To overthrow the cruel King who brutally slaughtered her foremothers, the last surviving water witch Elara Consuli must team up with novice warrior Juda Vikaris from the Serpent Order and realise an ancient prophecy, before the blood-thirsty ruler d...
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Elara crouched low by the pool side, touching her hand to the surface of the water. It rippled under her fingertips, circles spreading out, a perfect motion.
"Do you know that there are some waters that are even deadly to the Naiad?" she said, her voice low.
She'd expected to be scared then, a bone-juddering trepidation of what was to come, but Elara found that a strange sense of calm had overtaken her. A resignation, maybe. What else did she have to lose? Everything she had ever cared about was obsolete now.
"Elara, what did you mean?" Juda said, kneeling by her side. "You cannot tell me you believe in the madness of prophecy? That's just fodder for the devout and the foolish, for those who wish to fashion a world around a fucking fantasy and nothing more."
"Fantasy?" Elara glanced back at the cavern walls. "What is written there is no fantasy, Juda. Everything on that wall has come to pass, do you understand? Stories, prophecies, call them what you wish, but it is not something to be dismissed as fodder for the foolish."
Juda frowned and she found that she liked that, the deep valley that beset the skin between his dark brows. The urge to smooth it out with the pad of her thumb was strong, but she could see the way in which he wrestled with her words behind his eyes.
"What I understand is that my entire life has been bent around cold, harsh realities," he said, his hand skimming over the black rock. "There are things you cannot prevent, and things you can. We are all moulded by the decisions we make for ourselves, and by the decisions others make that either drift on the current or that raise the waves so high that it changes the shape of everything we have come to know. But what I refuse to believe, is that our fate is determined by a madman prophet who sat down one tide, dreamt up all this crazy shit in his head and scrawled it onto parchment that is only fit to gather dust on a library shelf."
She understood his words and ached for him a little, because she could see his bedchamber then—that stark space where his anger and his trauma filled every corner and pushed at the walls until the cracks threatened to widen and split apart. There had been nothing but reality there. A dark, all-consuming reality that had shaped the boy he'd been into the man by her side now.
"People are unpredictable creatures, that is true, and we cannot determine how the actions and decisions of others can ripple through reality, but I do believe in these stories. The Fall of the Naiad was foretold by my own mother, as was the story of the last of our kind. Those stories have shaped my entire life, Juda, just as your reality has shaped yours. It doesn't make them any less true."
She smiled as she stared into the water's depths.
"I didn't want to believe the stories written here. By my foremothers, Juda, there were times I wanted to scream into the blessed black of moontide until my throat was raw at the fucking unfairness of it all. Because while it's true what we do and what decisions we make can truly shape reality, a prophecy will just twist itself around all of that, alter its trajectory until it finds its path again. And trust me, it always finds its path. I would have ended up here anyway, in this chamber, sitting by this pool."
