Chapter 33 The Bone Oracle's Warning

• The ancient skull chamber lay deep beneath the castle, accessible only through passages known to the royal bloodline. I descended the worn stone steps with a crown of silver circlets in my hair—the traditional bridal ornament that would mark me as a willing sacrifice to anyone who understood the old symbols.
• The skull relics waited in their alcoves, seventeen ancient heads of my predecessors, their empty sockets seeming to track my movement through the chamber. But it was the eighteenth alcove that drew me forward, the one that had stood empty for twenty years.
• "Grandfather," I whispered, approaching the pedestal where the Skull King's remains should have rested.