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“NO!” I pushed back against the wall with scrambling legs, feet skidding against the prison floor. “No, please, NO!”

Dyonisia tapped a nail against her chin. “I think yes. It’s not personal, Rayna. I’ve subjected my own children to far worse, but none of them have the same potential you do. It’s all for the good of this world.”

In the distance, Jagaros roared. My own blood whooshed through my ears as the elite with the blazing instrument came forward.

A new cry exploded out of me. A single name, a single secret, a single plea born of all the memories I had just witnessed between Jagaros and my mother. A love so deep that it had brought them back together after five centuries apart.

“COEN!” I cried when that dreaded blaze of heat singed my skin.

As if my own love could hear me.

As if he could save me from this fate.

As if his fate wasn’t to kill me instead.

CHAPTER

53

COEN

Straightening up from a heavy crouch, I cast my gaze upon Fate’s temple for the first time in my life.

I’d seen misty memories of it in others’ minds and paintings of it strewn across Sorronia, but nothing would be able to mimic the sight of it in person. Made of what looked like phantom quartz, it wavered with internal formations, like hazy mirrors that plunged deeper and deeper into the stone itself. Five steeples spiked against a darkening sky, and stained-glass windows glimmered at me from the double doors like a pair of watchful eyes—also wavering slightly.

As if the paint was swirling with movement between blinks.

I skipped a quick glance over my shoulder. A bridge arced over the water that lapped against the small isle, spreading back to the mainland in the distance. Normally, a faerie couple had to request permission from the Sorronian council to cross that bridge and visit the temple, or else it would probably be swarming with gawkers right now. But no, the isle and bridge were both empty.

I was alone.

Swallowing my nerves like sandpaper, I clutched Old Veracious in one hand and the piece of paper from Rayna in the other, making my way up the sweep of steps toward the temple’s double doors.

It opened on silent hinges the moment my foot made contact with the top step. After a beat’s hesitation, I stepped inside and found myself facing something… fucking impossible, to say the least.

An infinite hallway stretched before me, burrowing into a distance so vast that it couldn’t possibly fit in this world, let alone the temple I’d seen from the outside. Columns made of that same phantom quartz supported an arched ceiling for as far as I could see, melting into something more like black amethyst the further it went. The stained-glass windows lining the walls cast a warbling, multi-colored light onto little carvings etched in the columns and floor.

And from somewhere among the endless unraveling of column after column, a voice was singing. Not in a language I recognized, but in such a beautiful, haunting melody that my skin stung with prickles.

I glanced sideways, forgetting, for a moment, that Rayna wasn’t with me. Forgetting that I couldn’t drink in her expression or exchange an amazed look with her or share this moment with her in any way at all.

Of all the times I’d imagined visiting Fate, she’d always been by my side.

“Hello?” I called out by myself.

The singing continued without pause. I took a few steps deeper into the temple, scanning the carvings in the columns on either side of me. The lines twisted and twirled into various faces, clasped hands, broken embraces, ripped shoes, royal gowns, animals, trees, fire, pathways and bridges, dirt huts and grand palaces, and on and on and on until my vision nearly collapsed.

Blinking heavily, I ripped it away and tried to pinpoint the source of the voice. Followed the sound until I’d plunged so far into the depths of the temple that when I squinted behind me, the double doors were mere pinpricks of shimmering color in the distance of an amethyst void.

But I was getting closer, the voice louder. Finally, I stepped past a column and turned to find myself staring at the back of…

A woman? Maybe? Whatever she was, her form seemed to be made of the same material as the stained-glass windows, warping with color as she sang that haunting melody and painted her fingers over the nearest windowpane. Wherever she touched, color sprang to life, undulating like seaweed under a rainbow wave.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

I whipped around, sword raised.

Another creature was standing behind me, hands clasped behind her back. So rooted in place that she might as well have been one of the looming columns holding this place up. In fact, she seemed to be made of a mix of phantom quartz and black amethyst, every feature—from the fall of her hair to the shape of her face—hewn from the same stone that made up the temple itself.