Page 64 of A Kiss of Hammer and Flame (Fated for Hael #1)

Thelaema retched, her body yielding what little food had touched her stomach to the sands.

It had been an age since she had attempted teleportation.

And yet there was no time to waste, because she felt it: her connection to the All-seeing flowing from a trickle to a torrent, as the dam that had curtailed the source of her Oraculine’s magicks evaporated at last.

In the garden below the Reliquus’ statue, seedlings emerged from the blackened dirt, clear signs of life to indicate that Cahra had succeeded. Hael was free.

However, with her High Oracle’s powers came the insight that she was not alone. There was one other. And theirs was a reunion four centuries in the making.

Thelaema braced herself and inhaled, the capital’s desert air parching her lungs before she pushed off against the obelisk outside Hael’stromia’s pyramid, the palatial temple open. She looked to the row of empty pedestals that bordered the approach avenue, knowing Hael’s hounds would soon arrive.

But the Reliquus was not her purpose here, Thelaema reminded herself.

Finally, as she had seen he would, her High Oracle counterpart descended the steps, their home as Oraculine and Oracularus of the Order of Descry, 399 years before.

Fleetingly, Thelaema wondered if Grauwynn had been granted the same vision from the All-seeing that had led her to him now. If he had some sort of plan.

She supposed it did not matter. They had both lived long enough.

Before she left the battle, the Nether had bestowed upon her crucial information: the person behind Hael’stromia’s fall. It was veiled, though she had not known it at the time. Veiled by her very counterpart. Her partner. Veiled by Grauwynn, from her.

He was the orchestrator of it all. But his motivations remained a mystery.

She would learn the reason for his heresy.

Grauwynn noted her at last, pausing. Thelaema stepped from behind the obelisk and directly into his path, in the centre of the forsaken road to their former temple.

‘Grauwynn.’ A greeting, and a warning.

‘Thelaema,’ he said softly.

She could garner nothing from his impenetrable face, his voice as neutral as the taupe pallor of his skin, as he stood towering above her on those steps. They stared at one another with the same periwinkle eyes. The colour of the Seers.

‘Is that surprise?’ Thelaema pondered. ‘Or stoicism? I never could tell.’

‘Nothing shall surprise us shortly,’ Grauwynn replied, lowering the hood of his robe.

It was not their garb, that of the Order of Descry, their robes black as these hallowed sands.

This was something different, light instead of dark, however shabby.

Thelaema squinted at it. The fact that it was shabby, worn, was odd.

Which god did it belong to? How long had he worn it?

Was this why they had been blocked from one another’s foresight?

‘I suppose. In which case, cease your dallying and peddle whatever lies you must.’ Formidable words. She would not dull them.

It was simple to disguise her peering at his attire with peering at her fellow Oracle. Was there nothing left of her former consort? The idea of him renouncing their beliefs…

Grauwynn chuckled. ‘How I have missed you,’ he confessed, a hint of something like remorse betraying his gaze, his wrinkled face echoing the sentiment. ‘Your shrewd mind.’ Then he switched tack, pressing against the gatehouse to her thoughts.

Shall we continue in the old ways?

Thelaema shoved back, prepared but still surprised he should attempt it.

‘Four centuries, no word, and you wish to communicate in the old ways?’ Thelaema’s words were acid, burning on her tongue, as she said, ‘Why do you ally with Atriposte and Decimus? They do not respect our ways, our prophecy, nor the All-seeing’s chosen Scion.

The one that I have been shaping, safeguarding, all while you have been—’ Thelaema halted, full of scorn.

‘Astray,’ she finished, waving her hand at his wayward off-white robe.

‘Have you spoken your fill?’ Grauwynn straightened, pinning her with a stare that once upon a time might have given her pause. No longer.

She retorted, ‘Of course not!’

‘Then in the time we have left before the All-seeing recommences from the source, would you prefer your sweet lies, or the truth?’

‘What manner of question is that?’ She moved to march on him, and it happened, the gentle, urgent tug of her Oracle’s intuition. In her mind, she saw a flash of silver – then red. She knew that red, those vermillion flames.

By the Nether, what has he done?

Thelaema bore no sign of her thoughts. Yet Grauwynn was right. Soon, the All-seeing would return the Oracles to their state of oneness, their unity of mind. Once that happened, she and Grauwynn would be able to divine each other’s every move. She had to strike. Now.

Thelaema took a step forward. ‘If I asked for truth, would you offer it?’

Grauwynn stood, robe stark against the black steps of the temple. ‘Would you listen?’

Thelaema chanced another step. ‘I would.’

If only to know, before she killed him. Aptly, Grauwynn failed to see her thoughts.

‘All that we had prophesied has transpired,’ he said, hands clasped in his robe’s cuffs. ‘The Reliquus has arisen. All that is left is the capital’s rejuvenation.’ Like hers, his gaze had fallen to the garden at the base of Hael’s statue.

Thelaema waited. ‘And?’

‘Once again, your shrewd mind,’ Grauwynn repeated, laughing and cocking his head. ‘And, my Oraculine, when it has, I shall conclude what I began. The Nether-magicks of the Reliquus will finally be conferred.’

‘To whom?’ Thelaema asked slowly.

Grauwynn, the male spiritual leader of their Order, smiled. ‘Why, to myself, of course.’

Thelaema stilled. ‘And the Reliquus?’

‘Andruit? The boy has lived far longer than any mortal,’ Grauwynn said dismissively. ‘He shall return to the dust from whence he came.’

‘His immortal existence is but a consequence of the Netherworld magicks that we, the Order of Descry, augmented him with,’ Thelaema argued.

‘A course of action that I warned against more than once. Now you wish to strip the Reliquus of his blessing – worse, his life? You have not the power to do it nor the permission.’ Tenebrius would never stand for it, she thought.

Hael, or Andruit as he had been when alive, was Tenebrius’ chosen vessel.

Even Grauwynn would not court angering the God of the Netherworld.

‘Oh, but therein lies the beauty,’ Grauwynn said. ‘For I indeed possess the power.’ The Oracularus revealed a shining dagger. The flash of silver.

Thelaema froze. It was the blood-blade with the falcon handle from Hael’s ritual that had reanimated him and created the Reliquus. Such an idol, on the day of Hael’s resurrection, could be enough to end him. And Cahra would be next, she thought. A capital coup .

Grauwynn continued. ‘Hael’stromia’s defences cast our Order out, after I tried and failed to draw the darkness from the Nether, and all while the Reliquus failed in his duty of protecting his Kolyath Emperor charge.

I have had four centuries to discern my mistake.

’ Raising the dagger, he went on, ‘It is this: I should have killed Hael first. Then, perhaps, our Xan would never have detected me. And never had to die in vain.’

Thelaema’s heart faltered, and she stumbled as she cried out, ‘You killed Xan?’

Xan, as Oraculant, was more than their fellow High Oracle. Xan completed the triad as the crux of the Order of Descry, the great harmoniser between Thelaema and Grauwynn’s temperaments, maintaining an equilibrium so that no single Oracle exerted control.

Their beloved Xan had died during the fall of Hael’stromia, a wound that had never truly healed for her. Grauwynn’s confession ripped it open, hanging in the air like a ghost.

She rapidly blinked away the tears, her breaths shaking as she grieved.

I should have killed Grauwynn! But at least, with her passing and his, the realm could usher in a new Oraculine, Oraculant and Oracularus. Starting with Wyldaern.

A new era of the Order of Descry, she thought weakly. A better one.

‘Such a course of action I cannot allow,’ she whispered, the weight of her sorrow grounding her as she prepared to do battle. ‘You know this.’ Thelaema lifted her eyes to his. ‘Why, then, did you not simply kill me?’

Grauwynn’s gaze cleared just a little, to the warm violet that had enamoured her younger self, as he murmured with finality, ‘I so wished to hear your voice.’

With a sigh of regret, he pointed the dagger at Thelaema and unleashed a sizzling bolt of black fire.