even known our existence was written in the stars.

A pair of formidable sisters, long before the warriors you stem from walked Ambrisk.

Imbued with the powers of life and death.

Those harsh stone eyes belonging to a legendary, mythical being bore into me.

One to raise the constellations, another to hold their leashes. A summoner of myths, and a destroyer of them.

“Jezzie,” I said, not looking away from that hard stare. “I think I have to use the magic.”

“The Angellight?”

“No,” I said, fear creeping in. “The part of my magic I haven’t been able to control, whatever the fel strella mythos gave us. It’s more than a connection to the pegasus and khrysaor, it’s part of why they’re here, and…”

“One to raise the constellations,” Jez echoed my thought.

“But isn’t that what attacked Jezebel in the inn?” Erista asked, watching us warily.

Disgust twisted my stomach. Repulsion at the magic I didn’t understand within me, at the possibility that it could hurt Jez if I used it.

Her choking breaths echoed in my memory, the sounds of corpses shrieking as they burned to ash.

I explained, “I’ve been thinking about the catacombs. Comparing how the magic reacted there to the Angellight. The latter always feels so…definitive. I can read it as tethered to a specific emblem or Angel. It’s mine, instilled in me, but it has a clear property.”

They both nodded, and Jez asked, “And the other magic?”

“The rest…” I thought back to the desperation flaring through me as we fled the corpses down in the catacombs, like alarm bells ringing in my head. I hadn’t known what I was casting out at them, I simply did . “It’s burning and effervescent like the Angellight, but it’s alive in a way that magic isn’t. It was searching that night.”

One to raise the constellations.

The two magics were often so similar, I wondered how many times I’d had both powers at my fingertips and didn’t realize it.

“I think it was trying to instill life into the corpses, but for some reason it backfired, and singed them to the ground instead.”

“Two sisters,” Jez murmured, searching my stare, “imbued with the powers of life and death.”

“One to raise the constellations,” I continued what the Storyteller had said.

“Another to hold their leashes.” At Jezebel’s words, her control over the alpheous flashed through my memory. Her gazed tracked over the marble at our feet, stopping at the enormous paws of that sphinx. Up, up, up, until it landed on that female face, so beautiful even etched in stone, and she voiced the words I’d been afraid of. “You need to wake her.”

“I do.” A familiar enthusiasm swirled in my chest, and instead of shoving it deep down, I allowed it to gather.

“Do you know how to do that?” Jezebel asked.

Not for the first time tonight, I was brutally honest about how lost I was. “No idea.” I forced a laugh, sheathing Starfire. “But I have to try.”

“What are you going to do?” Erista’s voice was guarded, her hand drifting toward her hooked blade as she moved between both Jezebel and the sphinx, and me, as if protecting the girl she loved and this precious work of art from an unknown magic.

“I promise, Erista,” I said, taking a step forward, “nothing the Angels haven’t sent me for.”

I’d been led here, and without any kind of direction, I had to trust what wove my bones and being to guide me.

Hesitantly, Erista stepped aside.

“Jez, put up your own shield,” I instructed, because while I wanted to test this magic on the sphinx, I would let it take my own life before I set it on my sister again.

Immediately, one of those silver-blue veils shimmered in front of Jezebel and Erista. If we were right, and Jez’s power was death while mine was life, maybe they’d repel one another as they’d fought before. I thought that was what they’d been doing when we flew with Sapphire and the khrysaor and that day in the inn, fighting after stifled for so long.

“Start slowly,” Erista cautioned, not harshly.

I took a deep breath, cementing that memory of Jezebel struggling to breathe in the back of my mind as my own warning.

Watching the beautiful stone face, I dug deep within myself. To the same place I pulled the strings of the Angel emblems, the hollows that filled in my spirit. But this time I ignored each one of those connections. Shifting them aside, I searched for something else. Something that had always been there, but that had woken on the bridge to another realm and longed to be unleashed.

There .

Hidden beneath the cover of Angellight, another source of magic welled within me. And when I finally acknowledged it, saw it for what it truly was, it rose like a great beast spreading its wings for the first time in long, long centuries.

Now that I knowingly called it forth, named it for what it was, the power to raise myths answered my call.

Magic budded through my veins, emerging at my fingertips. It looked so strikingly similar to the Angellight, as if both were meant to weave together within me. As if, perhaps, it was my being that decided what form they took.

Carefully, but not timidly—I didn’t want the power to believe it owned me—I cast a gentle stream of shimmering light toward the sphinx. It bathed the air like a shooting star.

My muscles tightened, shaking as I struggled to retain control over a power born of myths, and set to work raising a constellation.

Gold light poured around the sphinx, down over her head, across her shoulders and that powerful lion’s body. It explored those magnificent wings?—

The feathers ruffled.

“It’s working,” I breathed. It was the most minute flutter in the drafty hall, the stone facade slipping away to reveal the softness beneath.

But like a veil falling one draping inch at a time, white stone melted down her features.

It started at the highest points of her wings and the top of her head. Her flowing black hair and sharp green eyes. The nose and dusty-pink lips. All the way down to the massive paws and back to her whipping tail.

And when all the stone was melted upon the floor like an oily spill, the sphinx rose before us. My power recoiled into me, purring and satisfied after being intentionally fed for the first time in Spirits knew how long.

“By the fucking Angels,” I muttered.

I’d woken a sleeping myth. A creature long gone from this world, that many believed no longer existed. That many believed had never existed, much like the pegasus.

Before I could truly allow that to sink in, the sphinx opened her mouth, and she said in a voice like warm honey that showed no indication of having been frozen in stone for millennia, “Welcome, Alabath sisters. I have long hoped you would rescue me.”