Page 87 of Legacy of the Heirs (The Lost Kingdom Saga #2)

Centuries . He was far older than they realised.

The god had not shown Elisara this. She tried to match this revelation with what they had shown, but she could not.

Elisara stepped forward, focusing on the flicker that ignited within her the second she draped the talisman around her neck to hold her sword again.

Elisara blinked, and clouds moved overhead.

The wind picked up and whipped her hair back.

The two men holding Tajana exchanged a look.

Elisara raised her hand, calling on the flicker inside her; it was not fire, though, but simply the essence of herself—the essence planted there by another.

The sands moved quickly and tunnelled to create a large, empty moat around the army before her. Caligh grinned.

Elisara’s hands shifted, and thorn-covered vines grew around the trench, surrounding the army for a second time before she blinked and the vines caught fire.

In a final display of the four, she released the heavens, and rain crashed upon them all, trapping the army in a third layer of her defences as it filled the moat.

The power of four had existed in Elisara long before Kazaar, ever since her birth.

Yet he was the key to unlocking it within her.

His talisman awakened the essence and called to her blood.

The god showed her no answers as to why Kazaar, too, possessed all four, and it was a mystery she no longer needed to uncover without him by her side.

But what Elisara knew for certain was the prophecy never referred to Kazaar.

Elisara was the one with all four.

“I am here for her!” Caligh shouted over the rain.

Elisara reached for the sword at her back, which the god had shown being planted on the Unsanctioned Isle by a man she did not recognise, for Elisara to eventually take under the assumption it was nothing but a dull, discarded weapon.

It had never been that. The sword she had worn at her hip ever since had always been meant for her and this moment.

The image of Sadira and Larelle flashed in her mind again, just one part of the vision shown by the god.

The two stood hunched over the Wiccan book and Myths and Lies of Ithyion .

Sadira’s incantation page described the Sword of Sonos, while Larelle’s was incomplete: Sword of So—

Sadira had not instilled all their weapons with the Sword of Sonos. She had imbued it as the Sword of Souls, using the incantation from the old book of Myths and Lies, the sword the four gods had referenced.

“The sword can slumber—”

“The sword can awaken—”

“The wielder can take them—”

“The wielder can make them.”

Every life taken with the imbued weapons linked to the sword in Elisara’s hand: the Sword of Souls.

Osiris and the boy who held Tajana backed away as Elisara pulled the weapon from her back, raising it before her as lightning crashed against the dunes behind.

Elisara glanced down at her hands gripping the sword, and then up at Caligh through her lashes, a menacing look on her face.

“I am not yours to have.” Kneeling, Elisara slammed the sword into the ground, unleashing that of old lore within her.

The queen cried as her head fell back, and the rulers shielded themselves with their arms. As darkness exploded from her chest in wisps and flowed at her command, it took shape.

She hoped the army behind Caligh froze in fear at the lengths she would go to, to avenge her love.

She released the darkness within her, and it shifted into the forms of the trapped souls existing within her sword, killed in this battle and the others who had been trapped in it long before Elisara’s time.

Elisara looked up at the rows and rows of soldiers and creatures flooding from her as shadows, invincible without a corporeal body.

She did not need to look behind her to know the army of shadows filled the gap between her and the Novisian soldiers, shadows that flickered and blurred to form the shapes of those lost to war.

All were killed by her sword or a weapon linked to it, weakening Elisara throughout the battle in the brief moment each soul linked to hers.

Elisara blinked, her eyes the deepest black, like when Sitara, the Goddess of Dusk, had stood in her mind and placed a hand on her shoulder, unlocking the power she now wielded—that of old lore.

It was easy for them to assume that Kazaar was the darkness, believing what others told them, yet the darkness that seeped from him only ever appeared when he was with Elisara .

Lowering her head, Elisara met Caligh’s eyes. The Historian. The man who taught them exactly what he wished for them to know, planting books and the prophecy for them and their parents. But it was not light within Elisara; it was the dark essence of the first god’s spirit that burned within.

“I am not yours to have,” Elisara said, her voice echoing across the desert.

Caligh grinned, and Elisara roared her next words in a voice unlike her own.

“You took what was mine!” Sitara screamed through her.

“You took his essence, the only thing I had left of Sonos.” Elisara felt the moment the goddess left her body.

Caligh had not just taken the essence of Sonos from Sitara, but he had taken Kazaar from Elisara.

The darkness flooding her mind would not allow that.

“My dear, that was the plan all along.” Caligh grinned.

“To unlock what stands before us all, you needed to feel great emotion like the severing of a tie.” Elisara raised her sword as shadows twisted around her.

She turned to face her new army standing behind the rulers, who parted quickly for Elisara to direct them.

Her black eyes peered into the queens and king before her, their fear mirrored in their expression as they beheld the dark one that would bring suffering to all, the rise of old power—the kingdom will fall.

Elisara reached for Sitara’s power, which was placed in her when she was born.

The threads of it connected to the trapped souls in the sword, who now stood before her.

She pulled, readying them to move towards the copper soldiers.

Turning back to Caligh, Elisara’s eyes glinted as she whispered with a voice like unending darkness.

“Kill them all.”