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something?”
he said, voice lowering as he once again became serious. He
indicated the page in front of me. “Why did you learn
this?”
    The question had me taken aback, until I
caught the drift of his thought. If I had to know the language,
then the answer would be within the pages of the oldest texts.
    “ It’s not that,” I answered,
hesitating a moment to consider the idea, “I don’t think.” I
relaxed into my chair, recalling long-ago conversations with my
mother. “There are the visions,” I explained, “like this morning
and yesterday. They’re just flashes really, glimpses of what’s to
come.”
    He moved forward, elbows resting on his knees
so that his hands disappeared beneath the table.
    “ And then there are the
prophecies,” I continued. “They’re more like a knowledge, an idea
that’s suddenly in your head that you know to be true.” I struggled
to come up with a comparison. “Like the alphabet song.”
    He stared at me.
    “ You know how they teach you
that melody so you always remember your letters. The song is with
you, even now, but you don’t remember learning it. It’s just there . And it’s
true.”
    “ So, the prophecies come to
you in a rhyme?”
    I laughed. “No. I’m trying to explain how
they feel.” I drew a loose strand of hair behind my ear, knowing I
was giving the “feeling” of the prophecy way less gravity than it
deserved. “The predictions come to me in words. No, it’s not a
nursery rhyme. It’s a heavy, all-knowing verse in the ancient
language.” I realized I’d come back around to my point. “That’s why
my mother taught me, because she knew.”
    Logan sat up. “Why would the words come to
you in the ancient language?”
    I sighed. “I don’t know.”
I’d often wondered myself. They felt so real, I was almost certain
I would understand their meaning regardless, but she had wanted me
to comprehend every facet of the language. Some days, I wondered if
they weren’t my words at all, but some other, now gone someone that was pushing
the prophecies to us with a long-dead magic. How else could they
belong to both our kind and the Seven Lines? But that wasn’t
important now, and I shook it off, coming back to our conversation.
“Could be worse,” I said, smiling at his questioning expression.
“They could be haikus.”
    His lips twitched. “That would be worse.”
    It could always get
worse , I thought. A chill ran over me and I
sat up, once again returning to the pages in front of
me.
    “ Brianna,” he said softly,
waiting for me to look up from the book, “you will put things to
right.”
     
    It was hours later when he finally stopped me
again. My body ached and my forearms were creased from pressing
against the edge of the solid mahogany table. I scrunched my eyes
shut tight before blinking them back open to focus on the canvas
backpack he was holding.
    He gestured toward a small carved table in
the corner. “This time, I brought lunch.”
    I stretched thoroughly before following him
to curl up into one of the well-padded Queen Anne chairs. He sat
across from me, laying wrapped sandwiches over the table’s engraved
dragon design. I glanced up at him, trying to remember which line
the color of his eyes signified. I was pretty sure Amber was some
proto-language form of ertho. Earth.
    Logan seemed to notice my appraisal, so I
distracted him with a question about the dragon’s line. “Are there
any others left, aside from Aern and Morgan?”
    He pulled the cover back from his sandwich.
“Not anymore. Things got a little crazy after Morgan was born.
There were so many of us waiting for the day, watching for signs of
the prophecy …”
    He trailed off, realizing
that this was the
prophecy, that I was a prophet.
    “ It’s okay,” I said. “You
can’t even imagine how prepared my mother made me.” I knew prepared
wasn’t the right word, exactly, but I didn’t need to explain what
we’d gone through. It was certainly no surprise to