Elam let the Ovulum rock back and forth in his palm. “I believe Sapphira gave you to me for a reason, and I guess I’ll figure it all out as I go, but maybe it would help if I knew how long I’m supposed to keep track of Thigocia.” He drew the Ovulum closer to his face. “Will you tell me when the slayers die?”
The eye slowly congealed inside the glass. Its crimson-coated image pulsed in time with the orb’s glow. “For the sake of your curious mind, Elam, son of Shem, I will reveal what I know.” The eye seemed to retreat, and the entire face of an elderly man appeared. “I am Enoch, the first oracle. When God took me up from the earth, he gave me the task of overseeing a certain portion of his redemption plan. I reside in a spiritual realm, and my window to your world is the humble egg you hold in your hands, a dimensional viewer that is passed from oracle to oracle. Methuselah inherited the oracle title from me, but the flood created the need to pass the Ovulum to Sapphira Adi, a special kind of oracle whose true mission has not yet begun. Now that she has been set on her path, the Ovulum is yours, and as my descendant, you are the rightful heir.”
Elam pointed at himself. “So am I an oracle?”
“That mantle is yours to be grasped, but time will tell if you are able to wear it with authority.” Enoch’s face seemed to back away even farther. Robed in scarlet, he sat on a stool next to a table. “For now, I will address your immediate question, but there is no simple answer. Morgan’s arts could keep the slayers alive for many years, so the time of fulfillment of your task is uncertain. Just stay close to Thigocia and stay hidden.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard. I don’t eat, and I don’t get older. All I need is some sleep now and then.”
“It may be harder than you realize. The mother dragon is stalked by a monster who will stop at nothing to murder her. Guard her well.”
Elam nodded. “I will. You can count on that.” He breathed a sigh. “Good night, Enoch.” After pulling the knapsack under his head, he held the Ovulum close to his chest and drifted off to sleep.
Sapphira stepped back from the rectangular screen of light and waved her hand across it, dimming it to a soft glow. “That’s enough for a while. Elam’s just going to sleep.” The screen shrank from a dragon-sized aura back to a spinning orange column, the portal to the snake-infested swamp up above.
Paili bounced on her seat in the center of a pile of straw. “More!” she chirped.
Yara, sitting next to her, wrapped her arms around Paili’s neck and pulled her into a strong hug. “You need to sleep, too.”
Sapphira sighed. “We all do. Elam’s so busy, just watching him makes me tired.”
“It was so strange,” Yara said. “He looked right at us when he said good night to Enoch.”
“I saw that. It’s almost like we’ve been looking through Enoch’s eyes ever since Elam left.”
Paili rubbed her stomach. “Can we eat before bed? I’m hungry.”
Sapphira laid her hand over her own stomach. “Did Acacia bring more food?”
“A couple of hours ago,” Acacia called, waving from the museum.
Sapphira walked toward her sister and peered through the doorway. “Looking for something new to read?”
Acacia held open a scroll. “I’m studying the map again. When I was sneaking back with the food, I overheard Mardon talking about the digging project.”
“Any idea if the giants are getting close to the surface?”
“That’s why I’m checking the map.” She pointed at a drawing of the uppermost floor. “I think they started here, and the legend says that point is about two thousand feet below the surface.” She rolled up the map. “But I have no idea how long it will take. If they hit bedrock between here and there, it could take a thousand years.”
Awven brought each of the twins a jar. Acacia opened hers, dipped her fingers in, and pulled out a gob of black gunk. “But as long as the worm farms hold out, we’ll have their yummy guts to eat for years to come.” She pushed the gob into her mouth, then grimaced as she swallowed. “Not a good batch. Must have had a grub worm in the mix.”
As the two girls walked back toward the portal, Sapphira opened her own jar. “Everything’s going to change when they finally break through,” she said, “but if they don’t do it pretty soon, and if we don’t figure out how to open a portal” she pinched a clump of worm guts and winced at it “I might just choose to starve.”
“Elam never eats,” Paili said, wormy gunk spilling down her chin.
Sapphira stared at her. “What did you say?”
“Elam never eats,” Paili repeated. “Haven’t you noticed?”
Sapphira set her jar down, not bothering to recap it. “I already knew. He ate the fruit from the other tree.” She ran back to the museum, rushed past the statues, and knelt where Morgan’s tree once grew. It had taken days to uproot the awful thing and burn it, and the smoke had filled their chamber with a putrid odor for weeks, but it was worth it. As soon as Paili stopped handling the fruit, her speech improved dramatically.
“Paili,” she shouted. “Do you know where I keep my blossom?”
Paili appeared at the museum’s doorway. “Under my old bed?”
“No.” Sapphira pointed at a bookshelf near the door. “I moved it to that shelf I cleared out. Please bring it to me.”
Finding the blossom, Paili cradled it in her palms, and carried it to the bed of soil.
Sapphira wrapped her hands around the petals and folded them up into a ball. She gouged the soil with her fist and laid the blossom in the hole. “We’ll make a growth chamber right here. There ought to be enough magnetite bricks lying around.” Scooping dirt from around the blossom, she covered it up under a mound.
Acacia strolled into the museum, her arms crossed over her chest. “How do you know it will germinate? It can’t have seeds yet, can it?”
Sapphira looked up at her. “Do you remember hearing Merlin’s prophecy when the dragons transformed?”
“Remember!?” Acacia laughed. “You woke me up, screaming, ‘Look at the portal! Look at the portal!’ I was kind of groggy, but I remember watching.”
Sapphira got up and grabbed a scrap of parchment from a nearby shelf. “I wrote down the prophecy.” Pressing her finger on the parchment, she read the poem.
When hybrid meets the fallen seed
The virgin seedling flies;
An orphaned waif shall call to me
When blossom meets the skies.
Sapphira raised her eyebrows expectantly.
“Well,” Acacia said, “we’re all hybrids, virgins, and orphaned waifs.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s worth a try. Maybe that blossom will somehow sprout and touch the sky.”
Sapphira smiled. “Good rhyme, Acacia.”
Acacia smiled back at her and slid a scroll from one of the lower shelves. “Speaking of poetry,” she said, her mouth stretching into a yawn. “I think I’ll read some. It’s time for us all to get to bed.”
“Great,” Sapphira said. “I could use a good bedtime story.”
“Then you’ll join us?” Acacia asked.
Sapphira nodded. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Acacia gave her a worried-mother look. “You okay?” she asked.
Tightening her lips, Sapphira nodded again. She leaned against the museum doorway as her twin oracle walked back to the girls, who had gathered in a circle around a small pile of scrolls near the portal. Although the museum had once housed thousands of documents, the modest heap represented a precious share of their diminishing fuel supply.
Acacia pointed at the pile and ignited it, then jumped back in mock alarm. The other girls laughed, and as Acacia squeezed in between Paili and Awven, she glanced back at Sapphira, smiling in a sad sort of way before unwinding the scroll and settling down to read.
Sapphira strolled back to the planter and lowered herself to her knees in front of the mound she had piled over the blossom. She gazed up into the dark reaches of the cavernous library. The portal at the museum’s upper crossbeams no longer worked. The orange portal where the girls gathered probably still led to the nest of vipers in the swamp. The whirlpool portal at the bottom of the chasm was now unapproachable. The magma had become so hot, it scalded their faces even as they stood on the ledge, warning them that a plunge into its current now meant certain death. And the portal down in the mining trench where the abyss used to be had fizzled soon after it was created.