I made my way down towards the ship’s lower decks in hardly the best of circumstances, or the most well-settled of moods.
Truthfully, I wished for nothing more than that the night might end, here and now, that I might put the captain’s words behind me by the grace of a deep and untroubled slumber.
But I couldn’t.
Not just yet.
If tomorrow was indeed the day we’d reach Old Europe, then tonight there was something I had to do. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
So I creaked down stairs and crept past emptied hammocks until I found myself, once more, outside those lodgings of my now no-longer-quite-so-devout companion. Whereupon I knocked once, then again, then stilled.
“Enter, please,” my comrade’s voice resounded from behind gnarled, oaken walls.
It was time.
“It’s finally time, isn’t it?” Caleb muttered, as I traipsed into his chambers.
Quite right.
I nodded.
“I must confess,” he worried, anxiously itching at his right wrist, “I’m uneager to attempt this.” The Immolator glanced back and forth across the room, needlessly surveying it, never mind the fact that we were all alone. True to his words, Caleb looked just about as ill-at-ease as ever I’d seen him.
“H–so, how does it work, then?” He inquired haltingly, as I plopped myself down with a sigh upon the lumpy, hardened surface of his poor excuse for a cot. “How’d you do it, with Alyss? Physical contact, no?”
I rubbed my palms together as I glanced up at the Inquisitor now sat directly opposite me. A smile tugged at the very corners of my lips, an errant thought occurring to me just then. I beckoned Caleb forwards with one hand, whilst with the other jerked a thumb towards my lips, the offending, smirking organs all the while pursing in a thoroughly exaggerated manner.
Caleb recoiled, his jaw dropping, his mouth fouling into incredulity.
“You can’t be serious,” he deadpanned.
“Indeed, I’m not,” I replied, grinning broadly.
“You’d jest, at a time like this?” The Immolator growled at me, though it lacked much bite.
“What better time to jest?” I offered back, innocently widening my eyes.
“Easy for you to say,” he countered, stabbing a flawlessly-tanned finger my way. “You’ve not to suffer some stranger rooting around your mind, your most precious memories, your ev–”
“Are we strangers, then?” I asked, dryly.
“No, oh–you know what I mean, Taiven!” He lamented, pitifully. “You don–”
“Relax, your holiness,” I responded, rolling my eyes. “Remember, my only goal is to unlock your Blessing. Share my Grimoire’s upgrades with you. Maybe speak with it a little. A little. If possible. Figure out what it wants from you. That’s all.”
“Oh, is that all?” He replied, just as sarcastically. “I’m so reassured. When yo–”
“The sooner we begin,” I declared, silencing him through the use of a single, steady palm, extended over his way. Calm. Inviting. “The sooner it’ll be over.”
Caleb stared at my appendage quietly for a moment, a deep scowl twisting across his face, then sighed.
“Damn it all,” he cursed.
Caleb bit down hard, clenched his jaw, braced himself, and whipped out an arm with all the speed and dexterity his Immortal frame might muster, gripping me about the wrist so tight he bruised the tendons, then turning about-face and wincing in tense anticipation.
Nothing happened.
He glanced back tentatively, fearfully at first, then with a growing semblance of relief and hope.
“W–ah, was that it?” He exclaimed. “Why, that wasn’t so ba–”
“No, that’s not it, Sybil!” I snorted, much to my friend’s dismay, my cheeks quivering with mirth.
“Well then get on with it, already!” Caleb ground out, his perfect teeth grit tight, his bronzed skin flushing skin scarlet. “Priest’s fucking sake.”
“You have to–” I paused for a moment, fighting stalwartly against another overbearing grin. “You have to exercise your Blessing, first.”
Caleb scowled at me again, but soon shut his eyes and relaxed a measure, doing as I bade.
Despite having seen much the same so many times before, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe as I watched that fervent, torrid golden-yellow light start to seep from his inner Core, saturating his veins and flushing his muscle fibers, filling his frame entire with gaudy light.
“Ok,” I muttered, quietly, humor now replaced by an intense focus.
I called upon the song within me, drawing it up in great ladlefuls, guiding it forth as little fibrils of raw, sea-green Entropy. Whereas the Immolator’s own actions had been grand and brilliant, but rough, bearing little in the way of direction, mine were anything but. I pierced forth with all the ease, efficiency, and precision of some deft painter, or master surgeon. My many months of practice turned this whole routine from the nail-biting ritual it had last been to a veritable breeze.
The countless skull-splitting, back-breaking hours spent molding Draconic Blood had well paid off.
“Brace yourself, Inquisitor,” I forewarned, as our twin songs poised to meet. “This may sting a litt–”
Contact.
Countless unfamiliar sensations assaulted immediately and without reservation, just as ravenous and maddening as they had before. Echoes of alien synapses, memories of unknown origin, from a birth, and youth, and life I knew not of, yet which sought to force themselves upon me, into me, to carve their truth into my neural pathways.
But I was ready for them, this time.
My will was iron.
My control airtight.
//SILENCE//, I ordered, and they quailed before me.
The raging ocean bent before my will with but whimper and plaintive whine, an obedient hound all too grateful to have finally met its master. The collating power and Entropic might of eight full Shards, one Major, stood firm behind me, offering up their resources, their assistance, utterly and completely without reservation.
The foreign memories melted away like frost before the break of dawn.
Acceleration had taken me to the crawling world by reflex, anaesthetizing the room before me, turning it into a still painting, a perfectly realistic tableau. It froze Caleb’s expression of shock in place, fixing his tensing muscles. He was jerking away from my grip, no doubt subconsciously, but it mattered little.
By the time he managed to move an inch, it would all be over.
For a moment, I took the opportunity to examine our clasped palms, and to behold our twin songs, bright white-yellow and deep sea-green, intertwined.
Just as before, there was something so…beautiful, about them. So natural. So proper.
The way they twisted together, spiraling around and around each other. The way they moved in tandem, synchronously, coiling and curling around one another helically, as if partners in some endless dance. As if colleagues exchanging pleasantries and knowledge, steel sharpening steel.
I shook my head lightly, driving away the reverie. This was neither the time nor the place for it.
I had work to do.
With a grasp far firmer, far faster, and far more confident than before, I led my song steadfastly forwards, cruising through great arteries and betwixt spongy interstitium, driving smoothly down the aorta and piercing past the heart into the soft tissue below, where lay my destination.
The great, gilded Core of Caleb Conway.
Once more, I regarded it with an utter and complete fascination.
It was divine, yet discrete. Spiritual, yet tangible. A soul, cast somehow, into material form.
And yet…was it?
I’d never put much stock in the divine. The acts of Gods, in Mom’s esteem, merely appeared magical in nature due to our own absence of understanding. Ultimately, everything could explained. Everything could be rationalized. Everything was forced to obey the rules of our natural universe.
But then…what was this thing before me?
It wasn’t the source of our powers, nor our Entropy. Shards made up the former, and Entropy derived from existence itself; it was present in everything. Just like the song. Our Blessings were merely the tools with which we shaped it.
By that logic, a Core, or a Marble, or a Grain, would be most akin to a…storage vessel, of sorts. A repository. A battery.
But it wasn’t a battery.
It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. It was more than that, so much more. It was a physical location, or at least, a meta-physical one. I could enter it. I could place items into it. And, I could enter those of others. It had to physically exist, somewhere.
I was getting distracted, again. Such musings would not help my friend unlock his Grimoire’s hidden potential.
So, with bated breath, I placed ethereal palms across the warm, blazing sun in Caleb’s chest, and pulled myself inside.
Just as before, I was promptly immersed in darkness.
But unlike before, this darkness was hardly pitch-black, smoky, or suffocating. No. Instead, and funnily enough, what I saw reminded me the most of my own Trigger.
I’d been immobilized in deep space, trapped in an omnipresent vacuum. Gazing about me revealed the endless tapestry of an infinite night, all glimmering and glittering with cosmic finery. This time, no one and nothing appeared to repulse me. To reject me.
This soul was empty. Void.
Caleb was no Master, and there were no servants here to defend him. No defenses of any kind. At least, none that I could divine. I was free to do as I pleased.
Nor, apparently, was there any reason to search about. This Blessing wasn’t hiding, far from it. Almost immediately, I beheld my objective. My destination. Photo Emission’s true form.
It took my breath away.
Towering over me, even from hundreds of miles away, was a massive, floating sun.
Its magnificence was wholly indescribable. Its beauty was beyond words. Its color was an unfathomably complex melange of golds and reds and whites and yellows, with just a hint of purest sapphire twinkling from within its core.
All across its unimaginable magnitude, whisps and whorls brought richness and depth to its untouched canvas, plasmic storms that had raged for one thousand lifetimes. Curling tendrils of terrifying energy reached out from its surface to brush across the endless night, casting glimmering trails of radiance lightyears out into the depths of space.
It was nature’s magnum opus, the Gods’ first and most brilliant design. It was power, and elegance, and the source of all life. A heat more terrible than fire, yet more nourishing, as well. An energy less grand, and blistering, than lightning, yet so plentiful it would last for eons more.
It was heat, and death, and cosmic crucible, salvation, and sustenance, and without mercy, beautiful and terrible, and entrancing beyond words.
It didn’t need to speak for me to hear its name.
It was Light.
Within the deepest recesses of my own soul, something resonated, one tiny fragment of cast-off radiance detaching from the gaseous giant to take root among its siblings in my sea.
~~~
Words:
5. Light 1
~~~
And surprisingly, in addition to this, I detected from it…an agency.
I’d gleaned nothing of the sort from Alyss’s Blessing. That one might as well have been a piece of furniture. Although it, too, harbored a Word within its depths, one I couldn’t quite determine, neither Word nor Shard appeared sapient, in any meaningful way.
But this was different. Greatly so.
This Shard was more like mine, in that it possessed, at least, an intellect of sorts. Dim, faint, and barely present, but present nonetheless. I could sense its intentions, I could hear it in the song. It knew I was here, it’d known since the very moment that I entered.
It had allowed me in.
And yet, equally surprisingly, it appeared to be…nonhostile. Or at least, nonthreatening. Curious considering that, if there was one thing all Shards seemed to share, it was hostility.
But not this one.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
All I detected from the faint fluctuations in its latent rhythm was a slight frustration. An exasperation. There was something it needed, something it needed desperately, but I knew not what.
//IDENTIFY//
Its words emerged as a gust of ravaging solar wind, a roar of inexhaustible radiance, an awful fusion riptide poised to shred skin, ruin ears and send one tumbling for miles, catapulting through the vacuum of space. They approached me at the speed of thought, a single wave of livid plasma.
I stood firm.
I’d expected this. Caleb had already shared with me every detail of his prior interaction with this Shard. He’d told me of its overwhelming voice, its all-disintegrating aura.
But I was not Caleb Conway.
And, ultimately, this was just a Minor Shard.
I raised a palm before me, and the scouring plasmic force dissolved into a tepid summer’s breeze. It washed over me gently, soothingly, transferring data seamlessly into my mind.
I took a moment to process it. An identification request. Nothing I didn’t already know.
//IDENTIFY//
It blared for a second time, seeming both insistent and strangely apologetic.
I gathered its implication. It didn’t take a genius to do so. It hadn’t attacked me, yet, but I was still an intruder. If I didn’t acquiesce to its request, or leave quickly, it’d be forced to go on the offensive.
Errantly, a small part of me wondered if I could defeat it.
We were outside my sea, true, but still, I felt strong here. I was so much more than I’d been, last time I’d ventured into the depths of another’s soul. I’d yet to test myself spiritually against a true adversary since Sovereign, and something about the idea made me eager to try.
But then, I wasn’t here to fight.
Perhaps another time.
Instead, in a tongue warped from hours, days, weeks spent speaking the language of Shards alone, I responded.
As I’d done once with Alyss’s Nightmare, yet possessed of considerably more finesse this time, I reached into myself, drawing out my emotions, thoughts, and intentions as they pertained to Caleb Conway in threads of ethereal gossamer.
I pulled them up and out of me, compacting them together and expelling them a burst of errant radiation, of heat and light and energy and song. They traveled across the great emptiness between us with neither perturbation nor delay, bearing within them more information than could possibly have been conveyed by mere mortal speech.
There was a pause.
It was momentary, yet significant, the sun suddenly flaring in both astonishment and delight, clearly not anticipating my own ability to parse its dialect, before emitting yet another deafening eruption of scalding light.
//IDENTIFICATION ACCEPTED
IDENTIFICATION ACCEPTED
QUERY: .ISHOST? FALSE
QUERY: .ADMIN_PRIV? TRUE
PHOTO_EMISSION_FREEDOM061 GEN.SYS ACCESS GRANTED
WELCOME ADMINISTRATOR//
Immediately, its reply confounded me.
As far as I could tell, Photo Emission seemed to inherently recognize my status as a Noble Shard bearer, or perhaps mistook me for a Noble Shard, myself, which was unexpected enough. But more than that, the patterns and nuances of its speech were quite unique, even when compared to those peculiarities present in Fang, or Acceleration, or Alyss’s nightmarish servants.
It was less emotive, less adaptive, more robotic. Almost formulaic. Difficult to fully understand not just in intent, but in literal prose. If anything, it was reminiscent of that language I associated with Akashic, and the inner workings of their failed System. Or, perhaps, of what little I’d seen written in Runic Cipher.
I’d no idea at all what ‘ADMIN_PRIV’ might mean, nor did I grasp why this Shard referred to itself as ‘PHOTO_EMISSION_FREEDOM061,’ and not simply Photo Emission, which it was.
Strange.
Even stranger, I could still feel its frustration. From here. From miles away. It was angry, angry with something, that much was clear, but it wouldn’t speak. It wouldn’t tell me what, exactly. In fact, now that I’d verified my identity, it didn’t seem able to say anything, at all.
I licked my lips, and cocked my head to the side.
“Well, who knows?” I muttered. “Maybe it’ll be easy, for once.”
//Why are you angry at Caleb Conway?// I asked the Blessing, beaming my inquiry towards it. //Your Host. What do you want from your Host?//
There was another pause, longer this time.
The sun began to blink, first once, then twice, then many more times, flashing rather alarmingly in a sporadic pattern. I sensed its frustration skyrocket, as it seemingly fought with itself on what to do.
Finally, it responded with a particularly jarring, discordant pulse.
//ERROR.REPORT
ERROR.REPORT
QUERY NOT ACCEPTED
SYS.OUT.PRINT ANY {
Remember,
You must remember,
You must remember who you are
}
FOR FULL STAT.REP QUERY: STATUS
WELCOME ADMINISTRATOR//
My frown deepened.
Yes, there was definitely something more going on here. This Shard wasn’t normal.
Admittedly, I was far from an expert on the subject–but I’d worked with a fair amount of Shards by now. Worked with them up close. Intimately. In fact, insomuch as I could figure, I might well be the world authority on them.
And while it was mostly guesswork on my part until I could get a glimpse of Photo Emission’s true innards up close, from here it almost looked like there were…two Shards.
One reminiscent of those with which I was familiar, still emitting feelings of frustration and despair. And another, sutured haphazardly atop the first, limiting its agency, lobotomizing its expression. Almost as if it had been modified.
But, that was impossible. Only ADMINISTRATION could modify shards.
So, understanding little and with no other option, I accepted the Shard’s suggestion, pursing my lips and eschewing formal sentences to send a direct command.
//Status// I ordered.
And with no delay at all, the sun complied.
//STATUS REPORT
STATUS REPORT
TIC 23 568 451 295
DEV.ST CORE_03
C_ENTR.RES 99.97
C_INTEG 100
C_PROG 16
MEM.CACHE; FALSE
LEG.EV.PROT; FALSE
!WARNING! AI.SYS.CONN OFFLINE
!WARNING! AI.SYS.CONN OFFLINE
!WARNING! AI.SYS.CONN OFFLINE
WELCOME ADMINISTRATOR//
A slew of largely nonsensical mechanized drivel spewed forth from the Shard, reciting numbers and variables meaningless to me and blaring incoherent warnings.
“Motherfucker!” I snapped as a brutal spike of pain and disorientation shot through me. I snapped my eyes shut and grasped my temples tight whilst the series of shrill ethereal klaxons pounded their way across the contours of my skull. The sheer quantity of esoteric garbage was enormous. Incomprehensible. It made my head spin.
“Little shit,” I growled at the Shard from afar. “How was that supposed to help me?”
The sun, for its part, said no more than ever, instead peering anxiously out at me from afar. But that sense of thick frustration, of anger and anxiety that it habitually emanated was now tinged by a faint hint of hope.
And, as my mind unwillingly pored over the avalanche of nonsense, something jumped out at me.
“MEM.CACHE…” I murmured, examining a particular line of data. “MEM.CACHE…as in…as in, memory? A store of memories?”
I raised my eyebrows. Surely, it couldn’t be a coincidence. Caleb, and Alyss and I had all theorized that his Blessing was trying to get the Inquisitor to remember something, but…had we been wrong, this whole time? Could it be that Photo Emission wasn’t attempting to jog a memory, but rather, to share one with him?
I didn’t know, but then, I supposed I had no other choice. I couldn’t just leave, now.
“Apologies, Inquisitor,” I muttered, cracking my neck. “Seems as if I’ll be rooting around some memories of yours, after all.”
//Access…//, I commanded, then paused.
//Uh…memories?// I completed, a trifle hesitantly.
Yet the sun jumped on my request with all the urgency and exultation of a drowning man clutching at a dangled bit of string.
//MEM.CACHE ACCESS REQUESTED
MEM.CACHE ACCESS REQUESTED//
It blared, exuberantly.
//QUERY: .MEM.CACHE? FALSE
QUERY: .ISHOST? FALSE
QUERY: .C_PROG>18? FALSE
MEM.CACHE ACCESS DENIED
MEM.CACHE ACCESS DENIED//
The sun’s blue core flared an awful red for a moment, and I sensed a spike of sudden despair from the proto-consciousness it still harbored beneath its mechanical outer layer.
//QUERY: .ADMIN_PRIV? TRUE
QUERY: .TIC>23 568 336 721? TRUE
MEM.CACHE ACCESS; OVERRIDE//
I watched with a growing concern and anxiety as the Shard struggled with itself, fought against the unknown protocols that constrained it. It flashed erratically, red and orange-yellow and deep blue in an alternating and sporadic sequence, discharging great vents of Entropy into the surrounding absence of atmosphere.
Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what, or why. Had I made the wrong choice? Would my actions result in Caleb’s Blessing breaking, completely?
//MEM.CACHE ACCESS; OVERRIDE
MEM.CACHE ACCESS; OVERRIDE
MEM.CACHE ACCESS GRANTED
ACCESSING MEM.CACHE…
ACCESSING MEM.CACHE…
ACCESSING MEM.CACHE…//
There was a sudden change in disposition, some set of crystalline manacles finally giving way, and the star pulsed rhythmically, euphorically, like a madly-thumping heart.
Photo Emission opened at its very center to reveal a man made up entirely of bright blue light. The Blessing’s underlying emotions blared at me more desperately than ever now, conveying to me the feeling that it was absolutely essential this memory become known to its Host.
//MEM.CACHE DEPLOYED//
It said, with a vindictive, triumphant finality.
//WELCOME ADMINISTRATOR//
The man made of blue light shot my way as Photo Emission released a surge of terminal euphoria, and then I was somewhere else entirely.
I was surrounded by darkness, for the second time today.
But this darkness was not so absolute, or breathless, as that of deep space.
I blinked my eyes and found them respond sluggishly. I flexed my limbs and felt them do the same. Everything was too weak, too short, too slow. No Entropy responded to my calls. No Shards rushed to serve at my behest. I felt sick. I felt small. I felt as if an errant gust of wind might blow me over.
I was human.
The darkness gave reluctant way as my pathetically mortal eyes adjusted inchmeal, my surroundings lethargically resolving themselves into a thick series of overgarments, cloaks and capes and jackets of some thickly-leathered sort, though with subtle perturbations that made them seem just a bit too…perfect.
I was in a closet.
And, what was more, the cloaks were so large in relation to me that unless I was in some behemoth’s closet, I wasn’t just a human. I was a child, too. A very small child. A baby, almost.
A human child, hiding in a closet.
Why?
Why was I here?
Why was this the memory Photo Emission wished so desperately for me, or Caleb, to see?
I giggled.
But then, I didn’t. Not really. My body giggled, but it wasn’t me.
A sudden sense of vertigo swept nauseatingly over me as I realized, belatedly, that the form I currently inhabited wasn’t actually mine. Of course not. Most likely, it was Caleb’s. This was a memory. I couldn’t talk, or speak, or move about.
All I could do was watch. And listen.
I heard voices from outside.
I felt child-Caleb frown with the pair of lips we shared, grip the fine fabric of the overgarments tight, pull himself to short, fat, unsteady feet, and wobble over to the closet’s door.
Together, we peered through its crack, and saw a pair of figures arguing.
There were two of them.
A man and a woman.
And, judging by just how much larger they both were than me, they must have been adults. Their argument, though certainly intense, was bizarrely one-sided, too. The man seemed to be doing all the talking.
Or, in this case, the shouting.
He was tall and handsome, and in almost unbelievably good shape, with a messy mop of light-brown hair atop his head. He was dressed neatly, in an entirely normal set of clothes, and worried his wrists every which way as he shouted, deep, dark circles lining his narrowed eyes, a desperate edge to his panicked, back-and-forth stride.
He was the aggressor, yet bizarrely, he seemed afraid.
The woman was strange.
Her skin was pale, and her hair was long and dark. She was well dressed, expensively dressed, wearing an immaculately-tailored suit and tie. At her hip rested what looked like some sort of silver-plated ballistic weapon and upon her head she wore a lone fedora. Of course, none of this was overly strange.
No, what was strange was her demeanor.
Or, lack thereof.
For no matter what the man said, or how he shouted, she remained absolutely, perfectly expressionless.
“I won’t do it, Fortuna,” the man refused, his eyes flashing with a bright blue light that felt familiar. “I won’t. You can’t make me.”
But the woman with whom he spoke demonstrated no more reaction to his refusal, or flexure of his Blessing, than ever. She didn’t counter. She didn’t curse. She didn’t argue back at him.
She just stared.
All of a sudden, the man’s rage morphed into a mournful desperation. The many comely edges of his chiseled features wasted away, collapsing, crumbling into a hundred little lines of grief, and guilt, and weariness.
“Please, just…just please,” he whimpered, weakly. “If…if we were ever friends, then…then…”
The woman stared at him.
“This can’t be necessary,” he reasoned, desperately. “It can’t, I…I kn-I know, the Path is always right, but this is too much, I…”
The woman stared at him.
“I’ve done so much for you,” he growled, angrily. “So…so much, I’ve done things that…I’ve done things…”
The woman stared at him.
“Please, Fortuna.”
The man begged.
“He’s just a child. He’s all I have.”
His voice was heartbreaking.
“Please don’t do this.”
The body that was not quite mine, having previously made a continuous and concerted effort to keep quiet, let loose then an abrupt exclamation at the sight of the man’s abject despair.
With an uncanny, unnatural accuracy, the woman’s eyes snapped suddenly our way. The man’s more confused, sluggish ones followed hers, locking upon us, too.
They widened.
“Caleb,” he choked, confirming my body’s identity.
With slow yet efficient steps, the woman strode towards the door, and pulled it gently ajar. She demonstrated not a hint of interest, yet her eyes never budged from our diminutive form.
I felt a chill run down my spine.
My body’s gaze darted nervously towards the brown-haired man.
“Daddy?” we spoke, our voice high-pitched and wavering, one stubby digit directed towards the unsettling woman. “Who’s the lady in the funny hat?”
The man’s face shattered into guilt and pain. He looked away, blinking furiously, squinting his eyes shut so tight I saw the veins pulse about his temples.
The woman bent down low, staring at us with those dull, empty eyes.
“High Inquisitor,” she said, emotionlessly. “Listen to me, closely. The Maw is about to close.”
If I could’ve gasped, or startled, or drawn back in surprise, I would’ve. Somehow, I realized, this woman was speaking through time. Yet, even as I did so, a part of me struggled to believe.
I’d never heard of such a feat performed before. I’d never thought a thing like this might be possible.
The brown-haired man’s gut-wrenching grief was replaced, for a sliver of a second, with confusion.
“High Inquisitor?” He asked, frowning. “Who are you talking t–”
“Forget about the others,” the dead-eyed woman continued, ignoring him. Her words were quick and urgent. “There’s no point trying to save them. They’re already dead. Even Vox. Forget about them. Just listen to me.”
She was speaking not to the child stood before her, but rather, the man he would one day become. This must have been the point of the message, the point of the memory; she must have been about to reveal the reason Caleb was frozen all those centuries ago.
But something was wrong.
Something was very, very wrong.
This woman, whomever she was and for all her apparent prescience, had gotten something critically, crucially wrong. The Maw had already closed. Her words had arrived too late. Caleb hadn’t been the only one left alive.
And she was speaking to the wrong man.
Caleb was meant to be here, but instead she spoke to me.
She leaned in close.
“The one who killed your father now calls himself Metatron.”
Her dead, lifeless eyes bored into my soul from seven hundred years ago.
“You know what he is. You know what he’s done. You know what you have to do.”
But I didn’t.
I didn’t.
I didn’t!
I wanted to tell it to her, to scream it at her, that she was wrong, that something, somewhere, had gone awry. But I couldn’t, no matter how I tried. This had already happened. This was just a memory. The past was already set, and the future set in motion.
I couldn’t change a thing.
“Fortuna?” the brown-haired man asked once more, his brow beginning to furrow, his eyes to seep with a bright, blue light, in a display of anger now recognizable to me of his descendant.
“What are you doing to my son?”
“You know what you have to do,” the woman repeated, once more, drawing back. The memory was starting to fade, no matter how hard I fought to hold it together.
The background grew foggy, and the edges of her expressionless visage unraveled into so many tassels of smooth, ethereal fabric.
“No foe too powerful.”
Her final words seared themselves into my mind.
“No sacrifice too great.”