Heirs of the Gods

Ch 38: A preposterous amount of coincidences

Staring at the shattered mess of pages on the floor, there weren't many kind, graceful words in Ella's panicked mind.

As she dropped to her knees, the shrill voice in her head was a constant barrage of shit, shit, shit, and other such uncouth terms. There was little room for manners as she assessed the damage on the ancient book.

With surgical precision, Ella held her breath and lifted the book, only for her heart to pop out of her chest and take a free dive out the window as several pages jumbled out, sprawling on the thick carpet.

Ella near emptied her stomach as she lifted the pages, attempting to avoid messing their order. While she tried to put them into a semblance of a pile, she was already thinking about packing a rucksack and fleeing the continent. Surely, if she left within an hour, she could be at the border by dawn and thus avoid whatever capital punishment destruction of ancient faerie property warranted. Probably being jabbed by a hot iron poker and forced to dance to death. Truly, this was by no means a melodramatic reaction, thank you very much. Escaping the law was a perfectly reasonable choice.

But yet, even in her—melodramatic—panicked state, her eyes still caught on the state of the pages she was holding.

With a crease in her brows, she shifted so firelight would further illuminate the parchments. Even in the dim brightness, it was obvious to the naked eye that the pages were different. Thin as crepe and darker in colour, a deeper yellow, almost tan. She squinted and noted that although the handwriting was the same, the writing wasn't translated at all. It was in Eltausian.

She picked up the book to verify this fact, only to find that the thick, leathery cover had cracked open. Well, not cracked open. The book itself was fine. No other pages had fallen other than the ones stacked in her hand. These hadn't fallen from the book, they'd fallen out of a compartment.

Right there, on the back of the book cover, the leather had peeled back to reveal a slot. A slot that had clearly never been there, mind. It was a shallow little indent, just deep enough for a couple of pages, much like a built-in pocket. Neat and precise, as if the leather had always looked that way.

More confused than ever, Ella took the pages in a feeble grip and began going over them painstakingly. Sure enough, they were in eltausian. The same neat, handwritten scrawl the original pages had. She couldn't understand a word of the first five pages, but the following two had hand-drawn illustrations in the same style the rest of the book did.

They were dark, ink made drawings. Deeply shaded and almost anatomical. Images that made Ella's breath catch in her throat and cold creep up her spine.

She turned to the seventh page in the stack. Another drawing etched in the same sleek quill strokes. Bold and unmistakable, it was a chilling sight to see. It took a moment for her mind to process what she was looking at, despite the plain nature of the depiction. Ella blinked at it, her head going fuzzy for a moment before it caught on to the fact that this was indeed what she thought it was.

The realization was much like a sucker punch in the dark.

Ella recoiled sharply, barely managing to avoid dropping the pages all over again. Hastily, she let them rest on the low table, wanting to distance herself from the images they bore.

She had enough of a mind to throw a protection charm over them before she stood on wobbly legs and bolted out of the room, as if they would indeed turn to life and chase after her.

Ella barrelled through the gloomy hallways, almost blankly. Her trembling legs led her straight down to Aedion's room. Her fist connected with the wood, pounding with the fervour of a tax collector coming to take his due.