“Tawney, you can ask for anything.” I shook my head, wondering what she could want from me.
“Will you please tell me what this says?”
I blinked before my face contorted in confusion. “What?” I looked down and opened the journal. There wasn’t a word of English on the page, or any other language I knew of. Once again, this was the language I almost thought could be Latin. Oli’s dagger from Minerva, the doors to the Seers’ rooms, now Alless’s log. “You can’t read this?”
Tawney shook her head. “This is an ancient fae language. It hasn’t been spoken commonly since the time when ancient magic was still widely practiced.”
I looked at Kalian, but he shook his head. “I was never taught it. But someone must know.”
“Can’t you read it?” the Seer asked.
I frowned and looked down at the words. The letters were similar to English letters, the way Latin was, but there were just enough line variations that it was obviously a separate alphabet. Even if the letters were English, the words definitely were not. I squinted in thought at the text in Alless’s handwriting, remembering the dagger and when I’d seen the imprint on it for the first time. It reminded me of the night I met Daath and Syrion at the nightclub when the reaper had tried to kill me. Before he attacked, he chanted something in ancient Greek, a language I’d never spoken nor studied, but I could still decipher the dialect.
A sudden spark of familiarity began to light in my mind. The day I’d spoken to Alless, she told me I’d lived many lives as different people, different creatures, at different times. I hadn’t spent any time yet sifting through those memories, but a certain one slowly emerged in my mind. I remembered being a young girl, but not human, going over these characters with someone who looked like an adult but not old enough to be my mom. I remembered her being my big sister, helping teach me how to read these letters and speak the language.
I flipped back to inside the front cover of the old leather book, and the words before me quickly felt familiar, like hearing an old lullaby from childhood that I’d forgotten. The sounds, the meanings, and the words all flooded back into my mind in a wave of clarity and understanding.
“This is for Tawney,” I read the cover out loud. “I don’t know how long it will take to reach her. Keep it out of the archives and out of the library, only amongst Seers.”
Tawney’s hand flew up to cover her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes.
I flipped to a page near the middle of the journal that was blank, and I paused. It hit me how young Alless truly must have been when Minerva killed her. I turned back to the earlier pages until I found one she’d written on.
“… the Unseelie Queen will start sabotaging the balance with the help of agents in every realm until she can trap Death and Life and expand her power. It is for this reason the Universe has created the third and final member of the cycle, Spirit. Spirit, unlike Death and Life, will be mortal and will be reborn after every passing. Spirit will have the strength, the power, and the motivation to stop the Unseelie Queen and restore the balance to the realms. As Death has power over souls once they pass and Life has power over them before they are born, Spirit will rule over all who live, whether that be on Earth, in Gora, the realm of the ogres, or here in the realm of the fae. All living souls will be subject…”
I paused as I read. To hear Alless speak these things to me was overwhelming on its own and reading it was just as much to deal with. I looked up, and Tawney was crying, but there was a smile on her face. I glanced at my companions, and Kalian, Daath, and Syrion all stared at me in shock as I translated the text before their eyes.
“Myrcedes,” Kalian breathed softly. “How can you-”
“It was a past life,” Syrion blinked. “Wasn’t it?”
I smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Now I can prove that I’m telling the truth. Being able to read a dead language in here should help, right?”
“No one will doubt you,” Daath smiled, coming over to wrap his arms around me victoriously. After a moment, Tawney’s small, bright voice trembled through the air one more time.
“Can you tell me one final thing?”
“Of course,” I smiled, turning to her.
She looked around the hall and gestured to the doors, which had the old language burned into them along with the images. “What do these mean?”
I stepped closer to the door and leaned in. The image was of a man with wings sitting at a table with a single chair and a large stack of food in front of him. “The words describe the picture and the prophecy around it. This was a faerie who used to hoard wealth. He was rich but died lonely.”
I described the other stories on the walls. Tawney informed me that these were the first-ever prophecies recorded by Seers in the fae realm, so that must have been why they were on the doors in the Seer tower and why all the images had faeries, a species of fae that used to be more common. They weren’t extinct, but their traits were all so recessive that there weren’t many anymore.
“This is all quite riveting,” Daath cut in with a hint of sarcasm, though he became more genuine when I shot him a look, “but I believe we have a meeting to attend downstairs, Myrcedes.”
“Right,” I nodded. I’d
