Sparrow found himself surrounded by total, endless darkness, and he recognized that he was in that familiar place where he had last seen Grey’s shadow. The trees were no longer visible as they had been the last time he was here, but he looked around for Grey’s shadow anyway. If she was there, he could not see her.

As Sparrow was taking in his surroundings, he noticed a glow out in the darkness and began walking towards the glow instinctively. As he drew closer, he could see that the glow was coming from a tree of some kind. The tree was shorter than the great towering giants he had seen the last time he was here. Then he realized the glow wasn’t coming from the tree, but from hundreds of flower buds with four white petals around each bud.

Instead of the endless nothing that had been beneath the other trees, the ground was a carpet of lush green grass dotted with wildflowers. From the direction Sparrow had come from, the grass only reached a few paces into the darkness, but it appeared to be slowly expanding with the spreading glow of the tree. In the other direction, the greenery stretched out in front of him in a great landscape. Twenty paces in that direction there was a second glowing tree, and twenty paces to the left, the right, and further inward were additional glowing trees. This pattern repeated as far as he could see as if the trees were one giant, synchronized, network pushing the darkness back.

The trees continued to follow this pattern by spreading outward in circles with even spaces between them. In the distance, Sparrow could even see rolling hills covered in grass and dotted with glowing trees which somehow maintained their perfect expanding pattern, all working together to create a net of light that was pushing the darkness away.

There were also normal trees dotting the landscape between the glowing trees, all significantly taller than their glowing cousins, but not clustered enough to block their glow from accomplishing its task. Sparrow had a feeling that eventually the glowing trees would no longer be needed to push against the darkness, and the landscape would instead contain a lush forest of giant leaf trees.

He found himself walking among the greenery with a smile on his face, basking in the glow from the trees. As he walked, he had experiences and understandings from ages past come into his mind. It was as if the glow of these trees was lifting part of the cloud that had been over him these past seven months. He remembered his people coming to this world as explorers, looking down on a planet on the verge of extinction, containing only a few species of giant four-legged beasts still clinging to life. He remembered the call for volunteers to step forward, to become one with the life on this planet, to use their enhanced abilities to save this world from becoming a barren wasteland. He remembered stepping forward alongside hundreds of others, all leaping at the chance to save a world and create new life. Of these hundreds of volunteers, he and nine others had been chosen to be the guardians of this world.

Ultaris remembered that the guardians were supposed to work together towards a higher goal, a goal that had been placed under his stewardship. As the Guardian of Time, his job had been to look into the future and see situations that could be avoided or embraced, depending on what was best for the well-being of the planet and its populations. He would use this information to commission Life to create a lifeform that could adapt to the upcoming event.

Life would use her knowledge to create a lifeform worthy of the task assigned to it, ensuring it was placed in an appropriate environment to fulfill the purpose of its creation. The five elemental’s job was to show the lifeform how to stay alive by using their various elements. Light and Darkness gave the lifeform order, structure, and energy. When the lifeform died, Death was to recycle its body and essence into the materials necessary to start the process over again with new life forms.

He remembered slowly forgetting about all of this. Forgetting about his stewardship and origins and history. He remembered pairing off with Life. He remembered Death becoming a despised creature which his mate called a ‘bottom feeder,’ a name that she had not deserved.

As he walked, basking in the memories and the new understandings that had been absent from his life, he could see the pattern of expanding trees coming to a focus that glowed brightly in the distance. He focused on reaching that glow and had a memory come into his mind, a memory of distance and how to bend it. With a smile on his face, he closed his eyes while thinking of being in that glow. A moment later he opened his eyes to find himself standing in its center.

All around him was a perfect circle of trees, all with the same glowing flower buds, and an open expanse of flowers in the circle that the trees had created. Standing in the center was a humanoid woman with green skin, black eyes, and white hair. She was wearing a white robe and was standing before him with a warm smile on her face.

“Now THIS is the Guardian of Time! You have remembered a part of who you are, Ultaris, and it suits you” she said with enthusiasm.

Sparrow had more memories flooding into his mind, memories of an existence he had all but forgotten. They had different bodies then, dragons the humans had called them, but he would have recognized his mate no matter what form she chose to take.

Sparrow felt the memory of her death come crawling back into his mind as he looked upon her. He remembered being held helpless by Donner, Ensunden, Brise, Stein, and Regnan, the guardians of lightning, fire, wind, stone, and water. He remembered watching her die, feeling a part of himself slip into madness as her body melded with the body of Sterben, the guardian of Death, sinking into the earth where they had fallen.

He remembered trying to break the rules of time, rules that only he could understand in the first place, to turn back the clock and stop her from dying. He remembered wanting to kill the other Guardians that had held him at bay. He remembered wanting to kill the humans that had murdered his children, causing the fight between Life and Death in the first place. He remembered casting the most powerful spell this world had ever seen.

Sparrow looked at her smiling face, and the grief he had been holding onto for centuries began to fade away. He let go of the past, he let go of the pain, and he took a step forward to embrace his mate … but stopped when he saw a look of hesitation fleet across her face. The grass and trees seemed to bend away from him when her hesitation appeared as if they could sense their master’s emotions and was reacting to them.

“Weram zetarth Ihrmane Lebine?” Sparrow asked in a language he had forgotten he knew.

He shook his head and repeated himself in the common tongue she had been using, not understanding why he felt the need to repeat what he knew she had understood.

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“Why do you hesitate, Lebine?” he asked again, using her true name which only the guardians had known.

With tears on her face, she looked at him with uncertainty spread across her face. She answered his question with passion and righteous indignation, made all the more powerful because of the soft and controlled way in which she spoke.

“I see you standing before me, changed in ways that you could never see now that the changes have taken place. Yet I do not know which Ultaris you are. Are you the beast that went mad while imprisoned for thousands of years? The grief-stricken god who tried to destroy the history of this world? Who tried to wipe out an entire race of my creations, and who trapped me in the twisted void of his immortality when I stopped him!”

She may not have been shouting, but the greenery all around Sparrow reacted to her emotions as she spoke. The trees all began to quiver their leaves, in fear or anger he could not tell. The grass around Lebine seemed to lay flat as if cowering in the face of her anger, and a ring of thick black-petaled rose bushes shot out of the earth in a waist-high circle around Sparrow with massive thorns covering their stems. There was a long pause where they stared into each other's eyes, pain evident on both of their faces, pain that they both knew he had caused.

“Or … are you the wide-eyed boy looking upon the world in rebirthed innocence, blind to the manipulations of some you call 'friend'? Would you save them now if you had the chance? Or stay here with me ... leaving the world in their hands?” she asked softly, almost in a whisper.

“What do you mean by ‘save them’?” Sparrow asked firmly.

Lebine flung an arm out, and two of the trees in the outer circle of the grove started weaving their branches together. It only took a moment for them to form a circular viewing portal. The rose bushes had sunk back into the earth and disappeared as if they had never been there in the first place, allowing Sparrow to walk to the portal.

The portal view was slanted slightly downward and positioned high in the air over a massive meadow with an empty crater in its center. Ultaris immediately recognized the place as where he had tried to change the world. As he looked down at the crater, the familiarity of it brought memories unbidden to his mind. He remembered that the massive time spell he had been attempting to cast had started to fail and that he knew he was not strong enough to finish it on his own. He weighed his options, and in his desperation, he thought of using a part of his own essence to fuel the spell. He remembered feeling doubt about that plan. Feeling doubt at the thought of killing the humans. Doubt at the thought of altering history, at revenge, at being with Lebine again. Doubt that she could be restored, that she would remember what he had done and reject him, and doubt that he could even break the rules of time.

He had been so tired of the doubts! He remembered grabbing onto his doubts like they were weeds, and compartmentalizing himself using all of his doubts as a starting point for what he was willing to sacrifice. He had kept pulling at himself, digging out everything that he thought connected to his doubts, and he funneling all of it into a box in his mind. Eventually, he realized that he was pulling out parts of himself that he shouldn’t have been giving up. Parts that made him know good from evil and right from wrong, but it was too late to stop. All he could do was hope that the time spell would reverse the sacrifice he was making without creating a paradox. Logic told him that was impossible, so he fed that into the fuel of the spell as well.

Sparrow remembered sensing a massive force of energy barreling towards him from the sky, and knowing that he was, ironically enough, out of time. He remembered quickly creating a template for the spell he had been casting, so that all of the progress he had made towards casting the spell could be saved for a future moment. He tried throwing himself, his sacrifice, and the spell-marker into the future as the bolt of energy intensified just before slamming into him. The next thing he remembered was spinning uncontrollably through the air, and then waking up in a desert next to what he now knew was the template for his own spell.

The portal in front of Sparrow shimmered slightly, and he realized that he had been looking at a still image, but was now looking at what was actually taking place in the meadow at this time. The aftermath of a massive battle could be seen strewn across the crater with countless mangled bodies dotting the battlefield. He could see Izreea, Grey, Myrum, and Colson sitting on the ground next to great blocks of carved ice. They looked absolutely exhausted.

Floating in the air near the party was what appeared to be a male, human, lich holding a blue staff runed with the power of ice. With part of his essence restored, Sparrow could see that the lich was not the true form of whoever’s body this was, and that there was another entity temporarily corrupting the body. Near the group of adventures and the lich was a Kanidian. She was conversing with a man who was covered in paint from the waist up, while another man covered in a charred back substance approached them. Sparrow was far away from them, but it almost looked like the second man had smoke floating off of his skin. Sparrow knew exactly who they were.

“Why are Donner and Regnan in human bodies?” Sparrow asked as he turned back to face Lebine.

“They are not. They have been pretending to be two males that died in childbirth from a triplet pregnancy for half a century, hiding in plain sight so your other part could not send his Jackals after them” she said with a sigh.

“His Jackals? You mean Ultaris, the imprisoned one, is somehow responsible for creating the Jackals?” Sparrow asked with disbelief.

“A story for another time. Are you ready to decide?” she asked cautiously.

Sparrow remembered how she had reacted to him the last time he had tried approaching her, so he very slowly walked across the grove as to not startle her. She was shorter than he had been expecting her to be, or he had grown taller, he was not sure which. He came within a pace of her and held his hands out in front of him, letting her decide if she was willing to take them or not. A tear started trickling down her cheek, and he was not sure if she was sad or happy, but she took his hands in hers and waited for him to speak.

“I remember your death. I remember wanting to end the world to bring you back, to kill to bring you back ... and I remember rejecting those thoughts. I am not Ultaris. I may be but a product of his doubts, senses, and forgotten morals … yet I will take that description over being blamed for any of the decisions he made since the moment he decided to end the world” Sparrow said firmly, staring at her beautiful green hands until the end when he lifted his eyes to meet hers.

There was a wide smile and tears of joy on her face as she threw herself into his arms.

“I now see that I have more of the wide-eyed boy with all of his preferable doubts and forgotten morals standing before me than I thought” Lebine said into his chest as they both fell to their knees, holding one another in a long overdue embrace. A circle of flowers sprouting from the ground to wrap themselves around the pair as the glowing trees swayed as if in applause, all reacting to the emotions of their master.

“Sparrow … I’ll have to get used to that name … there is so much you still do not understand, and so much I want to tell you, but you are out of time” she said.

The world around him blurred slightly as his vision seemed to fail him. The sensation only lasted a moment and was gone.

“You can stay here if you wish, even incomplete as you are, and we can find a way to go home together. However, your companions will perish if you do not help them” she said while putting a hand on his cheek.

The world blurred harder this time, and it took longer for his vision to come back into focus, but when it did, he was still staring into her beautiful pitch-black eyes with her hand on his cheek. A tear rolled down his face, and she knew he was going to leave her to save his friends. He expected her to be upset, but her face beamed brightly with a wide smile, happy that he had made the decision she had hoped he would make, putting others before himself like a true guardian.

“I’m not going anywhere Mies Seibas, I will be right here. Now go. Go save the next generation of guardians” she said as she pulled his head down to kiss him for the first time in ages.

Sparrow could feel the world blur harder than it had before, and this time it did not stop.