Page 131 of The Stolen Throne
Omma and Horus follow Reven and me out, leaving Achlys with Tabra. After all that, Omma doesn’t look like the woman I’ve known all my life. She looks small…and scared.
Welcome to my world.
What Reven is, what he does, is terrifying. What we just witnessed was terrifying. If Eidolon can possess people with his ghosts, that’s terrifying, too.
We need to get ahead of the king, and, without meaning to, Trysolde’s story and the ghosts of Eidolon showed me a possible way to do that.
I take Reven and Omma to the zariph’s tent and send Horus to gather the others. I hate doing this to them when we’ve already been through so much and need to rest, but it can’t wait.
“What happened?” Pella demands as she enters the space.
“The thing inside Tabra happened.”
Vos sighs. “Just one night of peace would have been nice, Meren.” But even as he says this, he claps a hand on Reven’s shoulder. “You okay?” he asks in a low aside.
Reven nods.
“Are we all going to stand around staring, or is someone going to explain?” Cainis snaps. He wasn’t thrilled by my insisting we wait for everyone else.
We fill them in. When we’re done, no one speaks.
“Well…that explains a lot,” Omma murmurs.
“Explains what?” I ask.
“That explains what I was seeing.” Omma shakes her head, every single one of her seventy-some-odd years etched in her face. “I only used my power on your sister once, and that was all I needed.”
I stare at her. Omma is a soul Enfernae. Tabra is, too, though the specifics are still in question, but Omma’s version is the ability to see what afterlife a person’s soul will be sent to. She’s never told me what she sees, not even my own future.
Omma clasps her hands in front of her. “Tabra’s soul was destined for the Allusian heavens. But…” Her expression darkens, and she becomes the hard woman I’ve known all my life. “When I arrived here, I saw a different fate. I saw a soul meant to be in the seventh circle of the hells.”
“That can’t be good,” Cain mutters, voice as dire as I’ve heard from him.
The breath gets trapped in my chest. The seventh circle is for the worst of all humanity—rapists, murderers, child abusers, committers of genocide. People with souls so foul they can never be redeemed.
The seventh hell. That’s where some of Eidolon’s incarnations have gone? That’s what he put in my sister? Is the one I talked to in the desert—the one still on the loose somewhere—also one of those? I’m guessing not. But what about the ghost inside Trysolde?
Oh holy hells and damnation. Was there a soul trying to get inside me all those months with Eidolon? Am I carrying it already without knowing? Is that why the shadows are doing weird things around me?
We need answers, and we need them now.
There’s only one thing I can think to try, a place I can go for those answers, and it’s probably the worst idea I’ve had yet. “I need to go to the Land of Eternal Death.”
If Omma’s words filled the room with thick dread, mine send a crackle of anger through it.
“No,” Reven snaps.
“Have you lost your goddess-loving mind?” Cain shouts at the same time. “You can’t go there!”
There, the Land of Eternal Death, is the burning land of souls in Aryd. I am well aware no one in their right mind would want to go.
I take a deep breath. “Eidolon knows too much that we don’t yet—why the goddesses were trapped, where the other amulets are, why he’s doing what he’s doing, how to stop people from being possessed by his souls, how to stop him.”
Vos crosses his arms. “That doesn’t mean we send anyone off to get possessed like Trysolde and Tabra.”
“Tabra wasn’t possessed there,” I point out. “And for all we know, Eidolon put the soul in Trysolde a long time ago.”
“You don’t know that,” Horus says. “You weren’t there when either happened.”
