When I’d turned ten, recalling was no longer sufficient for my tutors, and they’d demanded I start applying what I’d read to hypothetical situations.
There was a reason I could expertly give a detailed examination of the elements of a problem.
It wasn’t nature.
It was nurture.
Brutal. Fucking. Nurture.
With me being tortured at night by cold flames, pushed to mental limits during the day by emotionless tutors, my childhood had been horrific.
But the lessons were effective.
Now, as an adult, inch by painstaking inch, I meditated and rebuilt my old memory palace under the spray of a cramped shower.
Time warped.
I blinked back into the present.
Luka cut up fruit and gave it to his twin as the kings glared at me in the dining hall. We were having another meal.
John hand-fed me fruit.
I tried to smile at him in thanks, but I was too deep in my mental library.
For some reason, the section I’d read at fourteen years old was blurry, the spines and words much fuzzier than the rest of the mind palace.
“Something is wrong with her,” Malum snarled. “We need to bring her to the medical room.”
Luka shifted in front of me protectively but didn’t respond.
John said, “She said she’s fine and that she just needs to think. Just let her do what she needs to do.”
“She’s not fine, she’s fucking catatonic,” Scorpius exploded. “She’s barely breathing.”
“Leave her alone,” John said harshly and shielded me with his body.
I blinked.
Time warped yet again.
I was lying on top of the covers in a narrow bunk bed that was cramped to discourage fraternization between soldiers. A distant part of me recognized that I was back in our new room, and it was night.
Mentally, I grabbed books off shelves and opened to their cover pages. I’d gone through thousands of books.
I opened The History of Rare Fae Beasts.
I closed it.
I opened How to Cultivate Plants.
I closed it.
I opened The Enactment of the Official Peace Accords.
I close—
Finally, I found what I’d been looking for. I flung open the book and devoured its contents. It read,
Thousands of years ago, an endless army of human soldiers set out to conquer the realms. In response to the invasion, the High Court mandated all able-bodied men and women eighteen years and older fight and defend their respective realms.
Millions were conscripted and fought in battles that spread across the realms.
The human soldiers had the strategic advantage.
Towering catapults flung flaming boulders across the horizon, and long pointed poles and swords skewered, as the armor-clad humans shot flaming arrows off the backs of powerful horses.
In contrast, the realms of the High Court had never developed weapons, because individual powers had always been sufficient in eliminating invaders.
It was a grave miscalculation.
The armies of the High Court were slaughtered.
When it seemed like complete annihilation was inevitable, the sun god took matters into his own hands.
Midbattle all the realms’ suns unexpectedly burned fifty degrees hotter.
The god of light boiled the lands.
All the people, plants, and animals were decimated, and anything that didn’t have a natural resistance to high temperatures died within a few hours of intense heat exposure.
The humans tried to flee back to their realm, but most dropped dead from dehydration as they ran for safety.
The sun god followed a few humans back to earth in order to identify the location of portals. Guards were subsequently stationed, and by all accounts, the human species have never tried to set foot in another realm since the war.
Smugglers who have illegally traveled through these portals tell tales of the sun god punishing the earth realm with extreme heat. They claim humans live in perpetual fear of annihilation. None of these reports have been substantiated.
After the High Court won the war against the humans, there was a consensus in the realms that the price of victory was too high.
Populations were decimated, and even after the sun god returned the realms’ temperatures to normal, devastating climate effects persisted.
The shifter realm plunged into a never-ending ice age as hundreds of glaciers melted and poured cold water into the warm ocean currents. In ten days, the planet froze over.
The sun god made a public apology to the realm and offered to increase the temperature, but students from the historic University of Enchantments calculated the planet would become uninhabitable if there was another warming.
The High Court declined to comment.
The shifter realm has not since recovered.
In the fae realm, seasons disappeared and were replaced with an endless summer. The monarchy became isolationists and banned advanced weapons development.
The moderate climate of the beast realm also disappeared, and the land has since been plagued with perpetual rain. Unlike the fae, the leaders invested heavily in the production of expensive weapons, and a few centuries later, they created the first enchanted guns.
A powerful realm was also divided into two; one side of the planet iced over like the shifter realm, while the other burned with perpetual fire.
For unknown reasons, the humans never invaded, and the Olympus realm was left unscathed. The few humans who survived the warming, but did not make it back to the human realm, were taken as prisoners of war to the underworld, Olympus’s maximum-security prison.
Planetary climate effects aside, at the end of the war, there were no armies to congratulate, because only a hundred of the strongest soldiers from all the realms survived the battlefield. Soldiers were either slaughtered by human weapons or succumbed to severe temperatures.
The Official Peace Accords, the OPA, were passed unanimously by all realms and executed with enchanted bindings. The peace accords were signed by the High Court and the sun god, and the mostly uninvolved moon goddess, in order to prevent future atrocities.
Narrow understanding expanded into a wide frame as context colored everything in shades of black and gray. The lack of human presence in the realms wasn’t because they were primitive and weak like everyone was taught.
A sinister false remembrance.
I stopped clinging to the spatial illusion, and books tumbled off shelves. Hundreds of stacks fell over as my mind palace crumbled into nothingness.
SNAP.
Consciousness returned.
Pain stabbed across my skull like a hot poker, and I sat up and heaved.
Luka’s arm was hanging over the side of his bunk, and I was gripping his hand.
My head throbbed.
My gasps were loud in the quiet room as the rest of the legion slept in their bunks.
I started to shake.
How had I forgotten such terrifying information about the sun god? It hadn’t been Jinx, because she’d said the memories she’d taken were unrecoverable.
Why were my memories from fourteen so shrouded in fog?