More images of her. Ghostly, hauntings of her running through a forest, but one not as dark or terrible as this one. One full of towering trees blazing with jeweled leaves and a sky ripe with the light of ten million stars.
And laughter.
Always laughter…
But the harder I tried, the more confused and jumbled I became. My tongue was thick with ideas, but my mouth couldn’t shape anything.
I whined as panic started to crowd my bones. What was wrong with me? I jerked my eyes toward hers, breathing heavy and wild.
She patted my knee, and her smile was soft, almost sad.
“Oh, Wolf. I am so sorry I took so long to find you. But if you can’t talk, never fear. Lleweyn always did tell me I talked enough for the both of us.”
My heart jerked at the sound of that name, and a bottomless, twisting pain punched through me, leaving me feeling weak and like I might sob. I never cried, and yet the hurt of what I was feeling was almost unbearable. She tried to pull her hand back, but I latched onto her wrist, holding fast, wishing I could tell her that she needed to stay. She needed to be exactly where she was.
I could not be alone anymore. I couldn’t.
I wasn’t sure what was written on my face, but she was nodding and patting my knee again.
“There, there big guy. I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere.” She sniffed and looked around the small interior of what I called home. “Nice digs. You and yours always did have a thing for cozy spaces.”
She laughed, and the sound was nice. Pleasant.
Tears dripped down my cheeks. I swiped at them angrily, but no matter how hard I scrubbed at them, they never seemed to stop.
Her smile slipped, and she shook her head. “Gods above, Hades told me I only had days. Days, Ewan. But how in balls am I supposed to pull you out of this place if you can’t even string two words together? How in the Underworld is it going to be possible?”
I heard the pain in her words, and her pain felt like my own. I clenched my jaw, feeling weak, inept, and stupid. For so long, I’d only had my own thoughts to keep me company. But those were growing weaker, and the voices that had strengthened me when I’d first come to this place were little more than a whisper.
Her free hand curved over my whisker-roughened cheek as she looked deep into my eyes.
“Look at me, Papa. Are you looking?”
Papa?
Father?
Was I her father?
I blinked but nodded anyway. Her smile was so tender, so full of warmth. I’d not felt warmth in so very, very long.
“I’m going to share with you a story. It is a sad story, but it’s a good one too. Would you like that? Would you like to hear this story?”
I wet my lips. The sound of her voice was doing things to me, making me feel a spark, a bit of warmth in my soul again. I’d been so cold for so long.
I whimpered and nodded.
And a lone tear spilled down her cheek even as she smiled back at me.
“This story starts like all good stories do. Once upon another time…”
Four
Rayale
I told him everything of his old life—everything I knew, anyway. How he and his beloved Red had first met. The love that’d bloomed from within the rocky soil of incredible hate.
I spoke all through the long and gloomy day, my voice echoing back at me from the rocks as I fingered the hourglass with nervous fingers. What I didn’t mention though was the curse, or the fact that he and Red were trapped in this pocket of broken time. Hades had warned me not to share too much, but surely if Ewan heard a little of his past it couldn’t hurt. At the very least, it could remind him that he wasn’t a beast, but a man. A thinking, intelligent individual who needed to come back to me now so that together we could leave this godsforsaken hellhole.
Ewan had sat entranced, staring at me with awe and wonder.
My heart broke to see him like that. He was nothing but a wild man now, barely even human, no speech in him whatsoever—or at least none that he showed me. If the words were in him, he didn’t seem inclined to share them. His black hair, usually trimmed and neatly groomed, was full of weeds and muck and trailed down to mid-spine. It was matted and in desperate need of a cut. He’d always been clean-shaven when I’d known him, but now he had a long, thick, matted black beard, the tip of which rested on his crossed legs.
It was like the beast in him had superseded the man almost completely. He was far more feral now than he’d ever been, when I spoke, his ears actually twitched as a wolf’s would when listening closely to something. He drew scent from the air with his mouth slightly open, and every so often, I’d see his tongue tasting the air.
Hades had given me mere days.
My heart sank. How was I supposed to pull the man back out? This wasn’t my wheelhouse. I knew very little about shifters. My time with Lleweyn, though intense, had been far too brief for me to learn anything of true value.
Ewan needed to be tethered back to the world of man, which would be easy if I bloody knew where Violet was. She was his tether to the world. She always had been.
What in the hells had happened to them?
It’d been easy enough to follow the wolf’s tracks to the cave. The ley line had dumped me out just a field over. I’d known it was him when the wolf tracks had shifted to footprints.
But it seemed that finding him was actually the easiest part of this mess. Recovering the man he’d once been… that, it seemed, was far from certain, not in the amount of time I’d been allotted.
If Lleweyn were with me, he’d know how, I was sure of it. I bit my bottom lip hard, feeling a pervasive and slinking twisting in my lower gut. In other words, doom. I was feeling doomed.
Gods, what a nightmare this was turning out to be.
I still didn’t even know why they were here in the ley lines. True, a curse had ripped through Kingdom, but winding up in a reality that wasn’t much more than an illusion seemed a far harsher curse than most.
He was resting now, having shifted to wolf form not an hour past, and was curled up in the fetal position, whimpering and kicking out in his sleep much like a dog would.
Outside, the rain never stopped. It drove on and on. This place was unimaginable hell. How had he endured this for so long?
Untying the hourglass from my belt loop, I sat it beside my still-soaked hood and sighed. The grains of sand continued to fall without ceasing.
Telling Ewan about his life had done absolutely nothing to slow down the ultimate destruction of the ley line. The tear in the fabric of the time continuum—the amber glow along the horizon line—if anything, looked to be even wider than when I’d first arrived. It now went as high as mid-sky.
The sun was sinking. Soon it would be night, and it was definitely getting colder outside. It was nice and toasty in the cave from the fire, thank the gods, but the rain was starting to ice over and shift to clusters of bone-white snow. The swampy marsh surrounding us was piling up with drifts of the fluffy, twinkling stuff. I bloody hated snow.
Snapping off a section of twig I held in my hand, I stared broodingly into the fire.
I’d made so many promises to Hades—promises that I would be the one to usher in an end to the curse, that if I saved Red and Ewan it would turn the tide of all our misfortunes. That he’d just have to wait and see and believe, and then he and Calypso would have their chance. Their turn to be fixed and then boom, end of curse for all.
I wasn’t generally the optimistic sort, I’d call myself more of a jaded pessimist most days, but pessimism wasn’t going to win the day for any of us. So I was trying on something new. It was a thing called hope. I was hoping with everything that I had in me that I was right. That somehow by reversing what’d been done to Red and Ewan it would be the tipping point for everyone else. Not because someone had told me this, mostly because somewhere deep down inside of me I had actually come to believe it.
I glanced at Ewan, his swarthy features contorted as h
e whimpered and whined in his sleep. He had been wild, barely even human.
Dropping my head into my hands, I closed my eyes, feeling suddenly and deeply lethargic and overwhelmed by all that had happened. All the feelings I’d suppressed for so long were starting to fracture and crack at the seams. Soon they would burst, and I feared I might not survive when they did.
I was barely hanging on myself. But I knew that if I gave up, Ewan and Red were well and truly screwed. There was no one else coming after me. I was it, their last hope.
What a bloody joke. Me, the ultimate screw up that had ever lived, was now the only one Ewan and Violet and Lleweyn and all their other cubs had to depend on. Oh, the irony of this situation was so thick that even I could see it from a mile away. I was fairly certain that someone somewhere was getting a good chuckle out of it all. Whoever had done this to us was just waiting for me to mess things up, just as I always did.
It would be so easy to toss in the towel, walk away and leave them to it. But I refused to give in just yet. So long as there was sand in that timepiece, there was hope. I had to believe that, even as that small voice of doubt kept growing ever more vocal within me.
“I have to,” I mumbled sleepily and told myself that I was going to rest my eyes, just for a second. It’d been a helluva day. I just needed a minute. “Just. One. Minute,” I mumbled, and my eyelids slammed down like blocks of concrete.
My world turned black, and then I was sucked into the vacuum of oblivion. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare that I was falling into. It was something else entirely.
When next I opened my eyes, the world was bright and alive with colors that were impossible to describe, bursting with plants and flowers I’d never seen before in my life.
The sky above me wasn’t blue, but white—pristine, beautiful, and unblemished.
I blinked, stunned into shocked silence as I stared at a world that was at once alien and heavenly.
“Where… what is this?” I asked when I finally found my tongue.
“This is Nebesa, my home.” A deep voice, both feminine and masculine, rumbled all around me.
With a gasp, I twirled on my heel and stared up at a white-robed figure who shone brighter than the sun. But the light did not blind me, only brought tears to my eyes. The figure was so beautiful. It was all things and everything, and my heart nearly burst from my chest.
The light blazed, as though it smiled at me. And then suddenly, the figure dimmed its light, and I saw it. But I still could not tell whether it was a woman or a man.
It simply was.
It smiled, and I cried. I wasn’t even sure why. I just felt unworthy to even be in its presence.
I looked away, but the robed figure walked to me and squeezed my shoulder. “Do not fear, little one. I will not harm you.”
I still couldn’t bring myself to look upon it. It hurt too much and felt too good. The feelings were confusing and overwhelming.
So I stared at my feet, squeezing my hands into fists. “What… who are you?”
“I am known only as the Creator.”
I trembled all over, the feeling of being small and insignificant nearly crippling.
“Walk with me, daughter,” it said in its lyrical, enchanting voice, and I couldn’t do anything but follow its lead.
As we walked, flowers bloomed beneath the Creator’s sandaled feet, and tiny universes seemed to flow from its fingertips, forming stars, cosmos, planets, and inhabitants of all types, all within the droplets that puddled at its feet.
I sucked in a sharp breath, thinking I should not be here and I definitely should not be seeing what I was seeing.
The Creator chuckled, and massive trees sprouted on the horizon, causing the land to rumble as they shot like arrows into the endless sky above.
“I know this can be terribly overwhelming. Just try to breathe, little one. I do not generally make myself known, preferring instead to keep outside of it all and watch from a distance, giving you all free will to do and think as you please.”
My nostrils flared, not sure that I could speak freely with something so overwhelming. What if it didn’t like what I said and snapped me out of existence?
It chuckled. “Dear me. You think so little of me, do you? Tell me, why would I go through the hassle of creating you at all if I only meant to end you with a snap of my fingers?”
I gasped, shocked. Not that I should be. Of course it heard my every thought.
I could no longer see its face behind the hood or even remember the face I’d seen before. I simply had no memory of it.
I frowned. What was this sorcerer? Was it a dark witch?
The Creator laughed, and the sound was a melody on the wind. “If it makes you feel better to think of me as a witch, then I suppose I am one. But in truth, there is no name for what I truly am other than the one I have already given you.”
I blinked, and it smiled.
“I know I can be too much to process. But I felt I had to intercede, just this once. I owe it to the one I love so dear.”
My frown pulled down harder. “Who?”
“She was known only as Harpy to your kind. But I knew her as”—it said a word I couldn’t even begin to process, but the sound made me think of something endless and beautiful and precious—“and your world owes her a great deal, for she is the one who took the seed of darkness from out of the Blue herself.”
My heart hardened, and a scowl crossed my face. “So she is the reason Kingdom was destroyed,” I snapped before I thought better of it. Then I gasped, realizing to whom I spoke, and covered my mouth with cold fingertips. “I’m… I’m sor—”
It held up a hand. “Do not apologize. Your understanding is limited. You are but a babe, and therefore think as one. How could I be hurt that you should do so?”
I bit my bottom lip, sensing it did not insult me even though it had, in essence, called me stupid.
The Creator laughed, and giant blooms of the most gorgeous flowers I’d ever seen sailed on the breezes, causing the world to smell alive with beauty.
“Not stupid. Not at all, little one. No.” It shook its head. “You were right, you know, when you spoke of this being the end and the beginning. It is, for I trained you to succeed, Rayale Pyper. Did you think your eternity trapped in time was for nothing?”
I cocked my head. “What?”
It grinned. “You will see. Soon, you will see just how powerful you truly are.”
“You… you speak of my power? My way with music?”
It chuckled, and again, the world shivered with life. “Oh, my dear, you are far more than even you know.”
I dropped my chin, fairly sure it was pulling my leg, and I kept waiting for the punch line. But none came. It merely grinned as though amused by me.
“Love, Rayale. Love is the greatest magick in all of the worlds, and you are brimming over with it. When the time comes, you will know what to do.”
I shook my head, sure I’d lost my mind completely. I must have been really tired when I passed out. Still, my subconscious—since surely it was that—was trying to give me answers. Vague though they were, who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth?
“But I’m running out of time. Hades said I had mere days, and Ewan is sick. He’s completely mental.”
It scoffed. “Oh, what does a god know anyway?”
My jaw dropped. Literally everything, I’d imagined. And yet, the Creator did not seem inclined to agree. I saw its face this time, saw its smile, but as I tried to form it into something I could hang onto in my mind, it vanished again, becoming nothing but shadows and smoke.
The Creator was with form and yet without it all at the same time. It was all things. I was beginning to doubt that I’d truly imagined it because never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined something like the Creator. Whatever it was, it was greater than anything I’d ever known before or would ever know again.
It lifted its arm, and I knew it was time to go. Panic filled my body, and I clutc
hed my fingers together. If the Creator was real, then I’d do anything to learn how to fix my timeline. “Tell me how to fix Kingdom. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. Anything.” I squeezed out the word past a too-tight throat.
The Creator smiled, and I felt blinded by the sheer beauty. “I already have. You simply need to remember.”
I jerked, flinging my arms out as the sensation of free falling gripped me in a blind terror. It took me a second to realize I was still in the cave in the failing ley line.
I glanced over to where Ewan had been lying before I’d fallen asleep. I saw nothing but dirt. I frowned and rubbed my temples, wondering if I hadn’t just been dreaming. My heart was beating frantically, and my pulse raced out of control, sounding like a roaring river in my ears.
Had it been real? Or had it not? I blinked, looking for Ewan. But Ewan wasn’t there. All my questions stopped, and I grew cold from head to toe.
“Ewan!” I jumped up, looking all around, skin tingling and feeling raw all at the same time. Panic was eating through me like hell worms. Where was he? Where had he—
He was just outside the cave, in wolf form, trotting steadily down the trail I’d followed here earlier. I released the breath I’d not realized I’d been holding.
Should I call out to him? Follow him? Was he sleepwalking? He was moving through the snow at a steady pace that seemed to bother him not one bit. I’d always heard it was dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. Deciding stealth was key, I made my choice.
Grabbing my still-wet hood, I hastily draped it over me, shuddering involuntarily before following him, curious about what was happening.
We walked for what felt like an eternity through the blinding cold and snow. I hated my life at that moment. Like seriously hated it. My feet were aching. Even through the thick boots I had on, they felt like blocks of ice attached to my legs. Every step was getting more and more painful.
I wasn’t walking quietly, and yet he never seemed interested in me. He kept to his path with blind dedication. Definitely sleepwalking, then.