Her bleeding eyes didn’t always work as they should.
“Speak,” she said, and the word came out through a ravaged throat, the sound a harsh whisper that nonetheless howled with screams.
Raising his head from the floor, the man . . . ah, it was the Scribe. Yes, she recognized that yellow hair down to the shoulders. The Scribe placed his hands on his thighs and kept his head respectfully bowed as he began to speak.
“I have finished my work on the prophecy, sire.”
Her blood pulsed, her senses sharpening. She remembered assigning him this task in the months before the battle with Raphael, even remembered reading the prophecy in an old scroll when she’d been a mere angel. At the time, it had meant nothing and she’d forgotten it for an eon. Then had come her growing power, and with it, a faint whisper of memory that told her the scroll was important.
It had taken her scholars and trackers almost a year to rediscover the ancient text, and since the moment of rediscovery, the words had become an echo at the back of her head, a drumbeat she couldn’t unhear.
Archangel of Death. Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow.
Rise, rise, rise into your Reign of Death.
For your end will come.
Your end will come.
At the hands of the new and of the old.
An Archangel kissed by mortality.
A silver-winged Sleeper who wakes before his Sleep is done.
The broken dream with eyes of fire.
Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.
“Tell me,” she ordered the Scribe.
The Scribe’s voice was crystalline as he said, “I have traced the origins of the prophecy to the Archangel Cassandra.”
Lijuan’s hand curled over the armrest of the jade throne, the carvings cutting into her flesh as the tiny hairs on her nape rose in a primeval response. “You are certain?” Cassandra had gone to Sleep so long ago that she was more myth than memory, an Ancient among Ancients. But one thing about her legend had never changed: that on her ascension, she had gained the great and terrible gift of seeing the future.
Legend stated that she’d chosen to Sleep soon after she clawed out her own eyes in a vain effort to stop the visions. Her eyes had grown back within the day, and in the hour afterward, her dress still bloody, she’d disappeared. Most of her prophecies had been lost in time and the ones that remained were often disregarded as the scribblings of some unknown fantasist.
“Raphael is the one kissed by mortality.” Lijuan didn’t understand how such a weakened archangel had almost been able to bring her down, but she would not make the mistake of underestimating him again.
“I have no answers for the last-mentioned, for the broken dreams with eyes of fire,” the Scribe responded. “But the silver-winged Sleeper can be only one.”
Lijuan’s grip on the armrest grew vicious as her back spasmed. Her wings had grown back after her brain and spinal column, as per the angelic hierarchy of what was important, but they were weak and prone to causing her torso to spasm, further exacerbating her remaining injuries.
Breathing through the vicious sensations, she stared into the metal disk that acted as her mirror, and spoke the name of the Sleeper who needed to die. “Alexander.”
1
Seven months Naasir had been hunting. Seven months since he’d told Ashwini he was ready to find a mate. Seven months and still his mate hadn’t made herself known to him. Didn’t she know he was looking for her?
Crouched on the railing-less edge of a high Tower balcony, he growled.