I stared at Darius for a long moment, unsure if I'd heard him correctly.
A prophecy? That was what had dragged an ancient creature across half the world? I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to ask him to start again, slower this time.
"What kind of prophecy?" I asked finally, voice softer than I intended.
My mind was already spinning ahead, rifling through everything I remembered from the dusty books I'd devoured back in the secret caves of the Queen— before everything changed.
The Ancients weren't supposed to exist anymore. The last records of them placed their kind far away, in the Xanthenk Mountains, buried within the icy ridges and mist-laden caverns of that region.
Back when the supernatural world was younger, they'd ruled entire empires built on magic that predated the witches. Then, they vanished. Gone before the world had learned how to name half of its monsters. Well, they had been attacked, annihilated.
