Quill of Thieves

Chapter 49

Excerpt taken from Unmasking the Thief Volume 1: The Saviour's Prophecy
Penned by: N. B. Verilibros

The young girl who would grow to be the thief heard the Saviour's Prophecy from her mother's lips and stole them to be her truth.

While the Mother slumbers in winter's breath,
A thief will arise to conquer the rest.
Earth's kin and creations will be torn apart;
Deceit, greed, and death bred from a mortal heart.

Yet a redeemer is born from a motherless womb,
The quill reforged to rewrite the realm's tomb.
Saviour of mortals and creatures of seven,
Confronting the thief and lies that have leavened.

Redeemer and sinner can rise Earth or descend;
Though only one lives while the other must end.

After the words had been spoken, the little thief's father cried out in alarm as the birther of the prophecy collapsed to the polished, marble floors. "Corelei!"

The little thief could only stare at her shattered mother. The voice had not been her mother's, but it had fallen from Corelei's tongue regardless. It clanged through the thief's young ears for years to come. The steady cadence of it. The weight of it. For her mother's typically wispy tone had sounded suddenly firm; her chaotic, nonsensical thoughts formed into such stable words that the little thief knew instantly they would be important and must be remembered.

She repeated them to herself over and over again as her father lifted Corelei's unconscious body from the floor of their home, cradling his beautiful but broken wife to his heaving chest.

Years ago, when the little thief had been nothing more than a growing seed in her mother's womb, Corelei had journeyed to the Eyelesene Glaciers to seek the Spirits for guidance. It had long been believed the souls of lost loved ones would reawaken in the glaciers of the Spirit Realm. Only manifesting into corporeal form when the living called to them in certain times of duress. And Corelei, who clutched her swollen belly wrapped in furs to keep out the chill, was certainly in distress. For her baby had moved for the first time and had kicked Corelei's connection to the elemental threads right out of her mother with its tiny foot.

"Grandfather!" Corelei shouted into the cold, dark sky. "Enzo Beulgravia!"

Beautifully vibrant lights of greens, blues, and purples danced above her head in the deepening obsidian of the skies; Luminae Luerhn, the lights were named. Spirits' Glow.

An iced bout of turquoise flashed overhead, atop a rounded peak of the nearest glacier, and Corelei's frost-bitten feet stumbled after it.

It had been the exact shade of blue as her deceased grandfather's eyes. Enzo Beulgravia, the infamous Author-born who had sacrificed his title at the Soleitian Academy in favor of studying the art of healing with the Spirits of Eyelesene.

"Gran-Papa," she cried out again, but it was not her grandfather who heeded her call.

Upon Corelei's return to Rainier where her family's magnificent ice fortress stood atop Mount Halum, the mother-to-be resembled a ragged shell of herself. Half-crazed and spending bouts of time stammering gibberish, none could determine what had befallen their once human queen. Not even the finest healers of Halorium who possessed Enzo's numerous notes and studies could determine a cause. But her faithful husband loved her still and hoped the birth of their soon-to-be daughter would mend his broken wife's ailment.

However, when the little thief arrived, and Corelei's condition remained unchanged, her husband grew to blame the child.

Thus was the first person the little thief stole.