by Ella Summers
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “The Guardians harbor many secrets.”
Arina closed her eyes again. Her hands had moved on to the armor. She repeated Zane’s words, “The savior will change the balance of magic back to the middle, back to mixed magic of light and dark origins. The savior is a god killer and demon slayer.”
Prophecies were always so dramatic.
“The missing piece of the Prophecy comes after Leda changes the balance of magic,” Arina said. “That missing piece is the part where Leda destroys the Guardians too.”
“So we will actually defeat the Guardians?” I asked.
“Not sure. I cannot see into the future. I can only see how the Guardians interpreted the Prophecy. But even if I could see into the future, I don’t think it would help much. You see, the future is not set. The Prophecy allows for several different paths. Down one path, you grow your magic, Leda; the Guardians did need you to grow your magic. They explored the Prophecy’s possibilities, and any path where they tried to stop you from gaining power just led to their destruction and your gaining power anyway. They decided they needed to let you gain all your powers before they struck out at you.”
“How can the Guardians have a Prophecy? How can they see into the future? That’s not the kind of thing magic-nullifying beings can do, right?” I looked at Damiel and Cadence, our resident experts in all kinds of magic, for confirmation.
“But the Guardians have collected supernaturals with all kinds of powers,” Cadence said. “Long ago, a telepath with future-gazing powers might have given them this Prophecy.”
Arina’s hands followed the gun’s contours. “Not all Guardians are united on what to do with Leda. Some think she’s more trouble than she’s worth and that the magical shift can be done in other ways. Some think they need Leda for it.”
Arina’s hand flashed out and she grabbed my hand. I felt a jolt as we connected, my hands and our minds.
And then I was once more in the Lost City. I saw the pale-haired angel from long ago. She flashed in front of my eyes, this fragment from the past.
Arina was beside me. “The Guardians’ forces attacked the city.”
“You’re seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Yes,” Arina said. “This woman, she was the Immortals’ chosen one, the one of balanced magic. The first bearer of the weapons of heaven and hell.”
“She was an angel.”
“No, not an angel. Something else,” Arina told me. “I don’t know what she was exactly. Some kind of deity, neither god nor demon. She flew out to face the invaders. The city was lost.”
“How long ago did this happen?” I asked her.
“Long ago, before the gods and demons came here. When humans were hardly more than primitive cave dwellers.”
“There were cities here on Earth so long ago?”
“The Lost City was built, destroyed, and rebuilt many times,” she said.
“There were many bearers of these immortal artifacts,” I remembered.
“Yes. Chosen champions of the Immortals. Only a champion can see these lost memories.”
“You’re seeing them,” I pointed out.
“I’m seeing them through you, Leda, as you see them. Because I’m reading your magic.”
The scene changed.
“Another champion.” I pointed at the red-haired angel Sierra in the Lost City.
“Yes.”
“How long ago did she live in her version of the Lost City?” I asked.
“She didn’t live. She will live.”
“What does that mean?”
“The visions of the red-haired angel, they aren’t memories from the past,” Arina said. “They are snippets from the future.”
“What?”
“They show what is yet to come.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “This is part of the Prophecy the Guardians are so worked up about. And that angel—Sierra—the future bearer of the weapons of heaven and hell…she’s your daughter, Leda.”
21
The Road of Time
“My daughter.” I gaped at Arina as the disjointed visions sizzled out.
“Yes,” she told me.
“But these are supposed to be memories, not visions from the future.”
“I don’t quite understand it myself,” Arina admitted. “This is some very powerful, very unusual magic.”
“How are the visions from the past linked to those of my daughter from the future?”
Arina shook her head. “I don’t know. But we can find out.”
“How?”
“The weapons of heaven and hell are channeling these visions, magnifying them, so you see them. Like a lens focusing the memories onto you,” she explained.
“Someone is sending me the visions from the Vault, a secret place accessible from the Lost City.”
“Who is sending them to you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe we can figure that out too,” Arina said. “I can help guide you through the visions stored in the Vault, Leda. But you must know that this journey won’t be without risk.”
“I have to do it,” I said, determined. “The fate of my daughter might be at stake.”
“And I’m coming with you,” Nero added.
“I believe I can handle guiding the two of you through the visions,” Arina said. “You will both need to stay focused—and close to me. It will be a narrow trail to follow these visions.”
Nero took my hand. “We understand.”
“One more thing,” said Arina. “In order to make sense of the various visions, I will attempt to shape the narrative chronologically. I will not, however, be able to assist you in battle. I can only guide your path.”
“Do you anticipate there will be fighting? It’s all just visions. None of this is real. Right?” I asked her.
“Just because it’s not happening now, that doesn’t mean it’s not real,” she told me.
“Is this like time travel when you have to be careful not to ruin history or something?” I remembered once reading a novel like that.
“No. It’s not time travel,” Arina said. “What you do won’t change the past, even as you interact with it. But just because you can’t damage the past, that doesn’t mean the past can’t damage you. Be prepared.”
“We are prepared.” Nero’s halo hummed with complete confidence; he was doing it to calm me…and it was working.
“Ok, then here goes nothing,” Arina said.
A warmth rushed over my body, like a gentle ocean wave. I felt my consciousness melt into the Vault’s memory stream.
The pale-haired angel had lived many millennia ago on Earth. I didn’t quite understand it, but I had a vague sense that she and her kind had been created by the Immortals. They were angels in all the tangible ways—and yet not really angels in some intangible ways.
I didn’t dwell on this knowledge that had dripped into my mind, a mind that was feeling a bit foggy at the moment. My eyelids were heavy, weighed down by all of this new information.
“Careful, Pandora.” Nero’s hands flashed out, catching me as I swayed.
“Thanks.” I offered him a smile. “This is all a lot to take in.”
We stood in the Lost City, right in front of a small temple.
Then I felt a jolt, and we were suddenly inside the temple, as though we’d been teleported there.
Arina was there too, beside us. “Sorry for shaking you up. This magic trail we’re following is very weird. I’m still getting the hang of it.”
A couple stood at the altar, their hands joined. One was the pale-haired angel. The other was a man who looked a lot like Damiel.
“I think we’re looking at your ancestors, Nero,” I said. “Damiel’s ancestors.”
“Damiel does have Immortal blood,” Nero replied. “Is this where it comes from?”
Some kind of priest was there. He was performing a wedding ceremony.
“It’s a secret wedding. The pale-haire
d angel and the man had to hide their love because…” I shook my head, but I couldn’t shake loose the answers that I sought. “I don’t know why. The reason is there, but it’s just out of my grasp.”
“There is a lot of information stored in these visions,” Arina said. “Don’t get caught up in the details, Leda. They’re not important. Focus on the larger narrative, on how this all connects together.”
It was hard to ignore the little things because I was curious, and I could tell Nero was too. This was a rare glimpse into his past.
“You didn’t see this when you read Nero’s magic?” I asked Arina.
“Not these people in particular. When I read someone’s magical history, I just intuitively focus on what’s really important to understand them.”
“This isn’t important to understanding Nero?” I asked. “His ancestors lived thousands of years ago on Earth. That’s pretty damn interesting.”
“Interesting, yes. But is it important?” she posed.
“If it weren’t important, why would someone have put these visions into the Vault for me? Why would someone be sending me any of them?”
“Without knowing who is sending you the visions, I cannot really speculate, Leda,” replied Arina. “But if they are benevolent, I suppose they might have sent you these visions because they are important to your future survival, or maybe important to defeating a foe.”
“A foe like the Guardians?”
“For instance. In any case, you should not ignore the possibility that the person who’s sending you these visions is not benevolent at all, but is rather trying to manipulate you or even do you harm.”
“We shall go through these visions and try to ascertain the senders’ intentions.” Nero was sensible like that.
“Ok,” I agreed because it really was the best plan. “Let’s see what they show us.”
The priest had finished the ceremony. The love birds sealed their union with a kiss.
The temple’s doors burst open. Legion soldiers stormed inside. No, not Legion soldiers, I reminded myself. The soldiers were dressed similarly, but they were not from the Legion. Their uniforms did not bear the Legion’s rank symbols. And this had happened, after all, thousands of years before the Legion had even existed.
The soldiers didn’t wait. They fired off their magic. When the smoke cleared, the priest was dead—and the pale-haired angel and her new husband had vanished.
They must have escaped—or at least the pale-haired angel had—because the next thing I saw was her walking across the scorched, blackened plains. It looked a lot like the Black Plains. And yet not quite like the Black Plains.
There seemed to be a lot of repeating, quite similar things in this visions—parallels between then and now. Some iteration of the Lost City. A place like the Black Plains. Angel-like beings. Legion-like soldiers.
The angel’s wings drooped, low and heavy. She appeared to be injured. A trail of blood followed her as she entered the Lost City, a city now ravaged by war and destruction.
She stood in front of a wall, looking at the wings symbol carved into the stone surface. The gateway. I’d been there too, two years ago in the Lost City. She set her hands on the wings symbol to open the gateway, then she passed right through the wall.
A gold-framed door was before her now. Crouching over, she leaned against the door. A sparkling, magical tear fell from her eye. It splashed against the panel of symbols at the door, lighting up the letters of an old, now-forgotten language. An Immortal language.
The door opened. Inside, the angel found the weapons of heaven and hell. She put on the armor first; the silver pieces adjusted to fit her body perfectly. Then she grabbed the shield, the sword, and the gun. Thus equipped, she hurried outside to face the enemies who besieged her city.
I looked across the broken city, trying to see who those enemies were, but they were all just a big blur.
“Surely, that is important,” I said to Arina.
She only frowned.
“Are you hiding things from us?” I asked her.
“It is not I who hides things, Leda. Someone else is hiding things from us. We’ve being shown only what they want us to see.”
“The question is, who is they?” I wondered.
“Indeed.” Nero’s voice was dangerous. He didn’t like when things were withheld from him. He didn’t like being manipulated.
I looked across the battlefield. The pale-haired angel clashed with the mystery soldiers. Their movements blurred, and the memory blurred into another.
I saw myself in the Lost City. I was inside the small room that had once held the weapons of heaven and hell. An angel stood behind me.
“Osiris,” I said.
“It’s an old magic,” said Osiris—or, rather, Damiel when he’d pretended to be Osiris. “A magic to make you go through the motions of your memory, like you’re in it.”
Right, Damiel had performed a spell to send me into a trance. The memories had been so strong for me there and then in the Lost City that it must have been an easy spell for him to pull off.
I looked down at the big ‘x’ that my past self had scratched in the sand while inside Damiel’s trance. It was accompanied by symbols—letters—from the same language the pale-haired angel had seen on the gold-framed door.
I blinked, and I could see right through Damiel’s disguise, right through the Osiris illusion he’d wrapped himself in.
“How do you even know that she’s the one?” one of the soldiers in the room asked. A soldier who’d been hired by that crazy Pilgrim Valiant.
“The spell doesn’t lie. It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to,” said Damiel-Osiris.
“What spell?” my past self asked.
“The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”
Another jolt shook me, sending me tumbling into the next memory.
I collided with Nero.
He caught me, folding his arms around me like a shield. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I assured him with a smile, then looked at Arina.
“Like I said, this beast is hard to drive,” she said. “I’ve tried to sort the memories in order, but it’s a bit like trying to collect water with your hands. Things keep slipping by. This memory came before the last one we watched.”
“I can see that,” I replied.
I saw Damiel in hiding, spying on two of the Guardians’ angels, the pair who’d captured Cadence. Their names were Taron and Giselle. He wore a suit of bright, silver armor. She wore a red, knee-length summer dress and a pair of brown boots. Both had long, beautiful hair that shimmered with an enchanting, eerie kind of magic.
“The Pilgrim Valiant has learned the weapons of heaven and hell are in the Lost City,” Taron said. “He plans to use them to take his revenge on the gods and demons.”
“Valiant will fail,” Giselle said shrilly. “He doesn’t have enough magic—or the right kind of magic—to wield those immortal artifacts.”
“No, he does not,” agreed Taron. “But the others think we can still use him.”
The ‘others’ must have been the Guardians. Taron and Giselle seemed to be more a part of the Guardians than they were merely two more of the people the Guardians had ‘rescued’.
“Valiant is trying to hire mercenaries to assist him,” Taron said. “We are to ensure he finds the right mercenaries. To open the vault where the weapons of heaven and hell are kept, he will need someone who can perform a memory recall spell.”
“An angel could perform that spell. And the rogue angel Osiris Wardbreaker is in the area right now.”
Taron nodded. “Wardbreaker will do—if he can be enticed away from his favorite hobby of massacring villages. I will make sure Valiant hires Wardbreaker.”
“I have been busy off-world this past month, Taron, so you’re going to have to get me all caught up. Why do we really want Wardb
reaker to perform the memory recall spell—and on whom?”
“On Leda Pierce.” Taron said my name like he was whispering over my grave.
“The Pandora?”
“Yes. She has the perfect balance of light and dark magic to be the vessel for those visions stored in the Vault of the Lost City.”
Comprehension dawned on her face. “Including the visions of our future.”
“The Pandora is at the center of the Prophecy,” said Taron. “Her actions will determine our fate. So we must see to it that she receives those visions in the Vault, visions channeled through the weapons of heaven and hell. Those visions will push her along the right path, the path we need her to take. The path that will end with the destruction of all gods and demons—and in the Guardians’ rise to power.”
“Then we’d best get started,” Giselle said.
Then the Guardians’ angels spread their wings and flew away.
From his hiding spot, Damiel watched their silhouettes in the sky grow ever more distant. “Yes, fly off to do your wicked masters’ bidding. I’ll be waiting.” Damiel’s smile was bitter, his eyes burning with hatred.
I could hear what he was thinking. He was planning to hijack their plan, to impersonate Wardbreaker and use the memory recall spell to tune me in to the Vault’s memories, memories that would lead him to the weapons of heaven and hell, immortal artifacts that he would use to fight the Guardians. And kill them, every last one of them.
“But how am I connected to the weapons of heaven and hell?” I wondered aloud. “How can I use them so well?”
I felt another jolt, gentler this time. Arina was getting better at moving us between the visions. I looked around, trying to figure out where—and when—we were now.
I knew at once. I’d seen this memory before.
Faris stood in a room with weapons hanging on the walls. He was dressed in a dark tunic and silk pants, one of his famous battlefield-in-the-ballroom outfits. Around his neck, he wore a gold pendant. It was the same pendant Athan had used to reveal Faris’s best-kept secret: this memory.