Page 40 of Messenger of Death (Ouroboros Academy #2)

W e all crowded into a ride share to town and dropped Liam, Khalid, and Lucian off on a quaint street with lots of businesses. Saffron and I continued to her grandmother’s place. It wasn’t that far.

“You don’t think we’re going to get back and have to bail Liam, Khalid, and Lucian out, right?”

“If they are just being a general menace instead of being violent, the constables will just excuse it when they find out who Liam is. If Liam got violent, they are going to have problems because of who Lucian used to be. I don’t think anyone who has met Lucian would associate him with Vlad the Impaler or any of his previous reincarnations.

That’s not exactly working in his favor. ”

“I’m guessing part of who he used to be is why he wasn’t invited to this.”

“Nope. When Scorpia found out he was at Ouroboros Academy with me, she grilled me every day to make sure I wasn’t in danger.

When she found out who he was bound to, she decided he was probably a force for good in this reincarnation.

It really is because the elders of all races are super secretive with outsiders.

If you were talking to a vampire elder, Lucian would be the only one invited. We’re here.”

Scorpia lived in a large, stone cottage and was surrounded by plants.

I didn’t even have to ask to know these were plants from Fairy.

A small, but formidable older woman met us at the door.

Saffron said she was over three hundred years old, but she barely looked like she was in her fifties.

Supernatural aging was weird, and I was still getting used to it.

And she bowed her head in reverence to me when I hadn’t earned a damned thing like she had. I was just the reincarnation of an ancient deity. I bowed my head right back because Saffron had told me enough that this woman deserved every bit of respect she was given.

“Come inside. I have tea and food.”

I could consume an entire pot of coffee and go back for more, but I could never seem to get into tea. Still, I wasn’t rude, so I took it anyway and politely took a sip.

“Oh, wow. That’s really good. What is that?”

“One of the many things our ancestors took when they had to leave Fairy. Saffron said you have a feeling the beings that destroyed Fairy are back. Tell me more. When the Morrigan has a feeling, one should always listen.”

“My familiar knows who they are, but is prevented from saying anything. All three of them have hinted as much as they can it’s related to Fairy. But no one knows what happened to Fairy and the reincarnation of Apollo had a prophecy that just called them the Forsaken Ones.”

“Then, you are dealing with the ones who destroyed Fairy and they will do the same to this realm unless you can figure out who they are and stop them.”

“Is there anything you could tell us that could help?”

“Yes. This is a secret fairies have fought to bury specifically, so they didn’t get reincarnated. It starts with this realm. Gods are difficult to kill and they don’t always stay dead. Another god can swoop in and bring them back to life and then you have at least two gods seeking revenge.

“Gods are like everyone else. They are complicated and products of their time. Some of the behavior we’d call toxic now wasn’t necessarily considered bad back then.

Then there are the gods who were associated with evil, but could also be considered protection against certain things. There’s a lot of those.

“Some were just evil and there was nothing good about them. You’d think the gods would come together and kill them since there’s power in numbers, but they didn’t always do that.

There was one particular malevolent force one pantheon kept trying to banish instead of kill.

The problem with banishment is that you have to send that evil entity somewhere and one of them ended up in Fairy. ”

Shit. So, I was right. I didn’t have all the pieces, and I was getting those, but this was related to the destruction of Fairy.

“Who was he?”

“That’s the problem. We stayed in our realm, so we only knew the name he gave us.

We’ve tried to find that out. He called himself Harami when he was banished to Fairy, but we’ve never been able to find a god with that name.

He gave a fake name and tried to reinvent himself while he worked out how to get back to this realm and get his revenge. ”

Fuck me. That was going to make it harder. He had a known name that we could find before he was banished. If the fairies hadn’t connected them after this long, how were we supposed to before someone else died or disappeared?

“What about the other one? Alexios made it seem like there was more than one.”

“Yes. He took a mate. Not all the fairies wanted him gone. One of them wanted more power. More specifically, she wanted to be an original. Harami did something unholy and turned her into the most destructive original in the history of several realms.”

“The weird blackness power that’s killing nature and taking away people’s powers. What is it?”

“It’s not a blackness power. Harami gave his mate the destructive power of the void.”

Saffron gasped, but I didn’t know what that meant. It sounded bad. They saw the look I was giving them.

“The missing students,” Saffron said. “They’ve disappeared without a trace but they aren’t dead or you would have screamed and Khalid or Professor Gefn would have helped their souls cross.”

“You have to remember how I was raised. I wasn’t allowed to read about any of this. I heard about witches and demons, but in a bad way. I knew about vampires and werewolves because of some of my classmates, but if they got caught talking about that kind of thing, they got in trouble.”

“It’s just hard sometimes because I like you and you don’t act like you were raised in some religious cult.”

“She’s right,” Scorpia said. “There have been many religions since the fairies fled to this realm. People raised in devout families, no matter what the religion, tend to either embrace being a reincarnation and jump in with two feet or they fight it.”

I snorted.

“If the man who raised me found out he was the reincarnation of an ancient god, he’d be doing the exact same thing he’s doing now.”

Scorpia threw back her head and laughed.

“Yes, that happens, too, sometimes. Anyway, about the void. It’s nothing and a negative.

Most of the time, it’s harmless unless someone manages to banish you there, which is actually very difficult and requires several strong magic users.

Harami had to do terrible things to the fairies he kidnapped to make an original who could harness it like that.

“His mate changed her name to Hemlock. It’s tradition to name fairies after the stars or things in nature, but never poisonous flora like that. It’s considered a bad omen to name a child like that.

“The void is a destroyer. If someone can concentrate it like Hemlock could, it sucks the magic out of everything and eventually the life.”

“The missing students,” I said. “But I would have screamed and Khalid or Professor Gefn would have known. I’m not sure I understand.”

“The void destroys everything, even souls. You didn’t scream and Anubis and Freya couldn’t help them to the afterlife to wait to be reborn because they didn’t just die. Everything about them, including their soul, was consumed by the void and ceased to exist.”

“I don’t know how to fight that or stop it. What did your ancestors do?”

“You can’t really do what we did. Harami and Hemlock were the most powerful beings in Fairy.

We didn’t have the magic to fight back. The location of the gateways between Fairy and other realms was kept among the elders.

Harami and Hemlock were trying to find the gateways to get back to this realm so Harami could have his revenge.

“Hemlock had already destroyed a lot of Fairy. The elders made a plan to gather seeds, animals, and fairies and escape into this realm, but trap Harami and Hemlock in Fairy. That should have been the end of them. Even though we never spoke their names again, they shouldn’t have come back.

“You can only reincarnate in the same place as your bones. No one alive back then would have let them out, so they would have died in Fairy, eventually. Hemlock destroyed most of the things they could have eaten and we brought a lot of the animals with us. There wasn’t much left in Fairy for them or any children they might have had and their line would have died out ages ago because no one was left in Fairy except for them. ”

“So, how are they here now?” Saffron asked.

Exactly. Not even Saffron knew all of this, so it was a pretty big fairy secret. I had a feeling the only reason Scorpia let Saffron sit in on all of this despite not being an elder was because she either thought Saffron would be an elder one day or she just wanted to keep her safe.

“The gateways are sealed and still a secret, but an elder or someone who knows how could open them. We’ve put out the word going back is an instant death sentence, but we really don’t know. There could be an entire society there built off incest or it could be completely empty.

“Most of us think we shouldn’t risk it. There are many types of fairies and we are scattered across this entire realm.

Each group has their own elders. Some fairies can’t blend with humans.

They are limited to supernatural communities and we’re constantly fighting with humans about nature being cut down and turned into an apartment complex or a shopping center.

“There are some elders who think we should send a team to Fairy to see what’s going on.

They think if it’s empty and nature has rebounded, we should go back.

No one has specifically said they’ve gone back to get the lay of the land, but if they found their bones and moved them out of Fairy, that person would have thought they were making Fairy safe for us.

Being an elder can drive anyone mad. I’m just guessing this is how Harami and Hemlock are back in this realm. ”

“They would be freshman, so someone would have had to have removed the bones at least eighteen or nineteen years ago. Why haven’t they said anything about the state of Fairy?” Saffron asked.

“Let me look into that part. You let the reincarnations figure out who Harami and Hemlock are in this life and deal with it.”

“Um, how are we supposed to deal with it?” I asked. “I wouldn’t know how to fight any of that. I thought maybe Alexios was their weakness because he’s a sun god.”

“He very well could be. Trust your gut. There are more of you than them and that’s going to be your best bet beating them. I’d avoid trying to banish them again because that was detrimental to our home, but you all have different magic and magic we didn’t have when they ended up in Fairy.”

I needed help. I needed people much older and smarter than me. The fairy elders hadn’t been able to connect Harami to a pantheon and who he was before he was banished.

Maybe the professors at Ouroboros Academy could.