Touch of Sibyl

Chapter Twenty.five

As soon as my fingers brushed the hilt, the eye snapped open and regarded me with its gray-purple gaze once more.

"Sibyl," an old, crusty voice seemed to murmur in my head. "At last. "

Okay, so apparently it talked, too. Supercreepy, but I was too far gone now to care. My fingers closed all the way around the hilt, and I yanked the sword out of The Case. The way the hilt was designed, my hand covered the lower half of the man's face-from the mouth down. His nose hooked over my hand, a wrist guard, I think it was called, with the open eye clearly visible above that-the eye that was still staring at me. For a moment, nothing happened.

And then, the emotions hit me.

The sword was old-ancient even-in the way the Bowl of Death was. So many things flashed through my mind. So many images. Battles, mostly. Hundreds, thousands of them, all happening in a single second. Big, small, quiet, loud. I smelled smoke and blood. Heard screams of rage and pain. Felt other swords, other blades, slicing into my own skin in a way that made me cry out in pain and completely furious at the same time.

I couldn't do anything but stand there and see the images and ride the waves of emotions pouring through me. I couldn't have let go of the sword even if I'd wanted to. After a second, the images slowed down enough for me to make some sense of them. I realized that I was watching battles from throughout history. Different times, different places, different enemies. Clothes, weapons, armor, people. They all changed, becoming more and more modern with every passing fight.

But one thing was the same in every image-in every battle, a woman wielded the sword. One after another, their faces flashed through my mind, almost too fast for me to follow. But I felt them, felt their emotions, felt all the things they had felt when they'd been wielding the sword. Pride. Power. Fear. Anger. And most of all, a sense of duty and honor.

There were gaps, too, times when the sword wasn't in the images, when it was just the women, one after another, being born, growing up, having daughters of their own, growing old, and finally dying. The images skipped on from one to the next, and I got the sense that this was a long, unbroken chain of women stretching back to the time when the gods themselves walked the earth.

Among the images, I saw a familiar face-Grandma. Her features flickered before me for an instant, before they were replaced by another face-my mom's face.

"Mom?" I whispered.

Mom smiled at me, and her mouth opened, almost as if she was trying to say something to me.

"Mom!" I stretched out my hand to her, as if I could somehow reach into the vision and touch her.

And I felt myself falling, falling, falling....

With a gasp, my eyes snapped open, and I found myself standing in the middle of the Library of Antiquities, in the spot where the glass case that had once held the Bowl of Death had been. I still had the sword in my hand, and I whirled around, looking for the others.

They weren't here.

There was no Jessy coming to kill me. No Morgan lying on the table looking at nothing. No Zac fighting off a Nemean panther. It was just me in the library-alone.

"Hello?" I called out. "Is-is anyone here?"

My voice echoed through the library, a frightened lonely little sound that seemed to stretch on forever-

"Hello, Aviana," a soft voice murmured.

I bit back a scream and turned around. A woman stood behind me, right in front of the closed double doors. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about her. Average height, slender, but with some muscle on her. Her hair fell to her shoulders in soft brown ringlets that seemed to shimmer with a metallic bronze sheen. She wore a gown that reminded me of a toga-long flowing fabric in a sweet lilac color. A silver belt looped around her waist, and some kind of silver flowers ringed her head like a crown. Laurels, I thought, wondering how I even knew that to start with.