The door to her bedroom opened up. The running pad of footsteps sounded across her room, but Val could scarcely hear them.

As she clutched her head and cried out from this excruciating headache, she did not care about anything else around her. A stark warning lit up in her mind, nonetheless. Presently, her mother entered her room immediately after Val had just witnessed her betrayal.

“Go away, please,” Val moaned. Whether her mother was friend or foe, she did not have the mental stamina to handle interacting with her right now, after what she had just seen.

“Val!” her mother cried while rushing to her side.

Why had Val bothered asking her to stay away? Her request had not even earned a moment’s consideration from her mother whose fingers now clutched at the sheets of her bed.

“Are you all right, Val? Whatever is the matter?” Genuine panic had seized her mother’s voice. “Do you need to go to the hospital? I can call for help—” She already started darting away to get to a phone.

With a grunt from the effort, Val made her hand shoot out to grab her mother’s wrist. “Stop. There’s no need for that. I’m fine.”

Her headache had only lessened since the moment that her vision had faded. The worst of the pain had already passed. Now, Val only had to deal with the pounding aftermath. Whatever agony had seized her mind, it was not the same as the migraines that she typically endured. Val suspected that learning Mind Blast had taken its physical toll, unbeknownst to her while she had been outside of her body.

Her mother should know better than to try to sending Val to a mortal hospital by now. The divine blood in her veins protected her from a host of health complications that plagued mortals. Whatever pained her, she would recover from on her own in due time. Few things could kill her aside from significant, traumatic damage to her body or enough toxins to put down an elephant.

Val’s reassurance put her mother no less at ease, who still fidgeted around at her bedside.

“Did you overwork yourself with some ability?” her mother asked. Her brow creased into a worried line.

With a tight, cruel smile forced to her face, Val said, “Yes. I saw something in the past. It had been a surprisingly difficult vision to reach.”

While she may be a mortal woman, Val and Ross had always done their best to include their mother in their lives by telling her about their abilities. Now, Val had to wonder if everything about their divine blood had made all but too much sense to her.

“Mom.” Val gathered her courage to begin this confrontation with her mother. “You are not a simple mortal woman like you have always led Ross and I to believe, are you? You actually know a lot about the divine blood and the gods.”

Her mother offered a tight smile, followed by a sad shake of her head. “I have no idea where you got that idea from. Your father is the one who had divine blood.” From there, her words slowed down, seemingly pained by the memory of him. “Naturally, I had learned a few things from him.”

Here, her mother sat at her bedside, not unlike the way that she had sat with Ross all of those nights ago. Her fingers reached out to smooth Val’s hair like she had done to him. Having just witnessed the past, these memories burned vividly in her mind, and Val hated it.

“I heard you screaming, and I found you curled up here on your bed,” her mother continued, more rapid in her concern. “You had said something about a vision. Did you have a bad dream? I mean, had it felt like a nightmare?”

Her head tilted to the side, truly not understanding a thing about Val’s powers. She was a clueless mortal woman, so she had not been able to hide her betrayal from Val well enough. The lines of her worried brow became more pronounced in the dim light.

Her mother’s age showed her fragile mortality. Those with divine blood aged until they reached the years of their prime physical condition. Val could expect to age into her early twenties, then stay at that stage of life until the end of time or until she would perish by unnatural means. Her mother, on the other hand, had clearly aged into her late forties as mortals do.

With her mother’s fingers running through her hair, Val recalled how she had played with Ross’s hair on the night of his disappearance. She seemed to play with their hair constantly, ever since they were children. What was it about her mother always playing with Val’s and Ross’s hair?

Val jerked away from her, too old to be babied like this. In case her mother held some enchanted artifact that had the power of manipulation, Val would not allow herself to be touched by her mother anymore.

Meanwhile, her mother folded her hands into her lap innocently.

Looking at her mother like this, Val had to admit a hard truth. She seemed like a typical mortal woman in every way. This only led to a deeper sense of confusion in Val’s heart. “I still cannot believe that you know so little about the divine blood, as you like to pretend,” she insisted. “I have finally seen a vision of Ross. You had been the one to send him away! You had given him information that you have withheld from me—the way to the Summit of Ascension no less!” She shouted this, exasperated still from her disbelief.

During her pause, Val gulped for air.

In response to her outrage, her mother insulted her with a gentle chuckle. “Well, of course I know some things. Your father did not leave me in the mortal realm to raise his immortal children without any sense of which way is up. He had high hopes for his children, actually.”

Val gritted her teeth together, only growing more frustrated at having so many questions yet not producing any answers from her mother. So far, it seemed that she had only ended up with more questions.

By the anger evident in Val, her mother must have thought to continue talking. She repeated that same, vague explanation that she and Ross had concluded. “You have challenges before you that will be easier to overcome if you do not have to face them head-on yet. At least, this is what Ross had told me from what he could sense of the future.”

Val’s head spun around from the insanity of this. She blurted out the swirl of these thoughts. “Why does that matter? I could better prepare myself against what I know is a threat.”

On a different note, she raved. “Also, I don’t care what my father hopes to get out of me or Ross! Why does anything that involves that man have to matter now? We do not talk about him in this family. We have never talked about him!” As far as Val was concerned, she had no father nor did she want his existence to start affecting her life all of a sudden.

Once again, her mother could only mock Val with a smile. “Well, you have divine blood and you have said so yourself, so many times, that you plan to go to the Summit of Ascension. Naturally, your destiny is entwined with your father’s legacy. You should not be so averse to his influence, like this.”

She did not want to hear this, so she stood bolt upright onto her feet. Glaring down at her mother who still sat on her bed, Val fumed. This anger, she contained within herself and instead addressed her mother with indifference. “I have a feeling that you are not going to tell me anything useful are you?”

Her mother shook her head. “No. That would defeat the purpose of setting you and Ross on different paths, now wouldn’t it?”

Val clenched her jaw tight enough that her teeth hurt. Her attempt at a calm exterior fell away. There went her temper again. “Well, good!” she shouted. “I have no desire to hear whatever you would have to say, anyway. I want to find my own path, having nothing to do with whatever hopes that you or my father have for me!”

“Val—” her mother reached out to touch her hand to her wrist.

She tore her hand away at the briefest touch. Val could not let herself be manipulated by her mother no longer. “I want to be left alone right now.”

“I understand.” Her mother nodded several times in a row. She retreated from her bedroom but lingered at the door. “Please do not be mad for too long, Val. You do realize that nothing has changed now, has it? You simply have gained more information.”

“Yeah.” That was true enough, and Val detested how she had been left in the dark for so long. “Just go.”

The door closed after her mother.

With a toss of her shoulders, Val let herself plop onto her side in the bed. Her head spun around with everything that she had just learned—and at the same time—how little of it all that she understood.

Nothing about her actual life had changed at all, yet with this new perspective, everything seemed to have changed. The walls of her room loomed around her, almost seeming to pulse with her still aching head. Val felt trapped within the mortal realm now more than ever.

She would need to get out of here soon, for her own sanity. Now that she had unlocked the past, Val was free to follow in the path of Ross which she had been forbidden to take.