Page 75 of Pandora's Heir
"Anyone else?" Kaelen asked mildly, though dragon fire still danced around his fingers, though his golden eyes burned with barely leashed violence.
The guards dropped their weapons with a clatter that echoed through the transformed space. Some fell to their knees immediately, recognizing the futility of resistance. Others fled, boots pounding against stone as they raced to spread word ofwhat they'd witnessed, to warn whoever would listen that the world had fundamentally changed.
But some, maybe a dozen, slowly and deliberately knelt. Not in fear or submission, but in something that looked almost like relief.
"The prophecy," one whispered, an older woman whose name I'd never learned but whose face I'd seen in the meditation chambers every dawn for years. "The Unbound Queen rises from the Keeper's fall."
"Stop." The word came out sharper than intended, edged with exhaustion and something that might have been fear. "I'm not a queen. I'm not your prophesied savior or chosen one or whatever else you want me to be."
"No," Master Theron said, and I spun to find him standing in the doorway with members of the Order of Truth. His weathered face split into a smile that transformed his entire countenance. "You're something far more important. You're proof that change is possible. That the patterns we've accepted for a thousand years can be broken."
Behind him, the villagers from Oakhaven pressed forward, their faces bright with a hope I didn't know how to fulfill. The pregnant woman who'd wanted to name her child after me stood at the front, tears streaming down her face as she beamed at me.
"The Citadel is in chaos," Master Theron continued, pulling a wrapped bundle from his robes. "Half the Keepers have barricaded themselves in the lower levels, refusing to accept what's happened. Others are fleeing to the villages, spreading word of the High Keeper's death and your transformation. The Order of Khaos..." He paused, uncertainty flickering across his features. "They've simply vanished. Their camps on the eastern slope are empty. It's as if your transformation of the Gate removed their very purpose for existing."
He held out the bundle, and even before he unwrapped it, I knew what it would be. The final pages of Pandora's journal, the ones even the Order of Truth hadn't known existed. The leather binding was almost black with age, the pages within so delicate they seemed ready to crumble at a touch.
Before I could read it, thunder rolled in the distance, even though the skies above were a beautiful blue. I knew in my bones that this wasn't the thunder of an approaching storm. It was something else, something that had been silent for so long we'd forgotten it could make sound at all.
Olympus was stirring.
