Chapter 11: The Altered Prophecy
It was the dust that told her something was wrong.
She'd been granted access to the sacred archive as part of her Moonheart education—rows of scrolls and texts going back centuries, a room that smelled of old certainty. She was looking for the original Moonheart prophecy, which Caelan had summarized from memory without ever producing the source text.
She found, after three weeks, that the source text did not exist in the archive.
What she found instead, tucked inside the binding of a much older text on lunar rites—hidden with the bored competence of someone who'd assumed no one would ever look closely enough—were six paragraphs on yellow, fragile paper that stopped mid-sentence.
The fragment she could read contradicted two of the three laws Caelan had cited.
She brought it to Lex at midnight.
She watched his face change as he read it. The careful blankness he wore in public cracked open in layers—surprise, then understanding, then something cold and furious that settled in his eyes and didn't leave.
"They altered it," he said.
"Part of it. I don't know how much. I need the original."
"The original is in the Elder Council's private vault." He set the fragment down carefully, like it was fragile. "Ava, if they find out you have this—"
"I know."
"I need to get you somewhere safe before this surfaces. There's a holding at the mountain border, I can arrange—"
"No." The word came out with a clarity that surprised her. She set her hands flat on the table, feeling the shape of her own decision. "No. You don't get to make me disappear for my own good, Lex. I'm not a problem you solve by hiding."
He looked at her. Something shifted in his expression—the same thing she'd felt in him the first time, that grief-loneliness—but differently now. With something that looked almost like respect.
"I'm not hiding you," he said carefully. "I'm protecting you."
"I know. I know that's what you're trying to do, and I know why." She held his gaze. "But I need you to hear me when I tell you that I can decide what I'm willing to risk. That's mine. You don't get to take it from me, even with good intentions."
The silence stretched long between them.
"All right," he said quietly.
"All right?"
"We do it together. Or not at all." He picked up the fragment again, reading it once more with the focused attention he turned on things that mattered. "If this is what I think it is, it changes everything."
"I know."
"It might still get us killed."
"I know that too."
He looked up from the text. The gold in his eyes—always present in quiet moments, a warmth she'd grown so familiar with she no longer startled at it—caught the candlelight.
"Then let's not waste time," he said.
