Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,181

that my beloved daughter was a concubine in the harem of a warmonger who tore half a world apart.

She didn’t disguise the desolation this caused her, and Akiva felt himself to be the root of it, as though time worked backward, and he had caused his mother to make the choice that would create him.

—I also know that this could not have befallen her… against her will. She was Stelian, and mine. She was strong. And so she must have chosen this.

The memories were as seamless as though they were Akiva’s own. Running beneath the surface of Nightingale’s words: a pure distillation of the woman who had been Festival, beautiful and troubled. Troubled? By a dowser’s sense for the veins of fate, and a compulsion to follow them, even into the dark.

—And so. And so she must have had a reason.

From Nightingale’s mind to Akiva’s passed the understanding that for many Stelians, fate was as real as love or fear—a dimension of their life with weight enough to shape it. It was called ananke, this sensitivity to the pull of destiny. If your ananke was strong, well then, you could follow or resist, but with resistance came an oppressive sense of wrongness that would haunt your every choice.

—And the reason must be you.

The memories evanesced, leaving a void, and Akiva bereft in it.

You, you, echoing in the emptiness, and finding other words there, waiting. “My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.” But before he could begin to process this, a new sending bloomed in the space where Festival had been. It was very different: cold, and remote, and immense.

—The Continuum that is the great All is bound and bounded by energies. We call them veils. They have other names, many, but this is the simplest. They are beyond our compass. They are the first and nest of all things, and this we know: The veils hold the worlds intact, and they hold them distinct. Touching, but separate, as the worlds are meant to be. When you pass through a portal, you’re transgressing a cut in a veil.

Veils, the Continuum, the great All. These were not terms that Akiva had heard, but he was gifted an idea of them, and there was reverence in it bordering on worship. It wasn’t a picture or a memory, because that was impossible. No one can have seen the Continuum. It was everything. The sum of the worlds.

Until now, Akiva had known of two: Eretz and Earth. In Nightingale’s sending, he understood… many.

It was dizzying. What he glimpsed in the idea of the Continuum was enough to make him want to fall to his knees. He beheld space, all around him and peeling open. And open, and open, no end to its opening, no limit to its dimensions. Like a god rearing its thousand-thousand heads, one after another after another after another, opening its thousand-thousand mouths to loose a tremendous, world-echoing roar—

—We draw energy from the veils to make magic. They are the source. Of everything. It is no simple matter. Power can’t just be taken. There is a price, a trade of energies. This is the tithe.

“The pain tithe,” Akiva said. He spoke it, not knowing how to communicate in kind, and saw Scarab’s brows knit, while Nightingale’s, which had been knit, fell smooth. She regarded him curiously, and her reply imparted gentle pity.

—Pain is one way. The easiest and crudest. The pain tithe is… using a plow to pluck a flower. Is it all you know?

He nodded. It was unnerving, this speaking without speaking.

“Not all,” objected Scarab, aloud. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”

The way she looked at him, the blame. Akiva began to understand. “Sirithar,” he said, hoarse.

Scarab’s look sharpened. “So you do know.”

“I know nothing.” He said it bitterly, feeling it more keenly than he ever had before.

Sensing his distress, Nightingale came forward. She didn’t reach for him but he felt, as he had once before, a cool touch at his brow, and knew it had been she who had prevented him from drawing power in the battle of the Adelphas, and who had, so briefly, soothed him after. In the next instant, he knew something else, and it staggered him: The enigma of the victory in the Adelphas. It had been them, of course.

These five angels had somehow turned the tide against four thousand Dominion. Many times over the past years, Akiva had tried to imagine the magic of his kin, but he had never guessed at such