Timotheus blinked once and then sat down heavily on the pure white chair by his side. “I foresaw nothing like this.”
“It must be why I can be here. Right? I’m mortal, but the baby . . . my baby must be half-immortal.” She shook her head. “Which I don’t really understand, since Alexius became mortal when he exiled himself.”
“Exiles still have magic within them in your world, even though it begins to fade the moment they leave here. That, combined with your magic . . . it is possible. But I don’t understand why I didn’t see it before today.” His gaze snapped to hers as he scrambled to his feet. “I used my magic on you. I could have hurt you—hurt the child. Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?”
Lucia shook her head. “I’m fine, really.” She slid her hand over her flat belly. “It’s very early still. I’ve been sick several mornings, but that’s all.”
Timotheus gave the smallest of smiles. “You were right to come to me.”
Finally, she relaxed the last bit of tension she was holding in her muscles. “I’m glad you agree.”
His rare smile fell quickly away. “Kyan is not dead.”
She stared at him. “What?”
Timotheus held out his hand. A moment later, a flame sprang up on his palm. “Fire is eternal. It cannot live or die; it can only be contained. Kyan is fire magic. And if fire magic still exists, then so does he.”
Lucia pressed her hand against her open mouth, her just-calmed heart back to pounding once again. “What do we do? How do we stop him?”
“Contain, not stop. He must be imprisoned again.”
“How?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he turned and moved toward the large windows. Lucia quickly followed him.
Just then, a horrible thought occurred to her. “Kyan believed you’re the only one who can imprison him again. But you don’t know how, do you? Eva may have, but you don’t.”
She watched his shoulders grow tense beside her as he remained silent, keeping his gaze fixed on the Sanctuary beyond the city walls.
“All this time . . .” she murmured, trying to contain the shaking frustration growing within her at not having all the answers she needed readily available to her. “All this time, I thought your vague hints and enigmatic riddles were meant to annoy me, to toy with me while you waited for the exact right moment to strike. But now I see why you couldn’t tell me anything real. You really don’t have all the answers.”
“Far fewer than I’d like to have,” he gritted out.
“We’re in great trouble, aren’t we?”
He glanced at her next to him. “Yes, we are. Like you believed of me, I believed that you might be the one who knew how to stop this magic that threatens to destroy us all. That Eva’s vast knowledge had somehow made its way into your stubborn mortal mind.”
Timotheus had a great talent for making nearly everything he said sound like an insult. Lucia chose to ignore this one. “It didn’t. At least, not yet.”
He nodded. “I know your ring is powerful. Eva used it when dealing with the Kindred, and she was never corrupted by them.”
“Corrupted . . . like Cleiona and Valoria. I have my own vision and I saw it—I think I saw what happened. They touched the orbs and . . . the magic”—she shook her head, trying to understand—“it . . .”
“Possessed them,” Timotheus finished for her, nodding. “Changed them, and cast them away from our world forevermore. After the great battle a thousand years ago, the Kindred were lost between worlds. And lost they remained all these centuries—until you entered the time line. Melenia too was corrupted, but in a different way. For all her claims of power and intelligence, when she touched the amber orb, the being who now calls himself Kyan was able to communicate with her. He manipulated her into doing his bidding.”
She could barely believe his words, but after getting to know the fire god, they made a sickening kind of sense. “She claimed she loved him, that she’d waited for him for all these centuries. But when they were reunited, he cast her away like she was nothing to him.”
“I’m not at all surprised. Fire can’t love; it can only consume.” He considered her for a silent moment. “Because of your ring, Kyan will be in a weakened state. You must find his amber orb before he regains his strength.”
“I never saw the orb in the first place.”
“Still, I would guess he would keep something so important like that with him. That orb is one of his few weaknesses, and to allow it into anyone else’s hands would be to open the opportunity for imprisonment. Therefore, you must find it. The first place to search would be the site of your battle.”
She nodded stiffly. “Are you certain about all this?”
“There are no certainties in situations like this, I’m afraid,” he admitted.
“So I’m learning. Especially about Melenia.” She refused to feel any sympathy for the heartbroken immortal, but she now understood her on a deeper level. She hadn’t become a goddess like Cleiona and Valoria. Her corruption had resulted in an addiction to Kyan, making her into a tool for him to use and manipulate and, when he no longer needed her, to cast away like rubbish.
Alexius hadn’t cast Lucia away, but she knew very well what it felt like to be used and manipulated.
“Melenia was smart and resourceful before her corruption, long before she turned against Eva,” Timotheus said. “She was one of the few left who knew the secret I must keep about this world. The secret that keeps me trapped here.”