“I am an Oracle,” the woman replied. “I see the past, the future and the present.”
“Oh, I thought you were blind,” Yelena burst out before she could stop herself. She covered her mouth in horror before continuing, “I’m so sorry—it’s just there was a girl at my school—and she had eyes like you, and she was blind—and I thought that…”
“I am blind,” the woman interrupted her gently, “but it doesn’t mean that I can’t see.”
Yelena nodded her head slowly, still very confused.
“So, if you’re an Oracle and part Ancient and Jinni, what are you doing in Nevertide? How did you even get here?” Aisha demanded.
“This is my home,” she replied softly. “I have lived nowhere else. I watch the worlds from my mountain—it’s peaceful here.”
I was starting to get a bit angry…or, actually, furious. If she had been here all this time—watching everything like she claimed—why hadn’t she done anything?
“You haven’t helped!” I burst out. “Nevertide’s been falling to pieces, and you haven’t done a thing. Why not? If you locked the entity and its army in the stones in the first place, why didn’t you just do it again? Loads of people have died! I got possessed—and it was really crap!”
The Oracle looked at me, her expression sad, like a wounded animal.
“I’m so sorry, but things must be this way. It is not true that I have not helped—I have intervened to the extent I could. I have maintained the dome that surrounds this land to keep Nevertide cut off from the rest of the supernatural world, I sent the warning signs as I promised I would, and I gave Tejus of Hellswan the opportunity to rise to power by building the labyrinth of the dead emperor, so that Tejus’s mettle might be tested against his brothers’. Had I not offered my services to the Emperor when I saw that Jenus would have automatically been his father’s choice, and offered to help him put his sons to the test instead – Nevertide would have been destroyed. If you could but see the events that have not unfolded, you would be thanking me—not treating me like a monster.”
I was starting to feel a little bad, but there were still so many things that I didn’t understand. The Oracle looked like she was about to start crying, and I nudged Yelena—say something!
Yelena shook her head in panic, looking devastated that we’d managed to get off to such a bad start.
“Tell us about the dome,” Horatio prompted, his voice a fraction more gentle than Aisha’s. “You said you maintained it—who created it in the first place?”
“My parents did. They found this land for me a long, long time ago. It was empty—there were a few ghouls here, and some other creatures like goblins and nymphs, but they never bothered me. I liked the nymphs…” She sighed sadly. “But then more ghouls came, and then the humans—and I decided to intervene after the first war. That’s when I locked the entity away.”
“But what is the entity?” I asked, confused that she was only referring to ghouls.
“I suppose you could call him the original ghoul,” she murmured. “The first—along with his army. They are a very different breed than the others, far more powerful, with several differing traits, and they have been around since the dawn of time… the darkness to any light.”
We were all silent. I couldn’t believe that the ghouls I’d seen were the same as the shadow and the entity—or, at the least, the same species. Ghouls were gross and horrible, but they didn’t terrify me as much as the shadow, or seem to have the same amount of power.
“We need to take you to GASP,” I replied hoarsely.
“Wait,” Aisha snapped. “I want to know why your parents trapped you here. Did they think you were a danger? Was it a punishment?”
Now the Oracle looked mortally offended. For the first time since we’d interrogated her, she looked angry. She fixed her unseeing white eyes on Aisha.
“You can be cold and unfeeling, Aisha of the Nasiri Jinn. You are lucky to have Horatio Drizan to rub away some of your sharper edges. My parents put me here to protect me. As you rightly said, the Ancients and the jinn would not have looked gladly on my parents’ union . They loved me, and my being here is an act of love.”
Aisha looked a little shamefaced, and shut up, but still eyed her speculatively. I didn’t think Aisha trusted the Oracle one bit…and to be honest, I didn’t blame her. From what I knew of the Oracle twins, the Ancients and even most of the jinn, her heritage wasn’t exactly the most comforting mix. Even so, we needed to get her back to GASP and the sentries.