“You mean this?” Almandine came from behind and pulled the swamp witches’ leather-bound book from the satchel she’d snatched from the house.
Relief washed over me as I grabbed the tome and held it close to my chest. Both Field and I stared at the young succubus in disbelief, while Anjani and Eva wore half-smiles in response.
“That’s my girl!” Anjani cheered with a satisfied grin.
“How? When?” I asked.
“When we went through the house.” Almandine shrugged. “Everything was happening so fast, I suppose none of you saw me run into Draven’s study. I just thought, as soon as the shield came down, that everything in that mansion would be theirs for the taking. The book sprang to mind as the most precious of all items in the house. I didn’t want the snakes to get it. So I grabbed it.”
“You are fantastic, Almandine.” Field placed a hand on her shoulder, and she gave us a shy smile in return.
“I could kiss you!” I gasped with newfound joy, moving toward her.
“Don’t!” She stopped me politely, taking the book back and hiding it in the satchel. “Listen, I’ll go look through the farmhouse and see what we can take from there. We’ll need anything that might come in handy, as long as we can carry it while we run.”
“We’ll help,” Anjani replied.
“I’ll come,” Phoenix added with a determined nod, and they all headed inside the farmhouse, while Eva went into the orchard to help Aura with the fruit picking.
I was impressed by each member of our group. No one complained, they all just pitched in—no questions asked, no looking back. I worried about Phoenix’s state of mind, but, like Field had said, there was no time to properly delve into it. He was heartbroken and angry, and for good reason. But he was strong and able to tough it out until we could look at options, once we’d reached Stonewall.
There was no way I was going to let the Daughters keep Viola away from us, from him. It wasn’t fair.
Field turned to look at me, his turquoise eyes carefully analyzing me.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“I’m good,” I replied. “Better than I thought I’d be, given the circumstances. I need to reach out to Vita, though, and make sure she’s okay. I haven’t spoken to her since last night, and she was supposed to get Kyana out of the dungeons.”
My nerves were stretched thin, but Field’s presence had a soothing effect, helping me keep a firm grip on everything. He was, in many ways, my rock. He took a deep breath, then looked out across the meadow, scanning the forest we’d left.
“I’ll keep a lookout, then,” he said. “You do your thing.”
I sat on the grass, crossing my legs, and breathed out. Field took his position a couple of feet away from me, a hatchet in his hand, ready to strike anyone who dared attack us. My heart was filled with love. It felt good to see him there. It gave me the momentary peace of mind I needed to tune everything out and let the universe open up to me.
With my eyes closed and darkness enveloping me, the world’s noises faded away, and I focused on Vita’s heartbeat once more. I found it, dim but steady, and followed it until the chamber in Azazel’s castle revealed itself to me.
I stilled as I realized Vita wasn’t alone in the room. Damion was there with her, standing by the caged window and waiting quietly, watching her and making notes on a piece of paper with a slim piece of charcoal. Vita was lying on the bed, her eyes white and runes flitting across her skin. She was having visions.
My blood chilled, thinking of the many ways in which Azazel was abusing my friend. Unfortunately, I was only a ghost there myself, and there was nothing I could do about it. All I could do was hope Bijarki would hurry.
Vita inhaled deeply as she woke up, the runes gradually vanishing from her skin.
She sat up, tears welling in her blue-green eyes. Damion said nothing as she looked around the room, her face brightening at the sight of me. I brought a finger up to my mouth, quietly reminding her that no one knew I was there except her. She looked away, quickly catching on, and shifted her focus to Damion. A deep frown brought her eyebrows together as she pursed her lips.
“What are you doing here?” she muttered to him.
“My job. You’ve been under for quite some time now, and Azazel had some urgent business to attend to. So he left me here to take note of your runes and alert him once you’re up,” he replied with a shrug.
“You’re damn right I was out for a while,” Vita snapped. “Whatever those weeds you burned were, they knocked me into oblivion.”
“You’re fine, no need to moan about it. I’ll go get him,” Damion mumbled, then left the room.
Chills ran down my spine, and a feeling of urgency came over me as he closed the double doors behind him, leaving me alone with Vita. She looked at me with a pained expression that rang more alarm bells in me.
“Aida, we don’t have much time,” she said with a trembling voice. “Azazel will be here soon and will expect me to tell him what I saw in my visions.”
The dread of seeing Azazel, even from my protected state of Oracle connection to Vita, was extremely difficult to handle. But I held it together, as we both had a job to do. I nodded briefly, waiting for her to tell me about the visions before I revealed the horror we’d been dealing with for the past ten hours.
“I won’t tell him everything, of course, I’ll bend it as much as I can,” she continued, tears streaming down her cheeks. “But just so you know, the future has changed, and not for the better. In short, there’s a darkness in Azazel, a curse of some kind that fuels his immense power. Not just the Daughter he has in his possession and the energy he’s drawing from the volcanoes. Something much more toxic and evil. We’ve changed the outcome, sort of. The Daughter no longer sacrifices herself to destroy him, but Draven does, by taking that curse into himself. I think it has something to do with that creepy snake medallion that Azazel is wearing, because in my vision, after Azazel is vanquished, Draven turns into a Destroyer and wears the damn thing around his neck.”
I thought I’d had a bad time of it already, but according to Vita’s vision, the worst was yet to come. I held my breath for a second, trying to process that information, as I had difficulty imagining Draven going dark like that.
“What… What do you mean, Vita?” I managed, my voice barely audible.
“Draven will become a Destroyer if he defeats Azazel. I think it’s the only way to kill the guy, by taking his curse away,” she reiterated. “Thing is, the burden is too heavy for Draven. He won’t make it. He’ll turn into the very monster he destroys and will go on a killing rampage. We… We die…”
Her voice broke as she got to the most painful part of our possible future. I had no words left, just an overwhelming feeling of grief seeping into my soul, tying knots in my heart and burning my stomach.
“We will try to stop him, but we’ll die. You, me, Jovi and Phoenix… The Daughter… I don’t know what happens to Field or our other allies. I only saw Serena, Bijarki, and Anjani left alive. And not in a good way. Bijarki and Anjani end up exiled on Marton with other incubi and succubi, whom they unite by getting married, in hopes of either finding a way out of Eritopia, or replenishing their numbers and eventually killing Draven and getting rid of that curse,” Vita said.
“How? If Draven must take on the curse to begin with, in order to destroy Azazel, who will take it from him to do the same?”
“I don’t know. But I think if a non-Druid takes the curse, it might not work the same way. Or maybe we’ll find a way to get rid of the medallion altogether. Or maybe we’re just delusional and hanging on to false hope, I don’t know. But I can tell you one thing—if Draven gets hold of that medallion and kills Azazel, it’ll start a chain of catastrophic events. The only people I saw left standing were Draven and Serena, whom he kept in a cage, unwilling to let her die because there’s still a part of him that’s truly him, and has feelings for her, and doesn’t want her gone. But all of Eritopia will burn. T
he few who survive are doomed to die out in the desert.”
“What of the Daughters, then?” I replied, feeling the rage toward those so-called protectors of Eritopia simmering through me. The thought of my brother dying, of me, of Field, of my loved ones dying—I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t accept it.
“I don’t know. I only saw them laying their little sister to rest on Mount Agrith, and Viola dying. Her connection to Phoenix is vital because she will die when Draven kills him.” Vita sobbed, speaking between hiccups as she wiped her face with the corner of a bedcover.
“Listen, we’ll work something out,” I said, aware that we had very little time to deal with grief and that Azazel was on his way up to her room. “Bijarki is on his way to get you. It will take him a couple of days to get to Luceria, so hang in there, okay?”
She nodded slowly, regaining her composure.
“I set Kyana free last night,” she said. “But I got in trouble for it…”
She lifted her leg, and the sound of chains tore through me. She’d been shackled to the bed, and I suddenly felt like coming to Luceria myself and beating the living daylights out of Azazel for doing this to her. I knew I stood no chance against Azazel, but still, the thought helped me process the anger.
“Listen, just stay here and don’t get yourself into any more trouble, okay?” I sighed. “You’ll be out of here soon.”
“What trouble can I get myself into with this around my ankle?” she scoffed, pointing at the chain.
“When has a shackle ever stopped you from doing something crazy, huh?” I raised an eyebrow in response. “That sharp tongue of yours alone is enough to do serious damage to these slithering beasts…”
Vita gave me a weak smile. I took a deep breath and broke my side of bad news to her.
“You’re not going to like this, Vita, but we ran into some trouble,” I said. “Don’t be alarmed—we’re okay, we’ll be okay, but the Daughters came for the Daughter. Phoenix calls her Viola, by the way. He’s broken, obviously…”
I watched her expression shift from horrified to pained, then to genuinely concerned as she listened to my brief account of our agitated night.
“They said she couldn’t control her powers. Thing is, she influenced some shifters who were attacking us during the diversion we put together for the others to leave the shield,” I continued. “And she did something to those shifters, something weird but permanent. Like she fundamentally changed them somehow, and now they are literally our protectors. There are six of them left, and believe me, they came in handy because as soon as the Daughters took Viola, the protective shield came down. It’s gone. We ran east, and we’re on our way to Stonewall now. Made some friends along the way; more succubi from the Green Tribe, to be precise…”
Vita’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, stunned by the developments.
“What… How… Are you guys okay? Phoenix? Field? What… How could this happen? Why would the Daughters be so cruel?” she croaked.
“I don’t know, honey. I think they have permanent PMS or something. We’re okay, really, don’t worry too much about us. We moved fast and got out of there. Took some of the snakes down with us, too. I think we’ll be okay till we get to Stonewall. Serena and Draven are looking through those Druid archives for a cloaking spell for us as we speak. We’ll need it because Azazel can sense us Oracles now. You’ll need it too when Bijarki brings you back.” I winked, forcing myself to seem cool and composed so as not to worry her. She had enough on her plate as it was.
“Just stay here and keep a low profile, Vita,” I added. “We’ll see each other again soon.”
We heard voices outside the door and instantly nodded at each other before I broke the connection and regained my consciousness by the water stream.
I exhaled sharply as Field crouched in front of me, noticing the tears glazing my eyes. I could feel them, wet and hot, ready to roll down my cheeks.
“Are you okay? Is Vita okay?” he asked.
“For the most part,” I replied, barely holding it in.
“What’s wrong?” he frowned.
“We’re in so much trouble, Field. Vita had visions... The future’s changed again.”
Serena
We’d been rummaging through the archives for several hours when Draven pulled a strange-looking chest from beneath a table in what had been labeled the “forbidden section”. So far, digging through old records had not been our most exciting activity, but it sure beat fighting or running for our lives. He dragged the chest over to the large, round table in the middle where we’d all settled to read through ancient Druid logs. It was a heavy piece, measuring about four by four feet, made entirely from black iron, covered with runes painted in red, and fitted with a large padlock.
I watched quietly as he murmured something and snapped his fingers against the lock. Sparks shot out, and the mechanism caved in as the lock clicked open. He lifted the top, and I craned my neck to get a better look at its contents.
Several massive books had been piled in there, bound in leather and carrying the same red runes that had been painted on the chest.
“What is that?” I finally asked as he pulled out one of the tomes for inspection.
“It dawned on me to check the forbidden section for something to cloak our Oracles with. Since we couldn’t find anything in the Druid manuals stored here, I figured it was worth a shot,” he replied, turning the book over and frowning at the runes in apparent recognition.
“What’s with the runes, though?” Jovi asked from the other side of the table, clearly bored by the fifth registry he was currently browsing through.
“Warnings, I think,” Draven muttered. “I recognize the words ‘death’ and ‘beware’ here, repeatedly scrawled in a sequence.”
“Should we even consider these, then, if the covers alone speak of death?” I replied.
He looked at me, tightening his lips as a glimmer of hope twinkled in his gray eyes.
“All we are doing is reading them,” he said. “If we find something to hide the Oracles, then we’ll have to look at the risks involved, but I say let’s cross that bridge when we get there.”
I nodded slowly as he placed the book on the table and began flipping through its old, brownish pages. The words had been written in black ink, and I could see diagrams and sketches accompanying the swirly text, along with dark red blotches and charcoal smudges. The book had seen its share of usage back in the day, from what I could tell.
A few minutes went by before I saw his eyebrows come together in a pensive frown as his fingers lingered over a specific passage.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, nearly on the edge of my seat. I hoped we’d find a solution for our Oracles sooner rather than later.
“Not what we’re looking for, but something I think we should all be aware of,” Draven said, still reading. “Especially those of us who know about the pendant Azazel wears…”
The others stopped their search for information on young Druids and concealment spells and focused their attention on Draven. I held my breath as he explained.
“This is a tome of forbidden Druid spells. Magic so dark that it can be truly horrific and merciless, going against our very nature. I’ve been reading through this, and some of the formulas have dreadful consequences, making me feel ashamed that one of my own kind actually devised them,” he continued. “But there is one chapter in particular that rings a damning bell. It’s a spell… Well, not so much a spell as a curse, called ‘The Soul Fusion’.”
He looked at me for a brief moment, concern etched on his face, before he began reading the words out loud.
“The Soul Fusion was Asherak’s final so-called gift to the Druids. We, by our very nature, are creatures of good, our souls linked to Eritopia’s nature, our hearts dedicated to progress and growth, peace and harmony, our minds shaped toward culture and exploration of the unknown while remaining reverent of the world around us. Asherak of Pathos was, by all accounts, the first ev
il to walk among the Druids. His soul was rotten with envy and greed. He desired power and control. He was the darkest creature to ever exist in Eritopia. He was vanquished after he nearly destroyed the planets, and his name was lost in the annals of history, never to be mentioned again. His spells and notes were mostly burned and their ashes scattered in the wind, save for a single copy compressed in these tomes here, classified as forbidden magic. It was preserved purely for the purpose of reminding the Druids of the dangers of selfish acts of cruelty. A path which we must never walk again,” Draven said as he scanned the text.
“So there was someone even worse than Azazel?” Jovi concluded, an eyebrow raised.
“Or perhaps just as bad. Asherak burned everything in his path. Killed all those who opposed him. He nearly wiped out the Druids, many millennia ago. But, in the end, he was defeated by the Grand Temple Druids, who brought their powers together to take him down. We never speak his name, for there is fear that his evil and poison may rise again, like a ghost,” Draven replied. “During his reign of terror, Asherak devised a number of spells, most of them meant for torture, unimaginable pain, and slow death. But there was this one, ‘The Soul Fusion’, which was different. Asherak desired immortality over anything else. While Druids have extremely long lifespans, we do not live forever. The first part of the Soul Fusion was to remove the soul from the Druid’s body—his life force, his energy, his consciousness and power—and cram it into a cursed object designed to hold it until another body is offered. You see, the Grand Temple Druids defeated Asherak’s armies, but by the time they got to him in his fortress, he was already dead. Or at least, they thought he was, until they found the cursed object on the floor next to his body and realized what he’d done.”
The pieces were slowly starting to fall into place in my mind. A greedy, bloodthirsty, and power-hungry Druid had found the cursed object and used it to attain enough strength to corrupt and infect an entire solar system, which he’d once been sworn to protect.