2044
LUCAS Gray
LUCAS and Laven would continue to travel along their path. The sun had begun to set after they had resolved themselves to their end goal. The night treated them to a dreary atmosphere. The winds outside whipped like spirits of the night. More than a few times LUCAS bolted upright thinking that they were found out by the caravan.
He closed his eyes and scanned for any signs of life. A few times he sensed the presence of some small creature—some animal crawling amidst the sands. He surely kept an eye if they approached close, but they seemed to keep their distance whatever it was. He did not sense another person close in on their small shack, and for that he was thankful.
He was also thankful for the fact that each time he had sensed something and come out of his subconscious that he had not woken up Laven. She needed to rest and recover from the massive amounts of energy she spent in saving their lives at the factory.
He felt the need to make up for that by ensuring they were safe throughout the night where she needed to sleep. At the first of her waking something inside him knew that they were going to start moving again. She opened her eyes and stretched for but a moment before the full of her mind returned. She got up without a word and began dismantling the bendwood shack.
He knew enough to not question what she was comfortable doing, and so he assisted in taking down the shack. For the little time it took to dismantle it, he memorized the steps they had taken to construct it and he could do it much more efficiently if they needed to again. Plus, discarding the evidence of their stay here was optimal if they wanted to avoid pursuit...if such a pursuit were to happen.
LUCAS knew that assuming there was nobody searching for them because they haven’t seen anybody yet was the fastest way to guarantee that someone would take them off guard, and so they worked to cover their trail as best as possible. At least—remove as much of their trail as what made sense in a reasonable time frame.
Laven was sure that once their survival after the mission that the guild would move to uncover the truth about the fall of the Kosunaga building—about their current mission—about lots of things that answering would probably lead to the revelation of their betrayer as their expense.
LUCAS was in full agreement. There wasn’t much they could do in the short term about all the bendwood, but that didn’t mean they had to leave the remains of the shack up to be discovered to give hints toward any potential following party. Was it paranoid to think that way? Sure, the both of them knew it, but they weren’t letting those feelings keep them from moving forward or interacting with one another, so they agreed a healthy level of paranoia—skepticism they coined it—would keep them free from extraneous conflict so long as they checked on each other about it.
During their walk they would ring ideas against one another about how far they would take their efforts to remain hidden. If they spent too much time on preserving their secrecy then they could very well be wasting time that could be going toward the actual goals they had set out for.
It was a balancing act—the desperate need to survive against conspiracy while actively trying to fight for the belief of common good. If either of them was alone they would surely be driven mad by the paranoia. Thankfully, though, there was some level of control within the chaos.
Nonetheless, LUCAS and Laven continued on their trek with a renewed vigor. They were sure of themselves and sure of the force they wanted to stop from progressing in their goals.
The Creatures of the Night had caused so much damage and distress among the populace that they couldn’t be allowed to continue to roam unchecked. In their resting times they would spend hours talking about the atrocities of the world around them—always landing back at the source of the Creatures of the Night.
Laven in particular was most interested in the events of the Roulette Game—as the specific events seemed to interest her curiosity. Although they talked plenty on the nature of the being that Laven had formed a pact with. They had not known the original source of the power but agreed that she should not be wanton in exuding the effects of her pact. Laven knew full well the limits of overexerting the power she was given, and LUCAS was more than worried they came with a secret cost that she had not been in the know of.
During their nightly convenings they would take turns keeping watch and they even grew to be efficient at making small bendwood huts. As the nights came LUCAS understood that he was not able to maintain his nightly watch as consistently as he would have liked. Trying to keep up quickly showed that he needed rest too—his systems began to overheat and short out if he left things unchecked. He noticed it once when he lost five minutes—gone with the blink of an eye. He had to wake Laven after that point. He felt bad, but she was understanding.
“I have been getting a little too much sleep lately,” she said. “Guess it isn’t fair to hog it all. Sleep well, I’ll wake you when the sun rises.”
After another day of travel they finally found something of note—the settlement LUCAS had seen in his sensors. They approached the outskirts and sped up tremendously as it appeared in their vision.
Looking at the buildings, the both of them stared at one another at how...modern they had looked. Laven walked slowly to the edge of the first building closest to them. The bright white paneling on the face seemed such a foreign site in the desert landscape around them. Dust blew across their feet, and she turned to LUCAS.
“What is this place? Do you have any idea? It looks like it’s been ripped out of time.”
LUCAS studied the emptiness around them—he didn’t even have to look inside to know that there was nobody else there with them. It was the epitome of a ghost town. He scanned his internals for any information...anything at all that would divulge the story of this encampment. He felt a dull energy below the surface—like the buildings themselves acted as a mask from a...a sort of odor underneath. Not the kind you smelled, but the kind you felt. He held out an arm to try and sense which direction he felt it in.
“I think...this place was ripped out from another time. I think...I think it’s a pocket that just shifted over.”
“Shifted...but the people didn’t come with it?” Laven asked.
“If there were any to shift over. I can’t grasp the source...but I am sensing something coming from...there,” he pointed towards the largest building down the center-most pavilion. “Follow me, I’m on the trail of something,” LUCAS said without turning. He started toward the largest building in the development. It stood two stories tall, and he felt guided by a trail of...it almost seemed familiar energy.
“Something that’s here now or something that was here?”
“Was...I’m sure of it. I think…that it was that girl. That one who has the other fragments.”
“You said her name was Allison, right?”
“Yes,” LUCAS nodded. “I’m sure she was here...I don’t think anytime close to now, but there was…” he paused for a moment. “I think...there are traces of another. I think...that dragon was here too.”
Laven’s reaction was enough to cause him to turn. “She wasn’t shaped like that then, at least, not for when she came. She was in a human body. Or taking over one—I’m not exactly sure on their full nature. But they were here. I’m almost positive of it.”
“Okay, and you think they met in that building back there? For what reason, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I fear they may have collaborated as far back as then...it might take some time for me to get an approximate date. But the fact that the traces of them are so faded don’t give me hope of good tidings.”
“Spooky,” Laven began. “I don’t like this one bit.”
“Neither do I,” LUCAS said. “It’s off putting that anybody would align themselves with those monsters. After all they’ve done.”
The two of them approached the front doors of the large building. LUCAS stared up at the face of the building and noticed high up sat a circular pane of stained glass that depicted a scene of angels comforting small humans below. It became clear the closer they approached the building the clearer it became that it was in fact a library they were heading toward. The stained glass confused LUCAS, though, as he would have guessed that it would have sooner been attributed to a church than a library, but the sign out front—faded as it may be—clearly denoted it as a library.
“A strange place to center a town around,” LUCAS said.
“I like it. Too common do places ignore the importance of the library—here you can see just how important it was to these people.”
“If there was anybody around,” LUCAS added.
“Well, that’s true. Not really sure if anybody was actually around to use it,” she tapped her forefinger on her chin.
“I wonder if the people before used this place...I have to hope so, right?” LUCAS asked. “Hope that people at one point cared about more than what they saw and felt themselves?
“I guess it means as much if they did or didn’t compared to where they are now…” she held out her hands. “Not here...that as a concept is still messing with my mind a bit.”
“If I understand how this current reality came to be—several hundred million realities were overlayed onto one another to form a complete composite.”
“I’m having a hard time picturing that…” Laven said.
“Take a hamburger,” LUCAS began. “And put another patty on top, and then another, and then another, and continue until you have a million burgers stacked on top of one another. Then you take a press, of course in this situation we have to pretend that such a press exists that could press down a million hamburger patties lined up on top of one another—and then we watch that same burger be flattened into one single piece.”
“You ruined the burger.”
LUCAS looked at her with a positive affirmation and gave off a chuckle. “Yes, if we were going to eat it then it would be ruined but thinking of it in terms of the universe here, I think that is what has happened. Multiple realities pressed into one.”
“So how would you consider this area here?”
LUCAS thought on this for a moment. “Leftovers...or an inconsideration. Either way, it seems that some information didn’t get pressed so to speak, but just came over largely unscathed. I think the people are like this too—we’re not millions of imprints upon each other—I think we would be able to handle processing all of that. This settlement might be just like that—taken from one point in time and untouched otherwise. There probably were people that lived here at one point, but those people most likely do not exist anymore.”
“What a sad state,” Laven said.
“Wholly so. And we have to try our best—as a whole and not just us specifically, to preserve what we can. Take what those who had lives before us and with us and carry them forward. At least, that’s what I think.”
“No, I agree. I think we should definitely try to learn what we can. I know it’ll be an easier task once we figure out more about the situation surrounding these beings of the night.”
LUCAS nodded, and the two of them opened the front doors to the library and stepped inside. Immediately a pungent smell wafted around them both. LUCAS saw a ray of light casting an imprint of the stained-glass artwork onto the ground. LUCAS found himself standing on top of the casted angel’s image—a shadow of the biblical figure and he felt an almost fitting sense of pride imagining the Creatures of the Night were under his feet.
The lobby itself forked in two different directions with a central staircase carpeted in a bold red with gold trims that led up to the second floor with doors on either end of the upper fork. On either side of them were walls painted with one of the most aged tones of beige and gray.
“Smells like death in here,” Laven said.
“Smells like rot. Death is only the beginning. Whoever or whatever has been here hasn’t been so in a very long time. More than a decade I think, could be even longer. I wouldn’t be surprised if the books inside were to fall apart at the touch. It’s entirely possible that large swathes of this place could have gone even more than one since being touched.”
“I can’t imagine it being the healthiest of places to stick around. I wonder what that Allison was doing here?”
“I am as of yet unsure...but I am sensing those traces going up…” he looked over toward the staircase to the second floor. “There. I think the both of them were both up here.”
“Think maybe she was looking for refuge?”
“From what, do you wonder?” LUCAS asked.
“I dunno. Could be anything in this day and age. Maybe she was running from the dragon? Maybe they were running together.”
LUCAS started up the stairs and Laven followed closely behind. When he reached the top LUCAS stopped quick and closed his eyes. He felt a pull both through the door to his immediate left, but also for the larger door right in front of him.
They opened up to bookshelves upon bookshelves. A wealth of several centuries of authorial work lay right in front of them and suddenly none of it seemed to matter.
LUCAS felt a strong surge pulling him toward a certain book—he felt in him a desire to find. It was a book that Allison had visited and revisited—but why? He walked through the aisles led by her invisible hand. Turning, re-turning. Like a maze that had a secret passage he walked to his inner rhythm. He went up aisles, down those same aisles, following the fervor of a soul that existed in this spot long ago searching for an answer to some question, but exactly what that question was evaded him and that made him even more determined to find it.
He closed his eyes once more and found the ley lines in his mind’s eye carrying him along. He thought to himself, “C’mon Allison. What were you searching for here? What was so important that you spent so much time here?”
At this point Laven lost the logic along the way. She was following right behind him, but as soon as he started retreading paths and redoubling over aisles he had already been to it became too much for her to keep up. She stopped following and simply watched him—wondering about the path he was being led down and—similar to LUCAS at this exact point—wondering what it was that inspired such an immediate drive to search so fervently through the different aisles.
Confusion painted her face, but she looked in an almost state of amazement and awe at LUCAS as he picked up on the trail and followed it to the “T”.
LUCAS continued until he finally found the stopping point—the apex of his search. He sensed an immediate and surging presence of the energy that he had sensed from this library at this exact point at this exact trail. He looked up and saw a number of books on both sides of him—there was probably around a hundred books per bookshelf, but his eyes centered and focused on the shelf behind him—it sat kiddy-corner to another shelf that stretched on another couple of feet.
He saw a book with an incredibly thick spine that had no text running down it—unlike so many of the other books around it. There was no author or title marked on the side, he grabbed at it and noticed how heavy it really was. He wasn’t able to grab it with a single hand off the shelf. A part of him thought about The Eye of Timaeus as he grasped the hefty weight of the tome but knew that this book was not that...although it did conspire dark feelings under the surface in a similar way.
He grabbed at it with both of his hands and had to slide it forward off the shelf. As he took it in the both of his hands he bounced with the momentum of recovering from the heavy tome. The front of it looked like it had no markings across the cover. It’s face was leather bound, but bare. He picked it up and noticed its sizable girth.
He flipped the book open and supported it with his other hand. What was inside wasn’t text, but imprints—they looked like shadows of people.
~...~
2032
Ally Fae
Ally woke up coughing a gruff feeling that scraped at her throat. She woke up lying on the ground in one of the libraries’ back rooms. Shivering, she felt scars of the previous night’s events flashing through her mind. She felt a shadow cross her path and looked up, expecting to find Sakonna standing above her holding...she bit down on her lip and reached out to try and take her child—her daughter back.
Tears flowed down her cheeks and felt a dark cold taking residence within her. There was a fogginess around the situation as her waking mind took over, but the image of Sakonna walking away with Arianna in her hands became imprinted in the front of her mind. She felt a cold retching as she wished she could turn back time and undo her decision.
She felt a cold sweat rush over her as she rolled over on her side. She couldn’t stand—she didn’t have the energy required to even begin to process moving.
Ally closed her eyes and felt a hand on her shoulder. “Go away Jace. I don’t want to talk now.”
She opened her eyes slightly and saw him lying beside her. Light from the outside spilled in through a stained-glass window built into the wall. It splayed over her like some divine being was playing a joke on her like she was some angel. Jace was staring at her with a face that wanted to say a thousand things, but on her control he only looked at her.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
They sat together for an hour, not saying a word to another and her simply crying in the silence of the otherwise empty library.
Empty. Such a disgusting word. Such a filthy, disgusting, horrible nasty word. It was a void—inside nothing existed empty. Empty wasn’t nothing, it was the exact lack of what she wanted—what she needed. She needed her daughter back. She felt so foolish for letting some demon convince her this was for the best. She was awful...awful. She was na—
“You’re not nasty,” Jace had broken the silence. He had looked like he had pushed the boundaries of what she had enforced on him to say it.
Ally stared at him. “I can’t help but feel you’re just saying that to say it. I should have never gone through with this.”
“So, I know my opinion doesn’t hold much weight,” Jace began. “but for as much as I disagree with their methods...as wholly as I support you in challenging their motives, I feel...a sense of truth about the fate of Ariana in what you two talked about. I think that being taken out of the game here is the best thing for her.”
“I know damn well I’m in no position to give her a good life...but I gave her life. I brought her into this world. I made that choice. I continued with it. I...just gave her away. I can’t...handle not having her near me. It’s likely if she was here we’d just die together and that’d be the worst thing ever, but I feel like here I am going to just die alone.”
Jace moved to speak but she cut him off.
“And please don’t tell me that you’re here you’re damn well in the know of what I mean.” He closed his mouth and then looked at her softly. “And please don’t pity me for god’s sakes. I’m twenty….” she had to think for a moment, a puzzled look crossing her face. “God...twenty fucking three. I’m an adult and feel as powerless as when I was a kid.”
“Since you’re so determined on worming your way around your subconscious from saving yourself...I hope you don’t take offense at your subconscious being as derisive in trying to fix you—deep down your brain desires to survive above everything else. And through everything else it will construct anything it can to hold onto.”
“Tell it to fuck off.”
“You’re speaking to it,” Jace said.
“You’re more than that,” she said. “I can’t so easily just say it to you. You’re more than me. I have the power to make you more than me.”
“And yet like the seed, where I came from is so easily traced back. You are not a monster, and you are not terrible. We’ll have plenty of difficult conversations to have moving forward, but this one is one where I will win, even if it kills me. Even if I as a construct within your mind no longer exist, if I have to shift into a form that will better convince you or protect you, I will.”
“You sound like you love me or something.”
Jace chuckled. “I think you know our bond is stranger than that. I am you. And yet, different. That is, until you make my story that is.”
“And there’s the motivation,” Ally said, rolling her eyes.
“Deep down within you is that motivation. It’s not larger than finding your child again, I feel that deep within my core, but it is there. It’s not wrong, Ally, to want something for yourself. You can want more than one thing at a time.”
“All I want is to crawl up and just die here. Is that too much to ask?”
“Yes,” Jace said. “It in fact, is.”
“I just want to lay here.”
“You can, for now,” Jace said. “I’ll keep you safe in case anything outside happens, but if things do get rough I am going to need to relocate.”
“I don’t sense anybody nearby,” she said, mostly to the floor.
“You can tell that kind of thing now?”
“It’s just one of those things I know.”
“Well then, I can do nothing else but trust that instinct of yours. But in that case, you can spend as long as you feel you need here, but I would hope that you in that time do what you need to for you.”
Ally saw him fade before her. She knew that even if he said he’d be there the entire time, she needed as much energy as she could get. She knew deep down that beating herself up wasn’t the way to move forward, but she still hurt so damn bad.
Ally slid against the back wall and pulled herself up to a sitting position. She held back a gasp as she raised a hand to her head. Her vision waned and she felt dizzy—a lightheaded feeling spun all around her and suddenly she felt the need to vomit. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath as she started to stabilize.
A thud sounded in the nearby room. She froze in place and waited where she sat for a minute until the stress took over. She bent to her side and spat up whatever had remained in her stomach. She was shaking heavily. A primal fear took hold of her, and she grabbed her wrist trying to stop the shaking—stop the intrusive thoughts—stop it just stop it.
“J-Jace, I was wrong. I think someone’s here. I….I need you.” She vomited again. It burned coming up, and she started to cry as this was it. She had made too much noise now. Whoever was out there had certainly heard her and she simply wasn’t strong enough to defend herself. She could tell she didn’t have enough inside her to summon Jace back. Her stomach kept leaping—trying to evacuate everything inside her and each spasm sent shock waves of pain through her body.
One minute passed and she was still alive. She sat in a stony silence imagining the falling hands of a clock just pinching her eyes closed and tightening her posture on the ground.
Three minutes passed and she was still alive.
Five minutes had passed, and she had not heard anymore movement from the outside. Was…this just a trick to get her to hope? Was someone capable of that level of torture now? She thought they could, but with each passing second she began to slowly doubt the existence of they in the first place. I need to go out there and confront whatever it is. If I die, then I die. At least Ariana can still live.
Her stomach was still spinning rhythmically, gritting her teeth only worked to partially prevent the pain, but she placed her hand against the wall and pushed against it to begin moving up. I’m not going to die sitting down and in my own vomit. I’m not going to let them have the chance of taking me at my lowest. Fuck them. Fuck that. Fuck...that.
She shook as she began to stand. She was sore all over. It rang through her body like a hollow bell shooting from bottom to top and then back down toward the bottom. She threatened to topple over and never move again, but she bit down hard on her lip so that it burst open and spilled blood down her chin. She stabilized and set her weight down on her other foot.
She was breathing heavy now, she tasted the copper bitterness of her own blood and gritted her teeth to will herself forward. It took her longer than she would have liked, but she made it to the doorway that kept her hidden away. She reached down toward the handle and with a grunt thrust the door wide open.
Out she looked toward a dozen aisles of bookshelves upon bookshelves with the door heading back out to the second floor of the lobby on the right-hand corner of the room. She couldn’t see everything from her vantage point, but it did not seem like there was anybody else in the library with her. The air clung with a thick layer of dust that fluttered in the air—something in this room had moved.
She knew better though to let her guard down, so she slowly made her way from the small backroom and headed down the first aisle that was closest to her. She didn’t even look up at the shelves themselves, but instead spent the next fifteen minutes slowly crawling through every single aisle. She even double-paced through sections she thought she had already gone through before, but she was so on edge she didn’t care.
When it was clear she was still alone, and more than thankfully so, she let loose a tense breath and felt her shoulders sag. She still felt sore, but she didn’t need to hold herself up against any of the shelves to keep up. She was going to need to find food if she was going to continue to stay here. That much was non-negotiable.
That was when she noticed the book that had fallen off its place on the shelf out of the corner of her eye. It was a thick tome that had no identifiable markings on its face or back—hell, even the spine looked to be completely free of markings. It had a dark sort of energy that surrounded it—even though it wasn’t a person mucking around here she felt no less averse to the feeling she got from looking at it. There was a certain allure to it that felt wrong.
She felt a strange pull toward the book and found herself walking closer to it as it seemed out of her own control. The book lay open face down, and it pained her to bend down to pick it up—yet she strangely found a burst of energy in being able to lift the book.
She managed enough to flip the book over, the weight pulling most of the work of returning the cover back to closed. She sighed and sat down beside the book, flipping the bare cover open. The first thing she saw was an illustration—crude, but still true—of a metal city with a large tower reaching toward the heavens. The only source of color came from an orange-colored light emanating from the tower’s heights. She turned the page and saw drawings of all different kinds of characters, many of them were unlabeled, but some of them had the name “Pinocchio” underlined under them. Ally noticed that they were written by different hands. They looked like they were marked with a deep black ink that had been stained over several decades.
She started to skim through the pages until she stopped at one page near the end of the book—a scene is drawn out before her eyes that froze her still. She saw a nearly all black venue with a bright neon-blue lining that seemed to glow off the page and sitting in the center of the page…
She couldn’t take her eyes off the figure. The picture not only seemed to move as if it were alive on the page, but as the view circled around she saw the face of the woman centerfold with long dark hair that mirrored her own. She was older, but it was her. Allison Fae, drawn out, and seemingly alive on the page. She stared intently as if mesmerized.
There...there was no way that anybody could have drawn this so closely to her own image. There...there was no way. She felt…sick at the wonder she was feeling. She was absorbing information faster than she could process.
She saw scenes play out from her life but from some…different life. Some life that hasn’t happened yet. She saw billions of faces that she had seen and recognized then but didn’t now. She saw Felix…she missed him but knew that the she of here did not miss him. She hated him. She loved him, but she saw the way he acted.
She saw too much.
Her head felt like it was about to explode, and suddenly the thing she saw was her flying on the back of a dragon through the night—choosing to risk freezing and aligning herself with…
“Sakonna,” she found herself saying aloud.
No. NO. NO!
She shouted so loud she didn’t care if anybody else had heard. There was NO way that she was…that she would do that. There was…
The image of Arianna being taken away flashed in front of her face and she found herself screaming even louder. She grappled for the page in the book and aimed to tear it. It started to move slightly, but almost acted in resistance. It refused to rip—to tear, and so she pulled at it harder.
“I refuse! I am not going to turn into that! That is not my future!”
She gripped with all her might and felt a sense of warmth that quickly transcended into a burning heat. She screamed so loud the heavens above started to tear themselves at the seams. A light blinding as any started to spill from the book into the world around her. She bit down on her lip puncture again and kept that image of her flying with the dragon right next to Arianna being taken away.
“I…..REFUSE!”
All feeling evaporated and the sensation of life drained to an absolute zero.
~...~
2044
LUCAS Gray
LUCAS held the book and stared at the intricate drawings on the pages that seemed to be moving. He was speechless at looking at their movement. He saw Allison Fae as he saw her in his vision from the fragment. He could not see the dragon she was traveling with, but the look plain on her face brought a sense of dread, but then suddenly blinding white light erupted from the book—arcing out from the face that was moving and shifting on the page. It had shown a girl about Laven’s age, maybe younger, but in that face he saw the energy he had been following. Something deep inside him told him the picture was of Allison Fae.
He could have sworn it was her...it was a certainty deep within him. But before he could think on that deeper he felt an immense weight in his hands. The book in his hands had felt like it had grown to a gargantuan size, but in reality it was just getting heavier. As if it were being filled with thousands of more pages and it almost brought him to the ground as it grew and grew. It suddenly grew so heavy LUCAS couldn’t keep a hold of it. He dropped it and the book spun in the air as the light burst out at a higher intensity.
“Luke! You okay?” Laven called out.
“Yeah, I’m good, I found a crazy ass book here, it’s…” but he couldn’t finish as the light faded like a hose shut off at the source, and in its place was the same girl he had been just staring at inside the pages.
“It’s what?” Laven found him in the aisle intersection he was standing in and looked where he had been dead focused on.
“Who are you…?” the girl asked.
“You’re...your name is Allison, right?” LUCAS asked.
He knew he had taken the girl by surprise; she had a very real fear in her eyes on him knowing her name. LUCAS put up his hands in a defensive posture, “We’re not looking to hurt you.”
The girl looked around her surroundings with confusion. “This looks so similar...yet so subtly different. Who are you? Why are you here?”
“She’s the one, right?” Laven asked.
LUCAS took a deep breath and let his arms fall. “My name’s LUCAS, though you can call me Luke. I know I look strange, but that’s for another time. This here’s my friend Laven. We’re here because, funnily enough, we’re searching for you...well,” LUCAS cocked his head. “That’s not particularly right. Not you as you are here, now.”
“As I am…?” Her voice was soft, it spoke little of the strength she seemed to command.
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” LUCAS said, but then he got an idea. “What year do you think it is?”
The question seemed to take her off guard, and not in the way that kept her fear running consistent but gave her something to think about. “It’s...’31 or ‘32 right? I haven’t been keeping exact track since the world changed over.”
Laven now looked confused. He looked to her with a knowing nod as if to tell her in a moment. Ally’s answer had confirmed his suspicions. “I think there has been some interference...You are not the Allison Fae that we are looking for. And your answer just now confirmed that. I promise I’m going to try to be blunt, but because I think we can help each other out if we can come to a mutual understanding.”
She seemed confused still, but she wasn’t counting it out.
“Today is December 19th, 2044. The Allison Fae we’re looking for is native to this year. Judging based on what year you thought it was—what year you came from—the Allison Fae we’re looking for is about twelve to thirteen years older than you right now.”
“And why are you looking for...me?” she said, timidly.
“I think to make things easy for everyone we can refer to her as someone separate from you. Makes things less confusing, but we’re searching for her because she has something we need, something we’re both looking for—objects of immense power. And currently, she’s paired up with a force we’re aligned against to get them.”
Recognition flashed in her eyes. “The Creatures of the Night…”
“So, you know of them?”
Recognition burned to a fiery fierce stance. “I want them gone. They took…” her fire faded. “They took everything.” She slumped against one of the bookshelves, and suddenly LUCAS noticed how much strength had evaporated from her. She looked like she could collapse at any moment.
Laven reached out and helped her back up. She flinched for a moment when Laven touched her, but she let loose a breath and let Laven support her up. “I just don’t understand why she would work with them. I don’t...I would never.”
“Listen, it seems like you’ve been through a lot,” LUCAS began. “I think we know how that feels, if you need to take some time to gather yourself we can wait to talk about more.”
Ally shook her head, “No, I’ve had too much time not doing anything about it. I’ll feel better once I’m doing something productive.”
“Okay,” LUCAS said. “I think we’d be honored to have your help, maybe we can find your other self together, but of course I don’t want to force your decision.”
Ally looked at LUCAS as she thought about all the times her life had been ripped from her control. Was it because of her older self’s determination? Could such a thing change her own course? She figured she had already made her decision by standing against what she had seen within the book.
“I’m in. And you can call me Ally. I hate going by my full name.”
“It’s nice to meet you Ally,” Laven says. “We’re going to have a lot of walking a head of us, but we can push that back until you’re feeling more like yourself.”
Ally moved to question, but Laven simply shook her head. “I appreciate the vigor, but if you feel even have of how you look, then I’d wonder how you’re even standing right now.”
Ally looked at her with a second’s worth of offense but knew deep down it was true. She sank down and took in a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about the specifics right now, but yes...it has been a lot, the last few...well...I guess I can’t really pinpoint an origin. It’s just been a lot.”
Laven nodded. “I get it. We have some food here, but we can gather more—local wildlife isn’t rare round this compound.
Ally seemed to be surprised, “Place was as dead as a door nail when I came through.”
“Seems a lot has changed around here,” LUCAS said.
Laven swung the bag around and unzipped the largest pouch, digging out a couple of cans of processed pasta. “It’s not going to taste like a banquet, but it’s better than nothing.”
Ally started to tear up, “Thank you….you’re too kind. I can be of more use soon—I’m good with metal. Fixing things up, engineering tools and…”
“Don’t worry about that now, just get some food in you, and we’ll go scrounge something up for a better meal. We’ll spend the night here and get a fire going.”
“Inside?” LUCAS asked, looking to Laven.
“We can control it, and we have lots of kindling around here.”
“Did it kill you to call books kindling?”
Laven made a face back at him but couldn’t hide her chuckle at the end.
Ally popped the seal on the top of the can and peeled the top off until it hung off on its final hinge, opening it wide.. She watched the two of them walk toward the door on the other side of the large room and held the can out in front of her. Looking at such a simple can really drove home how strange her current situation was. Her life had come to this point, and she wasn’t sure anybody in her past would have ever imagined it could have amounted to…whatever this was. And yet, it wasn’t against her better sensibilities. This could be the start of something fully new—something fully healthy. At least, with some work it could be.
She thought to the her of this time—paired with Sakonna and the other Creatures of the Night. That very thought that she could work with those…sigh. She felt a deep hurt as memories of Lilly came back into her mind and she then thought to Issachar and Ormus. There were intense feelings for them beneath the surface that she wished she could lash out—but the only person she would hurt is herself.
No. She would not become that future version of herself. She needed to focus on making a life that she could be proud of.
I refuse to become that.