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

Chapter 60

Chapter Sixty

Ophelia

“You were…waiting for us?”

The sphinx nodded, onyx sheet of hair cascading around her lioness form. “For many years now. Long before your births, the lingering spirits in this hall told rumors of the universe stirring. Of the two sisters who could raise and slay myths returning to us.”

“It is us?” I asked, my mouth dry. “We’re the sisters from the myth?”

“No. Think of yourselves as the next generation of them.”

As if summoned, voices rose among the fog. It was almost a gleeful sort of laughter tinkling off the marble. Something off-kilter and distant that made Jezebel shiver.

The sphinx turned her dark, slitted eyes on my sister. “I am sorry about that facet of the power.”

“What do you mean?” Jez asked, chin high.

“Is it not haunting to hear their dying, remorseful thoughts?”

“Sometimes, yes,” she admitted. “But often, the honor outweighs the misfortune.”

The sphinx tilted her head with feline grace. “Honor?”

“To be the one to remember them, the last connection their spirits experience to the living world. I can think of few greater honors than escorting them through that final hurdle of life.”

Angels. My ferocious, myth-born sister. Only she would find the glory in such a power rather than seeing it as a curse on her spirit. And to have kept it a secret for so many years, carrying both the heavy burden of life and the sanctity of it.

Jezebel was a true warrior at heart, worthy of the legends spun around her, of being the rider of khrysaor and destroyer of myths. Only one who handled the title Mistress Death with such grace earned it.

Stepping closer, I squeezed her shoulder, hoping she felt that admiration in the gentle touch.

The sphinx bowed her head toward my sister. “You have a noble heart, Jezebel Alabath.”

“Thank you,” Jez said with something I rarely saw: a modest blush.

“You said you’ve been waiting for us,” I began, and the sphinx’s attention swiveled back to me. “For what exactly?”

She smiled, and even that grin was mischievous and feline. “I have a tale. One I can only share with the chosen, but it required the sisters of the myth to free me.”

“What about me?” Erista asked, and based on her step back, she was prepared to leave, but the sphinx shook her head.

“You may stay, Miss Locke.” And there was something knowing—something rich with understanding—in that ancient voice. Something that reminded me of how Damien and Valyrie spoke to me in that dream.

“What is the story?” Anticipation fluttered through my chest.

“We must start at the beginning,” the sphinx said.

“Beginning of what?”

“At my beginning, Ophelia. Of how I came to be in this hall with a story to bear.” Walking soundlessly to the back wall, the sphinx turned a circle and settled on the floor, her paws crossed primly before her.

When she began, her voice was bathed in truth and legends, almost like that of the Storytellers. “I once roamed the Soulguider lands freely. Until the fateful day the Angels were tricked into ascending by the wiliest of higher beings, and their divine power was imprisoned. On that damned day, I was turned to stone, and have not woken since, much like many other lives slipped from this world.”

Jezebel and I exchanged a look, brows furrowed. Tricked?

“But before that, the dunes were mine to traverse, and the warriors were subjects to overlook, so that they might not cause harm to my Angel and mistress.” A venomous glint shone through the sphinx’s jade eyes.

“I was a gift to her from a god himself when she asked for a defender.” She chuckled. “Though, she meant a lover or a friend . But as I said, gods are tricksters, and Xenique did not properly frame her request. He gave her a half dozen of my merciless kind to stand by her side instead. To defend her.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would a god give an Angel a gift when warriors were so uninvolved with them?”

A devious smirk flitted across the sphinx’s lips. But she turned to Erista. And she bowed her female head, wings rustling with…excitement? “A true guard of secrets. Your service is appreciated.”

Erista’s face remained impassive.

“E?” Jez asked softly, voice wavering. “What does she mean?”

“She cannot tell you,” the sphinx said, cruelty painting her voice. “No Soulguider may share this deepest secret. But I can.”

My sister’s eyes flicked nervously between her partner and the half-feline, once-stone beast.

“What is it?” I asked.

The sphinx tutted. “My kind does not reveal secrets so easily, Ophelia. That would be careless.”

Everything she had said thus far was not the point of this tale, not if she’d been able to offer it up. Nothing about the Ascension or how she came to be was the true mystery.

I groaned internally. Of course, I had to prove myself. Being chosen by the Angels was not enough for anything—except offering them my cursed blood. I was growing so tired of this, the frustration heating my veins, but I mustered up all the strength held within my title and asked, “What must I do?”

Was this the trial for the Soulguider emblem? My hand drifted to Starfire’s hilt, but the sphinx shook her head at the movement.

Where all dead and riddled secrets lie…

And sphinxes were not known for their physical feats.

I dropped my hand from my sword and quirked a brow. “What is the riddle?”

The sphinx lifted her head proudly. When she spoke, her words drifted through the mists, obscuring those wandering spirit voices and coating the marble walls, voice like a song:

“ Older than the stars,

and more powerful than the mists.

A rarity of crimson crowns,

guide by starlight and tides,

rule of death and fate,

veins of renown ebb rarely through the world.

Gifted to the Angel guiding souls

by a womb of pure intention.

What am I? ”

The final note rang along the marble walls, and the sphinx settled into her position.

My mind was blank. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I expected. A riddle of the sphinx was surely meant to be difficult.

“Choose wisely, Alabath sisters,” the sphinx said with a smile that could only be called sinister. “For if you provide the wrong answer, you become my prey.”

My stomach bottomed out. All the rumors about the sphinxes were true, then.

“And if we don’t answer?” Jezebel asked.

My head whipped toward her. “What?”

She gave me an incredulous look. “If we aren’t certain, we shouldn’t try. We’ll find another way to get whatever information she has.”

But there wouldn’t be another way.

I may not have been certain what the sphinx knew—whether she was simply guarding the emblem or something else—but whatever it was, Damien and Valyrie had told me to come here. To find the secrets in the Lendelli Hills.

Whatever those secrets were, we needed them.

“If you choose not to answer, I will open the door through the mists.” The sphinx waved a paw behind us, where that original archway had been. “But I must forewarn you, you will not be given a second chance.”

“Ophelia,” Jezebel whispered, a note of pleading in her voice.

I brushed a strand of her cropped hair behind her ear. “Let’s think for a moment, Jez.”

Think.

This riddle was not vastly different than the prophecies Damien had delivered. A varied motive, certainly, but the rhythmic cadence and ambiguity rang with the same haughtiness.

If Damien had delivered this, where would I have started?

“What words seem important to you?” I asked Jezebel. Erista stood silently at her side, avoiding our eyes.

Jezebel sighed, clearly still against this idea. “Something older than the stars,” she mused.

“That jumped out to me, too. And more powerful than mists,” I echoed.

“Angel of Souls…so it’s related to Xenique.”

“Makes sense.” I looked around us. “Given all of this.”

“Crimson…” Jez trailed off, and I nodded. “Crimson is not typically a clan color of the Soulguiders.”

“And veins and land,” I said, voice low.

Jezzie’s nose scrunched. “I didn’t want to think about that one.”

“It could be referring to the streams,” I suggested. “They cut through the dunes like veins.”

“Could be.” She nodded, more comfortable with that suggestion, but unless the answer was a reference to Xenique’s magic, I wasn’t sure what the veins would signify, and what could it possibly be about the Angel’s magic?

“More powerful than mists…” I repeated, looking at that haze crowding the ceiling. Mists couldn’t be the Spirits, though. That wouldn’t make sense.

“The Angels are more powerful than the Spirits,” Jezebel said, following my sightline.

“Crimson and veins,” I repeated. My gaze dropped down to my scarred hands, where my blood had been used too many times to count.

Angelblood? I didn’t want to voice it aloud lest the sphinx think it was a guess, but could the answer truly be so obvious?

Crimson…ran through veins…more powerful than mists…but?—

“Older than the stars,” I muttered.

The Angels were not older than the stars. To be older than the stars would be to be older than Ambrisk itself. Neither the Angels nor their blood stretched back those eons.

But…others did.

Stars and tides. Death and fate.

Crimson, veins.

My eyes sliced to Erista.

She’d mentioned it once. Only once, and so many months ago, it felt like another life entirely. There was no way she’d known this moment would come—that she had seen it in one of her visions. Because Soulguider visions only predicted death, and none of us would be dying here tonight.

The Soulguider met my stare, and hers dipped ever so slightly. An indication that when she mentioned this substance all those months ago, on a mission to the Southern Pass in the Mystique Mountains to head off an Engrossian host, she thought it was a piece of information we may one day need.

I turned back to the sphinx, knowing if I voiced the incorrect answer, my life would be sacrificed.

And I said the word Erista had spoken on that mountain night beneath the stars. “ Godsblood .”