I stared at the seer thinking only one thing: I should be used to this by now.

How often had it happened that I met a complete stranger that turned out to somehow know who I was, whether it was because of my parents or because I was the so-called "chosen one" that would supposedly be the one to break the curse on my family line?

It happened way too often. And right now, it was happening again. 

"I'm sorry, but how do you know who I am?" I asked.  The woman smiled at me. Her eyes seemed a bit distant; as if she was seeing me, but at the same time, she wasn't. She reminded me so much of Valenya that it was haunting. 

"Please sit. Maribelle, why don't you get our guests something to drink?" the woman said. I glanced at Gerrard. He had a questioning look on his face and his lips were drawn in a straight line. I could tell that he didn't trust who this woman was. But we wouldn't be able to trust her unless we talked to her. With this in mind, I sat on one of the plush red cushions by the wall. Gerrard hesitantly sat down with me. We both faced her. 

Maribelle brought Gerrard and I a cup of some cool liquid. It was the color of dirt, but it smelled strongly of cinnamon. In it were swirls of red glittery spice, which were most likely the cause of the strong aroma. I took a sip of the cold drink and was surprised at its taste. It was sweet. 

"Cinnamon and peppermint," the woman said.

"Are you going to tell us who you are or not?" Gerrard asked, not touching his drink. I rolled my eyes at him. He never was the patient type.

The woman chuckled at his insistence.

"My name is Jeya. I am a seer," the woman, Jeya, replied. "And you, my dear, are Gerrard. No last name because you consider yourself to be relation-less. Hard outer shell, soft inner shell for those that you care most about," the woman continued. Gerrard shifted uncomfortably next to me. She had read him on the dot. Everything she had just described was completely on-point.

"How did you know who I was? And why were you expecting me?" I asked her, shifting the attention from a clearly uncomfortable Gerrard.

"I know who you are because I knew your mother. I was expecting you because I am a seer," she replied. 

"How did you know my mother?" I asked. 

"Tut, tut. Too many questions. Shall we dine first instead?" Jeya asked.

"No, I'd like some answers first, please," I replied, trying not to sound rude and impatient.

Jeya smiled at me in a knowing way. 

"Very well, then. What would you like to know?" she asked.

"How do you know who my mother was?" I asked.

"She visited Aghbad to see if she could find information about the curse she was trying to break. I met her about 22 years ago," she replied. I furrowed my eyebrows.

22 years ago was 2 years before I was born since I was now twenty years of age. I knew my mother and father had been married before the war and before my father found out about my mother's treason. They had been married for exactly two years. After the dream I had in Sylvanterra, I knew that during the war, my mother was pregnant with me. My mother had me when she was 21, which meant that when she was here in Aghbad, she was in the first stages of her pregnancy. 

That's how Jeya knew who I was.

"Have you figured out the math yet?" Jeya asked, watching me carefully. I looked at the woman, coming out of my thoughts. She couldn't read my mind, but she was a seer and seers were no doubt well versed in reading other people's expressions.

"Yes. My mother was pregnant with me when she was here," I said. She nodded.

"You had just been conceived," she said. 

"Did you know what would happen to her when she came here?" I asked. She nodded once more. I felt my throat constrict and the warm sting of tears prick my eyes. "So my mother knew she would die, even though she was having a baby?" I managed to ask despite the growing lump in my throat. 

"She did. But she knew that you would be safe from the poison that would eventually run through her veins," she answered. I clutched the tassles on the pillow that I was sitting on. 

"She had already made her decision when she was here?" I asked, finding it hard to breathe. I heard a drumming in my ears and I knew I was going to cry any second now. Gerrard found my hand and took it in his, holding it tight. His hands were as cold as mine and I knew that the news wasn't upsetting only to me. 

"You mean her decision to disobey Jerome's orders? Yes. She had decided that that was the only way she could break the curse on your elemental line," Jeya responded. 

"Did she tell you anything else about what she thought the curse could do?" I asked.

"She thought that if she sacrificed her life out of love for the one she loved, the curse would break. Because, after all, the curse was put on the original water master because he played with love," she answered me.

"I know that already. But what else did she tell you?" I asked.

"Nothing else. That was the answer that her research came up with," she replied. I felt my sadness subside and its place, frustration arose.

"But that doesn't help me! Clearly her plan didn't work! What did she do wrong?!" I asked.

"I cannot help you answer that question," she said.

"Why not?! You're a seer, aren't you? Look into the future and see what answer I come up with and see if the answer that I come up with is right!" I exclaimed.

"That is not how our powers work," Jeya said, her tone shifting from mildly amused to serious in a second.

"Then how do they work?" I asked. "How did you know that I would be here, yet you can't even tell me what my future holds now?" 

"I knew that you would be here because it came to me in a vision. I knew from the moment I met you--no, not this time, the first time in your mother's womb--that I would meet you again. I knew that you would come here searching for answers. How do you think I convinced the Sultan's men to not kill you upon arrival?" she asked.

"You convinced the men?" I asked, disbelief plastered on my face.

"They bring me in when trespassers visit and ask me to see whether or not the tresspasser will cause trouble. I told them that you were simply here to search for answers about your mother," she replied.

"So if you can look into the future on demand for them, why can't you look for me right now?" I asked.

"As I said, the visions come naturally. I cannot force them to come," she replied. 

"So every time a tresspasser comes into the city, you 'naturally' get a vision?" I asked. I was finding what she was saying very hard to believe.

"Yes, because I am linked to the city. I am notified of any harm that will come to the city," she said. 

"I don't understand..." I said.

"Most seers are like me. We are tied to the earth where we were born, the cities in which we live. The fates of the people that we serve are important to us. Because we do not have normal elemental magic to save each other, we use our powers of insight and intuition to keep harm from reaching our people," she replied. 

I bit my lip. It made sense; to an extent. I had always wondered how the seers protected themselves. I guess Jeya had just given me the answer. 

"You know, Caley, you are the one person that all seers know about," Jeya said to me after watching me carefully for a few moments.

"How come?" I asked.

"Because you are the chosen one; the one who will bring magic back to the form that the original witch had intended it to be in," she replied. 

I laughed hollowly.

"I doubt that," I said. "I'm doomed to die," I said. She raised her eyebrows, as if this was news to her. "I took the Oath that my mother took. I have poison running through my veins, too. Only mine's isn't activated. Not yet at least. so even if I am the savior, I won't be able to stick around to see it through. I'll be dead and gone, just like my mother, because there is no way that I can do what I need to do without breaking my loyalty to the one I swore the Oath to," I explained. 

"I don't understand. Your mother--she said that she would prevent that from happening--" she said.

"She tried. She wrote me a letter and warned me not to take the Oath. But I didn't read it until it was too late," I told her.

"Ah, free will. The yin to Destiny's yang," she said. 

"Yeah. Unfortunately, in this case, it would have been better if there wasn't any free will involved," I said. 

"You know, destiny and free will are not so completely separate as we may make them seem. They are intertwined, which is why I likened them to yin and yang. They are opposite forces, yes, but they need each other to survive. Even though you think it was by choice that you didn't read the letter right away or when destiny intended for you to read it, maybe, all along, destiny didn't want you to read the letter and that in the end, everything will work out as planned," Jeya offered. I let out a fake laugh.

"That is a very optimistic view that is very highly unlikely," I said. 

"Do not be so naive as to doubt the forces of the world. Destiny works in strange ways. Prophecies always come true, even if they have a strange way of going about it," she replied. 

I shook my head. Of course she would believe that; she was a seer. But I knew better than to believe in false hope. Even so, however, I couldn't help but feel a small weight lift off my shoulders.

"Did my mother tell you her exact plan for breaking the curse?" I asked. She nodded. "Can you tell me?" I asked.

"Yes. I can. Although, I think it would be best if we supped first, don't you think?" I asked.

"Yes, I'm starving," Gerrard said.

I looked at him, raising an eyebrow. He had been quiet the whole time, allowing me to have my space and ask my questions. It was one of the things that I liked about Gerrard. Even though he cared about me and held my safety above all else, he knew when to step back and let me do my thing. 

"Very well. Maribelle, have Kina make us a meal. We still have much to discuss before the Sultan's speech, so tell her to make haste," Jeya told her daughter, who was sitting in the corner playing with some dolls. 

After a few moments, Kina, who was a pretty young maid with a thick golden plait that hung over her shoulder, brought in four steaming bowls of what looked like soup. The soup was redish in color. I could see various vegetables floating in the thick liquid. Kina served the soup with a side of bread that was laced with herbs and spices. The meal, although simple, was actually quite filling.

Once we finished eating, Kina gathered up our dishes. I noticed that she levitated the dishes out of the room, right in front of Maribelle, who paid no attention to the use of magic in front of her. It was amazing, really, to be able to use magic freely and out in the open without the fear of accidentally exposing it to a non-Magii.

We all settled back into the pillows strewn across the floor. 

"I suppose now you would like to hear about your mother?" she asked me. I nodded, leaning forward slightly, eager to hear about my mother's exact plan and reasoning. This was what I was looking for. This was what would help me figure out what I needed to do to find the countercurse.

"Let me begin by saying that your mother spent a lot more time looking for the counter to the curse on your elemental line than you have. You are lucky that you have her thoughts and hypotheses. Your mother started her search with nothing," Jeya explained. I nodded. Of course, I knew this already; my mother had done a lot of work; most of which was stashed in the shed behind Elijah's manor.

"After all of her research, which I won't recount because it is unimportant, your mother concluded that sacrifice was the only way to break the curse," she told me.

"I know that. But what else did she tell you?" I asked.

"Well, you must understand why it was that she came to conclusion of sacrifice. The curse that was put on your elemental line was put on it by the original witch because the original water master toyed with her love," Jeya began.

"You've already told me this. What else is there?" I asked impatiently. 

"Do you understand why she chose sacrifice?" she asked me. I shook my head. "In ancient magic, sacrifice was the ultimate form of magic. The ancients would sacrifice many things to nature, to provide Mother Earth with gifts because She provided us with the gift of magic. So, for example, when an expectant mother was afraid that her child would not be born health, she would perform some sort of sacrifice that would ensure that her child's health would be uncompromised. Sacrifice usually came in the form of gift giving, like performing a sort of ritual using nature, or in the form of a blood sacrifice--sacrficing the blood of an animal to get what you wanted," Jeya explained. 

"The more important the wish, the stronger the sacrifice. Blood sacrifices were the strongest forms of sacrifice that the ancients performed. So to give one's life would be the most ultimate form of the ritual. To combat the strength of the most powerful curse that a Magii has ever done--the Original Witch's curse--your mother thought that the most ultimate form of sacrifice would be the answer," she continued. "But of course, as you know, it didn't work," she said. 

"But what went wrong?" I asked.

"Isn't that the ultimate question? Isn't that what you are searching for? Why your mother's plan didn't work?" Jeya answered. I frowned and leaned back. 

She was right. That was what my job was. But if the ultimate form of sacrifice, the ultimate way of breaking a curse, didn't work, then what would?

Unless something went wrong with the sacrifice.

"What about the other curse that was on my mother? The Blood Oath curse? How do I break that?" I asked. 

"That is also a very good question. And one to which I do not have the answer," she replied. "To mix blood in the way that the Blood Oath requires is possibly one of the darkest forms of magic. It is revolting and dangerous and that is precisely why it is so dark. After I met your mother, I tried coming up with solutions as to how to break that oath without activating the poison inside one's body and without accidentally killing oneself in the process. I still have found no solution," she said. 

"So there's no way of stopping it?" I asked.

"There has to be a solution. Somewhere. Magic is based on nature. And a vital essence of nature is balance. For every curse there is a countercurse. For every spell, there is a counterspell. It is one of the laws of the universe: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There has to be an answer. The difficulty lies in finding it," Jeya said. 

I sat back, mulling over what she had said. 

Basically, as I saw it, I was back at square one. I still had no idea what I was looking for. I still had no idea how to even go about finding the counters that I was looking for. If a seer had devoted this much time and energy into finding one of the countercurses and still hadn't come up with an answer, how was I to do it in less than a year?

I was feeling more and more helpless by the second. But this only fueled my desire for finding Mikael even more.

As I sat thinking, another thought occurred to me, one that saddened me more than I already was.

"Can I ask you something?" I asked Jeya, feeling somber.

"Of course," Jeya replied. 

"How come my mother lasted so long? After the poison activated. Why didn't she die right away? How did she live for another 17 years?" I asked. Jeya looked at me, a small sad smile on her lips.

"I would imagine that she lasted so long because she had something--no, someone--to live for. She had you and that helped her persist through the agony of her curse," she replied. 

I felt my heart break and the tears that I had managed to hold back for the entirety of the conversation finally came out. 

My mother had suffered through so much for me. She had given up so much so that I could live. She struggled through years and years of what could have only been blinding pain just to save me, to make sure that I grew up with the love of a mother. It was such a poor repayment, throwing my life away as I had. If I had only loved her enough to read her letter when I had first received it, my mother wouldn't have died for nothing. Now, her daughter would suffer the same fate she had. The only difference would be that her death was for a noble cause--saving me--while mine was because I was ignorant. 

The pain tore through me like a jagged knife on raw skin. I had let her down. I had let down the woman that I had forever idealized. And that pain was so much worse than anything I had suffered through so far. 

Gerrard wound his arms around me and pulled me close to him, rocking me back and forth. He didn't say anything. He didn't tell me that it would be all right because I think he knew now that it wouldn't. Nothing except finding the counter to the curse on my elemental line would help to heal the intense guilt that I felt. 

And that was exactly what I intended on doing: finding the counter so that I may do at least part of my duty as the chosen one and so that my mother will not have died completely in vain.

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A/N: Wahooo! Updated twice in one week! Y'all should be grateful. I should be catching up on my mountain of homework right now. Instead, I'm writing this chapter. See how much I love you?

Given, I did want to get all of this written down now so that I wouldn't forget it later on. Because, let's be honest, I probably won't update again until winter break in December. 

That being said, what do you think? Will Caley figure out what went wrong with her mother's plan? Will Caley be able to find the counter? What do YOU think the counter that her mother came up with was missing?

Leave me a comment! And don't forget to vote!!!

XOXO