House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas

The Horn had been sister to the Mask, and the Harp Nesta had mentioned. It had come from here, and worse, was part of some deadly arsenal of the Asteri—

And Theia.

The carving in the tunnel of the crowned, masked queen—Theia—flashed in Bryce’s memory. She’d been holding two instruments: a horn and a harp.

The Daglan, Silene went on, always quarreled over who should control the Trove, so more often than not, the Trove went unused. It was their downfall.

Was this it, then? Why she’d been sent to this world? To learn about this Trove—that it might possibly be the thing to destroy the Asteri? But Bryce could only watch as the vision showed Theia’s hands snatching the objects from black pedestals. Spiriting them away from the subterranean mountain holds where they were kept, using cave archways to move swiftly across the lands.

Caves like this one. Capable of moving people great distances in a matter of hours. Or an instant.

Snow drifted across the image, and then Theia was standing atop a mountain, a black monolith rising behind her.

“Ramiel,” Azriel whispered from behind them, from beyond the wards.

Theia embraced a handsome, broad-shouldered man amid the swirling snow.

My mother and father, Fionn, had kept their love a secret through the years, knowing the Daglan would find it amusing to tear them apart if they learned of the affair. But they were able to meet in secret—and to plan their uprising.

“Fionn …,” Azriel murmured, awe lacing his voice, “was your ancestor.”

Nesta turned from the vision, frowning toward Azriel. “You might as well come in,” she muttered, and pointed. Silver flame rippled in a straight line, spearing for Azriel. He didn’t flinch away, only tucking in his wings tightly as streams of smoke filtered up from the floor.

A path through the wards. The spells shimmered against the flames, as if trying to close in on the road she’d made, but Nesta’s power held them at bay.

Azriel inclined his head to Nesta as he stepped through that slender passage lined with silver flames, not one ounce of fear on his beautiful face. Only when Azriel had passed through did Nesta release her power, the wards slamming back into place in a shimmering rush, like a wave washing over the shore.

Bryce pointed to the hologram—to the golden-haired Fae male. “Who is he?” she asked quietly. There had never been any mention of Fionn in the histories of Midgard, the lore.

“The first and last High King of these lands,” Azriel breathed.

Before Bryce could contemplate this further, Silene went on, But my mother and father knew they needed the most valuable of all the Daglan’s weapons.

Bryce tensed. This had to be the thing that had given them the edge—

The snows around Ramiel parted, revealing a massive bowl of iron at the foot of the monolith. Even through the vision, its presence leaked into the world, a heavy, ominous thing.

“The Cauldron,” Nesta said, dread lacing her voice.

Not a useful weapon, then. Bryce braced herself as Silene continued.

The Cauldron was of our world, our heritage. But upon arriving here, the Daglan captured it and used their powers to warp it. To turn it from what it had been into something deadlier. No longer just a tool of creation, but of destruction. And the horrors it produced … those, too, my parents would turn to their advantage.

Another shift of memory, and Fionn pulled a long blade from the Cauldron, dripping water. A black blade, whose dark metal absorbed any trace of light around it. Bryce’s knees weakened.

The Starsword.

Two other figures stood there, veiled in the thick snow, but Bryce hardly got a chance to wonder about them before Silene’s narration began anew.

They fought the Daglan and won, she went on. Using the Daglan’s own weapons, they destroyed them. Yet my parents did not think to learn the Daglan’s other secrets—they were too weary, too eager to leave the past behind.

“Wait,” Bryce cut in. “How did they use those weapons?” Nesta and Azriel cast wary looks her way. “How the fuck did they use them? And what other secrets—”

But Silene kept speaking, history unspooling from her lips.

My father became High King, and my mother his queen, yet this island on which you stand, this place … my mother claimed it for herself. The very island where she had once served as a slave became her domain, her sanctuary. The Daglan female who’d ruled it before her had chosen it for its natural defensive location, the mists that kept it veiled from the others. So, too, did my mother. But more than that, she told me many times that she and her heirs were the only ones worthy of tending this island.

Nesta murmured to Azriel, “The Prison was once a royal territory?”

Bryce didn’t care—and Azriel didn’t reply. Silene had glossed over how Theia and Fionn had used the Trove and Cauldron against the Asteri, and why the Hel had she come to this planet if not to learn about that?

Yet once again, Silene’s memory plowed forward.

And with the Daglan gone, as the centuries passed, as the Tithe was no longer demanded of us or the land, our powers strengthened. The land strengthened. It returned to what it had been before the Daglan’s arrival millennia before. We returned to what we’d been before that time, too, creatures whose very magic was tied to this land. Thus the land’s powers became my mother’s. Dusk, twilight—that’s what the island was in its long-buried heart, what her power bloomed into, the lands rising with it. It was, as she said, as if the island had a soul that now blossomed under her care, nurtured by the court she built here.