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

Chapter 78

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Ophelia

I was off balance. That pressure settled against my back, and every part of my body was tearing.

In the wash of Angellight, I’d seen a glimpse of Vale’s reading. Only the first one, but Annellius had known. He had figured out all of this, what lurked in the mountains, and Damien had…

Damien had…

I gasped, trying to see through the pain still burning along my muscles—through the weight dragging me down.

“By the fucking Angels,” Tol rasped.

“Are y-you,” I stuttered, “okay?”

“ I’m fine, Alabath.” His voice was still stoic, though. He shifted his arms around me, and my body was racked with an agonizing shudder.

Angellight blared through the cavern, rushing like a wind so loud, I couldn’t hear what anyone beyond him was saying. Could only see my friends’ astounded faces as their eyes darted between me and the Angels. As Santorina and the fae stared each other down and the Engrossians huddled around Dax. As Jezebel and Erista guarded Lyria’s body, still prone and bathed in the light of the Angels. As Vale was slammed with reading after reading, her eyes silvered, and Cypherion braced her.

As Malakai rose on the stairs, his eyes locked on mine, his hand clutching his hollow Bind.

My own thudded with what might have been shock.

But I couldn’t try to figure it out. Because over the center of the room, the seven gold outlines solidified into bodies and wings and limbs. The Angels hovered above us.

They’d been so similar to Bant’s spirit when it was released from Kakias. And disappeared into the mountains . The other six spirits had been encased within the stone. Bant’s joined them upon the death of its shell, and when we set them free, we unlocked their bodily forms, as well.

The Angels swelled, and I was so small beneath them. So defenseless. I needed a weapon, needed?—

Starfire and Angelborn were gone. The ache went through me, deep to my bones. I tried to shake it off, and another painful shudder wracked my body.

“Ophelia,” Tolek said, frantic, as if he’d been repeating my name and I only just heard.

When I angled my head up to look at him, something brushed my arm and?—

“ Holy fucking Angels ,” I gasped.

It wasn’t a muscular ache along my back. It was a pair of glorious wings drooping along the dusty cavern floor. As white as Sapphire’s downy feathers, threaded with gold and shimmering.

Wings .

I had wings.

I tried to move them—to ensure they were real and truly attached to me—but I could barely manage a flutter, and even that sent a tearing pain through my body.

Something sticky dripped down my spine. Reaching back—careful to move as little as possible—I swept my fingertips through it. When I brought them forward, my vision swimming, they gleamed crimson.

Blood. The emergence of wings had made me bleed. There was an irony in there that my mind couldn’t untangle in its frazzled state.

I was a warrior. Not an Angel. I didn’t want to be anything but a warrior—my entire life it had been my dream, my cause.

“Damien,” I gasped. Every shred of my body hurt to turn, trying to find a new equilibrium. Tolek held me upright, but even his arm at my waist was painful as it jostled my wings. I didn’t know how to move the damn things out of the way.

But I sought out the Angel who had visited me time and again. And?—

“Holy fucking Angels,” I breathed again. I’d thought Damien was awash with almighty power before, but now he was an image of pure legend.

His light ebbed with visible magic, his wings dripping with shimmering gold. My pair was small in comparison, suited for my frame where as his seemed to swallow all the air around him.

Him and the six other Angels, each with their own magnificent wings. Ether poured from their forms.

Thorn roved the highest, power swirling around him like fog as his eyes crawled the cavern. On his head, a halo shone, thorned like his emblem and dripping with what resembled… blood .

I swallowed a bud of fear as one drop slipped from a spike, falling dozens of feet to the floor below. The other Angels watched him warily. And I could pick them all out, like the light I’d harnessed from their emblems tethered me to them.

“Hello, Ophelia,” Damien said, drifting lower with a smirk that tugged at his scar. The jagged slice to his face unsettled something sinister in my gut. “Well done.”

“What did you do?” I gritted out. “To Annellius.”

A swarm of emotion passed across Damien’s expression. Everything from sorrow to remorse to guilt. “He died, Ophelia.”

“ You killed him .” Tears tore down my cheeks, both for the pain running through my muscles and for the ancestor I never knew. Damien had seen that Annellius, their Chosen, wanted to scorn the Angels, and he had killed him atop that mountain.

“We have all made mistakes,” Damien said.

I shook my head and my entire body throbbed. I cried out, breathing labored.

“What’s happening to her?” Tolek demanded.

“Something unprecedented” was all the Mystique Prime Warrior replied, eyes narrowed.

“I told you, Chosen Child,” the sphinx said from her perch in the top corner of the theater, “on the day of your birth, two legends merged into one, thanks to the Godsblood and the Angelcurse. Together, those myths woke a breath and blood not seen in so long, they were believed lost forever. You awoke more myths than you know.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but a clear, awed voice rang through the cavern, “Ithinix?”

From the ring of Angels watching Thorn, one emerged, feathers unspooling with a deep purple light, so dark it was almost onyx.

Xenique .

The demigoddess ancestor of my mother’s line. My gaze flashed to Jezebel who was studying her from a distance. When she met my eyes, awe shone.

Xenique flapped her wings and drifted toward the sphinx. Toward Ithinix , the name she had not revealed until her Angel returned.

“Hello, Mistress,” Ithinix cooed, her tale twitching.

Xenique laid a hand on the sphinx’s cheek, something so tender in the movement. So mortal in a way legend claimed the Angels couldn’t be. “I have missed you, dear friend.”

“And I, you,” the sphinx replied.

They were quiet for a moment, then Xenique peered around the sphinx’s body. “What has happened?”

Mila .

Ithinix observed the general, prone on the stone seats behind her. “Succumbed to the heart of the Gates of Angeldust.”

Xenique’s brow creased, but she nodded, dismissing our unconscious friend.

Malakai stepped toward the Angel, anger clear on his face, but before he could interject, Erista said, “Prime Warrior.” She crossed the cavern and kneeled at the bottom of the seats. The Soulguider opened her palms toward Xenique, gold crescent moon tattoos absorbing the Angel’s light. “As a loyal warrior, I ask for your blessing in our mission to guide spirits and secrets of the dead, that you may honor my practice with the power of your Goddess, the Mother of Death and Barer of Lives Lost.”

I looked to Damien, remembering the lack of reverence I showed in comparison. Though, he did have a habit of showing up at the most inconvenient times. And he apparently had killed the last Chosen. I leaned closer to Tolek.

With a pleasant smile on her lips, Xenique looked from Erista to Jezebel—and then to me. “Rise, child.” Erista stood, tilting her chin up as the Angel floated down to her. “I have seen the good you have done in your practice. The matters you have guarded close to your heart, and the sisters you have guided back to me.”

Her words sent a squirming instinct through me. Jezebel’s silver-blue myth magic budded in her palms.

“With all due respect—” I gasped over the pain at my back. Before Jez could react to the Angel or her anger with Erista, I said, “My sister and I are Mystique Warriors. We may bare Soulguider blood—the blood of the gods—but we have both completed the Undertaking.”

Xenique’s smile was haughty, chilling my blood-and-sweat-stained skin. “I believe you have already seen how much more lies within your stories.” And her gaze lingered on the wings at my back.

“Sometimes,” a cool female voice added, “the Fates bear us more gifts than we realize.” An Angel with hair that gleamed silver and eyes swirling in depths of navy blue fluttered her wings as she drifted beside Xenique. Valyrie . The Starsearcher. “But never more than we can manage.”

“Holy cursed Angels,” Cypherion blurted out, and we all spun toward him. His eyes were locked on Valyrie. “That voice. I’ve heard your voice before.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Vale was blinking herself out of her reading, frantically scouring the cavern. She sought me out, but I gave her a grim-lipped nod. I know , it said. I know of Annellius.

My heart tore at the tear that slid down her cheek. At the fear blatant in her silvered eyes and how she wiped it all away. Vale cast a wary glance to Lancaster and Mora, but then, she forced herself to stand straighter and face Cypherion.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He eyed her, clearly seeing through her front, but his expression softened and he answered, “On the night we went into the archives and you read—when Titus ambushed us—it was Valyrie’s voice that spoke through you, Stargirl. When we found the book in the archives written in Endasi, she said of course she knew the language. That she was there when it was created.”

“It happened tonight, too,” Malakai called down from the steps, striking the Angels with accusing glares. “In the Gates.”

“Valyrie?” Vale asked, her eyes still aglow but uncertain.

The Starsearcher Prime Warrior lowered herself to the ground before her warrior, her bare feet meeting rock.

And for the first time since the fated Ascension Day—since they’d gone within that prison—an Angel walked our soil. The impact of this great power returning to Gallantia rang through the stone.

“Child of many Fates,” Valyrie said to Vale, and my heart stuttered at the ownership in her tone. “It is so good to see you harness your power, Fatecatcher.”

“Fatecatcher,” Tolek whispered to me. “That phrase was in her scrolls.”

“Do you think it was talking about Vale?” I muttered, but Tol only shrugged.

Vale’s frame glimmered in starlight even within this chamber. Cypherion stood a step behind her, hands within reach of his weapons, but Valyrie paid him no heed. She evaluated her warrior with the pure satisfaction only immortality could birth.

“What does that mean?” Vale asked.

Valyrie dipped her head. “In time, you shall learn.” She looked around the cavern, eyes pausing on Mora and a small breath of shock leaving her lips before she stole herself. “We have much to discuss it seems. You may bear nine Fate ties and readings of higher powers, but I have not had access to my magic for a very long time. There is so much only I can impart.”

“What about the Warrior God?” I asked, shifting toward Damien where he’d been whispering with Bant. Hatred and betrayal curled through me when Damien’s eyes met mine.

As their muted tones slithered across the stone walls, the Engrossian Angel watched Barrett, Dax, and Celissia with unsettling curiosity. The trio stared right back, Dax still wincing over the scar to his gut, and I swore Bant’s head tilted curiously at the slight flinch.

“It seems the mortals have been playing such reckless games, brother,” Bant said to Damien. The Mystique’s scar twitched as his jaw ticked.

“ What. About. The. God? ” I clipped out. I was done allowing Damien to avoid me. Done being their toy.

But it was Bant, his hair and eyes as dark as the magic Kakias had manipulated from him, whose attention latched on to me, and he said, “You have cleared the way.”

And at our backs, in the wall the half-moon Angel statue bowed toward, white light carved a fissure through the rock, cleaving clean through stone?—

No. It melted it.

But stone couldn’t melt. Not from any natural, easily accessible substance at least. We’d seen scorched rock before—during that first trial on the Seawatcher platforms. A result of burning Angellight, I’d thought, marking the path to the emblem.

But perhaps it hadn’t been the light of Angels after all. Because even Angellight did not contain this pulsing power, melting a door where none had been before.

Flicking a lock.

Unleashing a prisoner.

This was stone touched by the hand of a god. One long-contained and ready to devour what stood in his path. The wall melted into a river of molten rock as my weapons had, and I flinched at the reminder. But I couldn’t get lost to the pained memory.

Because as soon as the passage solidified, white light pouring forth and bathing every inch of the cavern, the shadow of a god filled the archway.