“She has trouble slowing her heart and breathing sometimes,” Holland shared quietly—and unnecessarily.
“I’ve noticed.” Nyktos’s thumb continued those featherlight sweeps while I inwardly cringed. He probably thought…only the gods knew what he thought.
I didn’t want to know.
Face heating, I backed away from Nyktos’s touch, hitting the edge of the dais. His hand hovered in midair for a few seconds, and then his fingers curled inward. He dropped his arm as I turned to the raised platform. I focused on the hauntingly beautiful thrones sculpted from massive chunks of shadowstone. Their backs had been carved into large and widespread wings that touched at the tips, connecting the seats. I wiped damp palms against the patches of dried blood on my breeches.
“You are both positive that no one else knows what she is?” Nyktos asked.
“Besides your father? Embris knows the prophecy,” Penellaphe answered, referencing the Primal God of Wisdom, Loyalty, and Duty as I pulled myself together. I faced them. This was too important for me to miss while having a mini breakdown. “And so does Kolis. Neither knows more than that.”
The eather stirred once more in Nyktos’s eyes at the mention of the Primal Kolis, who every mortal—including myself until recently—believed to be the Primal of Life and the King of Gods. But Kolis was the true Primal of Death. The one who’d impaled gods on the Rise surrounding the House of Haides just to remind Nyktos that all life was easily extinguished—or so I assumed. And it was a logical assumption. Nyktos’s father had been the true Primal of Life, and Kolis had stolen Eythos’s embers.
I fought the shudder, thinking over the prophecy Penellaphe had shared. The part about the desperation of golden crowns could be related to my ancestor King Roderick and the deal he’d made that’d started all of this. But prophecies were only possibilities, and they were… “Prophecies are fucking pointless,” I muttered aloud.
Penellaphe turned her head to me, raising a brow.
I grimaced. “I’m sorry. That came out worse than I intended.”
“I’m curious exactly how you intended that statement,” Nyktos wondered. I shot him an arch stare. “But I do not disagree.”
I stopped glaring at him like I wanted to stab him.
“I understand the sentiment,” Penellaphe said with a bemused expression. “Prophecies can often be confusing, even to those who receive them. And, sometimes, only bits and pieces of a prophecy are known by one—the beginning or the end—while the middle is known to another and vice versa. But some visions have come to pass, both in Iliseeum and in the mortal realm. It’s hard to see this since the destruction of the Gods of Divination and the passing of the last of the oracles.”
“Gods of Divination?” I’d heard of the oracles, rare mortals who had lived long before my birth and were able to communicate directly with the gods without having to summon them.
“They were gods able to see what was hidden to others—their truths—both past and future,” Penellaphe explained. “They called Mount Lotho home and served in Embris’s Court. The oracles would speak to them, and they were the only gods truly welcomed by the Arae.”
“Not the only gods welcomed,” Holland corrected softly.
Penellaphe’s rosy blush momentarily distracted me because there was definitely something going on there.
“Penellaphe’s mother was a God of Divination,” Holland continued. “That is why she was able to share a vision. Only those gods and the oracles could receive the visions the Ancients—the first Primals—dreamt.”
“I don’t have her other skills—the ability to see what is hidden or known,” Penellaphe added. “Nor have I received any other visions.”
“The consequences of what Kolis did when he stole the embers of life were far-reaching. Hundreds of gods were lost in the shockwave of energy,” Nyktos explained. “The Gods of Divination took the hardest hit. They were all but destroyed, and no other mortal was born an oracle.”
Sorrow crept into Penellaphe’s expression. “And with that, what other visions the Ancients dreamt, and may only be known to them, have now been lost.”
“Dreamt?” I lifted my brows.
“Prophecies are the dreams of the Ancients,” she explained.
I pressed my lips together. Most of the Ancients, being the oldest of the Primals, had passed on to Arcadia. “Uh. I did not know prophecies were dreams.”