Mermaid Tear (The Fated #2)

07 | The Fall

Zuher's fall.

The words were a punch to the gut.

Zuher's fall.

In all her imagining of what might come after she arrived at the palace, Iliana hadn't once considered a route in which the emperor fell. There was a simple reason--if all the assassins and rebels of the continent couldn't end the madman's reign, what was someone like her supposed to do? Snark him to death?

Yet, here was a witch doctor telling her that something she did, or was going to do, would begin the end.

It was impossible.

And not only that, it also spelled her death. And war. Revolution.

An empire couldn't function with just one person, especially one rumored to be as mad and tyrannical as Zuher. There had to be councilmen, generals, spies, and an army of people willing to follow him. Afterall, while he held an endless amount of power in Reotak, he never left the country. Yet, he ruled half of the world.

The motivation of those who followed him was pretty easy to guess. Because of what she'd seen so far, Iliana was willing to bet a majority of them were demons--which mean they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain by leaving Zuher in power.

Someone like him didn't fall just because of death.

They lived on in their policies, in the world they created where nobility thrived, and the common folk begged for scraps. To truly eradicate them, one had to strangle their influence and set fire to the heart of their power. Simply killing a tyrant did nothing. Fear sparked in her stomach, even as she urged the panic squeezing her lungs to relax.

It was impossible. Aatami was probably as mad as the king himself. He was making up a groundless story without evidence. There was no way a common girl like her could--

Her eyes fell on the symbol of silence sketched in Aatami's journal. The symbol of how, for some reason or another, the gods had linked her fate to Lykos'. A likely Letian charm that some random witch in Chuteros had no reason to know.

'If sacrificing one person saves an empire, that life is worth it.' Lykos' voice in her thoughts weighted her stomach like iron. Gods, it felt like years since she'd heard him say those words. At the time, she'd been distracted by what it meant of their destination.

Not now.

"Calm down," she finally croaked, catching Aatami's attention. While she'd been silently melting down, the witch had begun a jittery trip around the room, snatching various objects and papers off their shelves with seemingly no rhyme nor reason. "You can't just--what exactly is going to happen? Where did you see these? Was it Koun?"

She pointed to the charms, and the witch stopped moving. She could almost see the gears churning in the erratic witch's head as they stared first at her, then at the notebook.

"No. I showed him. I showed him what I saw. Thirteen years ago. I saw it. The red strings tying the champions. Fate tangled into thorns. Pieces were missing, details hidden behind an amber string. But, what I saw, what I lived in my mind, and I shared."

Aatami suddenly crossed back to the table, flipping through the notebook until they found a place that satisfied them. A dead leaf laid stuffed between pages decorated with cramped, Reotakian scrawl.

"Dead lands sucked dry by overpopulation and Umae's scorn. Starved bodies tossed in mass graves as the world slowly rots. Centuries lived by only a handful. Then, nothing."

Ice crept into her veins, and Iliana could only stare. "I...don't get it. But, surely the gods would stop something like that."

And what did it have to do with her? Or Zuher being dethroned?