Page 115 of Season Warriors & Wolves

Chapter twenty-five

White Bishop takes E7

Kilian

She hopped from one book aisle to another with Atlas and Oryn hot on her feet, perusing the long lines of the chained books that had perhaps not been opened in the last ten centuries or so.

An old Adriatian priest cleared his throat. “Can she really read them, my king?”

“If this is a way to question my wife’s words then I might just say no,” I said, turning to him, “just to see if that valiant courage really exists in my kingdom.”

He faltered. “I-it is not, my king, but it won’t stop our curiosity. No one has ever been able to read the Esmeray diaries.”

“Pray tell, how can I quell this curiosity besides with my own two hands wrapped on one's throat?”

“Kil!” Snow called from somewhere deep in the library and I pushed off the wall to go to her. Had he realised that my wife could have possibly just saved his life?

“Yes, love?”

She pointed a finger to the top shelf where a thick volume of an Esmeray diary was chained. “Get me that one.”

“What’s in it for me?” I asked, taking the book and holding it up and over her head.

“Depends, what do you want?”

I puckered my lips and lowered my face down to her.

Chuckling, she puckered her lips, too, and we both shared a little awkward peck. “Ah, so easily pleased.”

“What have you found, my hellcat?”

She traced a few lines under the simple book title—probably over the letters hidden from me. “There. Right under it. Blood and something guardian.”

“Blood of an Ithicea guardian.” I took her hand and traced my finger over her palm, forming the letter. “That stands for first heaven, or what we call Ithicea. You learn fast.” Old Darsan was not easy.

“Had to,” she said mindlessly, already flipping through the pages of Hereditas. She smoothed a finger over the blank pages. “You said these were written with the blood of a fallen guardian. Which fallen guardian? As far as I know, no guardian of the prime heavens has fallen. It is said they could fall, but there has never been a mention of anyone fallen from what I’ve read. I don’t believe Aurora is a fallen guardian either, and most of these were written long before she became the Octa Virga.”

“Oneira, a guardian of Dreams, who still served the Goddess of Nothing. She’d sent dreams to a man sentenced with a life of Nightmares. Not out of pity, love or care, but out of jealousy of her sister Efelia, a guardian of Nightmares who lived among praise because of the terror she caused to those she visited. Back when terror was praised. Doing so, she’d broken the foundation of what she was created on and therefore fallen from the heavens and sent to live out her days as a simple woman who was a slave of nights full of nightmares. Esmeray had met her in her travels to the lower realms that were not overlooked by gods—some say she had searched for her purposefully, to write these books and that the guardian had willingly gifted her last days to her.”

She chewed her bottom lip to the point it was bleeding. “We have no portals or gates to other realms in Numen. Only to the heavens of our gods.”

“There once were. When the three reigning deities, Gods of Nothing, Some and Most, lived peacefully amongst and undivided. But that was pretty long ago, my heart.”

She swallowed and lifted her eyes to me, her voice was low when she said, “Kil, I saw something in Seraphim.”

Though hardly possible any gates had remained in our time, it couldn’t be entirely impossible. And since Snow was perhaps the only one who could open them from our realm, she would be the target of not just her father. “You saw nothing in Seraphim. Hear me?”

She nodded and took my hand, pulling me to a seat where Thora was sitting with Nia before a large dictionary that was one page turn away from falling apart.

“Please remind me to buy Atlas something nice for himself,” Nia said, quickly scribbling notes on a thick notebook that was also a drop of ink away from turning entirely black. “Don’t know where he dug this from or from what cold skeleton's hands he pried it off, he deserves something nice.”

Snow smirked at her friend. “You look like you’re one page away from moaning.”

A pen hit my wife right in the head from an unimpressed Nia. “It’s gold. This is gold,” she insisted, pointing a finger on the book. “This language, these letters have not been seen since the time when gods walked back to their heavens.”

Snow hooked a thumb in my direction, puffing her shoulders proudly. “He speaks it. Reads it. Knows it.”

“Mal, too,” Thora mumbled while intently trying to trace whatever words were on another Esmeray diary into a piece of paper for Nia to translate.