I grabbed her shoulder and squeezed gently.
She looked up at me, sniffing through her bright cherry-red-tipped nose. Scrubbing at it with her wrist, she sighed deeply. “Gods, I’m a mess. I just… I guess I just thought…” Then she laughed. The sound was strained and full of emotions I couldn’t quite place. “All that talk of making things right. That I would show him. Show them all. I’m such a fool.”
She shuddered and hung her head.
Even more trees were being ripped from the ground that was being obliterated right before my very eyes. What had once only been a streak of blue in the sky was now a crawling mass, drawing ever and ever closer to our location.
The sand in the hourglass was little more than an inch high. I’d thought we had hours before. Now, I was rather certain we had mere minutes.
Deep down, I knew that when the last grain fell, I would be gone, and there was relief in that thought.
“I wish… I wish I knew ye more,” I said it slowly, opening myself up to the stranger who felt oddly familiar to me. “But ye are nay of this time, lass. Ye should go, while you still can. Ye should—”
She wiped at her nose miserably and shrugged. “Go where? Huh? To who? You and Red were my family. And Lleweyn. Without you two, there is no him, and without him…” She swallowed and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Well,” she said and shrugged, “there is nothing back there for me now. It’ll all be over soon anyway. I failed. I don’t deserve to live happily ever after, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
I sighed and shook my head. Words I didn’t understand poured out of me, but I knew they were true all the same. “He was always mad for ye, that boy. Just too damned stubborn to own up to it. Sort of like his Da, I’d imagine.”
She whipped around on me, nails suddenly biting into my bicep. Shocked, I looked down, wincing only a little. Then I looked at her. She was still, almost like stone. But her eyes were wide and gleaming, and her breathing was like the open and close of a heaving bellows.
“What. Did you. Just say?” she paused between each phrase, enunciating carefully.
I frowned, drawing a blank. I’d said words I could no longer recall, and glancing over her shoulder, I noted that the distorted line in the sky had drifted dangerously closer to us now. Our end was coming in a brilliant wave of spectacular killing blue.
The world rumbled with defiance as the ground groaned and heaved violently, getting sucked into the vortex of impenetrable blackness. A massive tornado that obliterated everything it touched was growing bigger and wider as it moved toward us.
Jumping to her knees, she snapped her fingers under my nose. “Don’t worry about that. Look at me,” she said. “Think, Ewan. What did you just say?”
“I… I…” I frowned and shook my head. “Rayale, I don’t ken.”
She screamed, wrapping her arms around my neck. “Oh my god, you are still in there, aren’t you? Oh my god, you’re in there. You’re still in there. Which means…” She glanced over her shoulder, face contorting into one of desperate agony. “I just need more time. One more day. I just need more bloody time!”
And then her shoulders heaved as she began laughing, but there was no humor in it at all. It was angry and annoyed. The sound chilled my blood and soul.
“Oh gods, it’s just not fair. I can’t stop laughing, but I’m absolutely miserable.” She chuckled even as tears slid unchecked down her cheeks.
“Lass, are ye well?”
“No,” she laughed. “No, I’m not, beast!” Her eyes were wild, and her laughter echoed madly around us. “I was trapped in time, too. Did you know that? For an eternity of days. Thought I’d never escape. Met a Gorgon once. That was amazingly weird. And then the smartest centaur in the world came for me. Solved riddles. Got us out of there. It was incredible. I shouldn’t have survived that place, but I did. I bloody, freaking did, and I told myself that it was because there was a reason. I wasn’t yet done, you see. I still had a purpose, a task to complete in this life. But never, not freaking ever, did I once imagine that this would be how it would all—”
She stopped talking and was suddenly blinking wildly. “I moved in time,” she whispered.
I shook my head. The blue line was nearly upon us now. The entrance of my cave was now gone, ripped out of the earth, and I felt the tug, the impossible pull of immense power tingled upon my scalp as the winds pulled at me.
Our time was at an end.
“I think I’d have liked ye, time walker,” I murmured, and she gasped.
“That’s it, Ewan. You’re brilliant. You’re bloody brilliant!” She laughed again, and this one was pitched with madness and full of wildness.
I tried to reach for her, to give her a hug, but she was scampering for the wall in the cave with the hourglass, filled only with a dozen or so grains of sand.
The light slid over my feet, and I felt the yanking, the awful stretching of my limbs, as I was sucked into the vacuum of obliteration.
But just before I winked out of existence, I saw her pull her flute to her lips, and then I saw nothing more.
Hades
* * *
“No!” I roared as I watched her get pulled into the crumbling inverse suction of a destroyed ley line. Hammering my fists down upon the table where the viewing orb rested, I screamed at the darkness, the only thing that remained of what had once been.
It couldn’t end this way. She had to succeed. Because if she did, if she could, then I had hope that maybe I could too.
I’d known the odds were stacked against her, known it was near impossible that she managed to bring them both back from the brink. But I’d never dreamed her foolish enough to stay with them as they were sucked into the impossible void that even I couldn’t reach through.
“You should have called to me, enchantress,” I murmured to the looking orb, heart shattering within me. Such a senseless loss. “You should have called,” I murmured, with my heart lodged tight in my throat, at the darkness of a destroyed ley line.
But then, just as I was about to turn and walk away, I saw a glimmer of light.
Seven
Rayale
The end wasn’t really the end at all. I had no form, but my consciousness remained. And yet without a body, I heard my flute playing. It was a guide, a compass that drew me in, and beside me, I sensed the stirring of two others somewhere within the void.
I wasn’t sure how I did it, but the music never stopped. The destruction of the ley line had been absolute, but I existed just outside of it somehow.
As did they.
But I wasn’t sure what to do next, and deep down, I knew that if the music stopped, we would be lost completely. My flute was the only thing keeping us tethered here.
“So many years,” the deep and ancient voice of the Creator echoed through the cavernous nothingness, making my soul flutter like a madly beating heart, “you were trapped in time. But you never went mad, Rayale, because you were never alone.”
It was here with me. With us. Though I had no eyes, I could see, and all around me, there was only a wave of black. There was nothing else. And yet, I felt its presence.
I frowned. I had been alone. I’d been completely alone. Alone for an eternity of ages.
Then a shape took form before me, white and cloaked in brilliance. A face, neither male nor female, smiled upon me, and warmth flooded all the way through me, making me warm again. Giving me hope.
“Hello, daughter,” it said deeply with a soft, loving smile that warmed me to my proverbial toes. I could not speak, but I knew that it understood I was happy to see it.
“You were not supposed to beat Baba Yaga,” the Creator said slowly, even as light began to pulsate gently around it, banishing the darkness as the first stirrings of creation beat to life. “The games, the eternity trapped in time, it was to lead you here, to prepare you,” it said. “To help you unlock your true potential. You are so much more than you ever believed, enchantress.”
There was a sky
above us where none had been just a second before. The glimmering figure moved nearer and nearer to my consciousness, extending out a hand to me.
And then its finger pressed into me, and I felt my vision explode. I saw myself back in time, not in the ley line with Ewan or Red, but in time itself, before Tymanon and Petra had found me.
My memories of that place had been of me in stasis, unmoving, unblinking, just existing, thinking endlessly about everything and yet nothing at all. But I was beginning to remember new memories, ones I’d completely forgotten until just that moment. I saw myself not alone, but with the Creator, walking alongside of it, talking, learning.
I gasped as I remembered in vivid detail all the memories that had been lost to me. Laughter. There’d been so much laughter. And warmth. The feeling of being safe and sheltered and protected and learning at its knees as it spoke to me of the bizarre and incredible. And as I remembered, the darkness became clearer, lighter.
“You pull at the threads, Rayale, just so…” It had spoken to me then, and suddenly I remembered that I’d watched it fashion a world for me from nothing. The Creator hadn’t just shown me. It’d been teaching me. I remembered seeing the Creator spin the light of time and weave a magnificent masterpiece of worlds, dimensions, and things beyond human comprehension.
I’d smiled, awed that something so great would deign to teach me. Why, Creator? Why are you showing me this?
Because someday you will need to know it, my daughter. Someday the lives of those you cherish will rest in your hands, and how well you learn determines not just their fate, but your own too.
This is because of the curse, isn’t it?
Yes.
So why did you allow this curse to happen at all? Why not simply take the seed from the Blue? Why allow all this pain and suffering?
Its smile caused a cloud of electric blue butterflies to wink into existence in a brilliant and metallic cloud of hovering satin wings.
Because iron sharpens iron. Strength only comes through adversity. Love can only be truly known if there is hate to measure it against. The ying and the yang of life is a delicate balance that even I must adhere to. But when it is over, the world may be slightly different from the one you knew, but you will all be better for it.
Then, oh so patiently, the Creator had taken my hands into its own and began to teach me. I tickled the threads of time as it had shown me, but it was so much harder than it had looked in its capable hands. Time scattered through my fingers like sand in an hourglass.
Its laughter caused a garden of roses to burst at our feet.
Perhaps, rather than tickle the threads, use your powers to gain an advantage.
I frowned. What powers are those?
Your music, Rayale. Call to time with your music.
And then it showed me how, showed me just which tune should be played, and I created a spark of life. The how of it was a memory that was lost to me at that moment, nothing but a brilliant blur of colors, but I remembered the feeling of euphoria that had gripped me, the sense that I was all-powerful, that I had literally created the start of new life.
You must stop now, Rayale, the Creator cautioned. You must stop.
Why? I laughed. I’m having so much fun! This is incredible. Indescribable. This is—
Dangerous. It is too dangerous for you to play with. Power of this kind demands a price from one such as you, my daughter. A steep price. It is the balance, you see. To create life means to take it from someplace else.
I had gasped then, losing that flicker of life. The sensation of pain and agony crawled over my flesh like hundreds of marching spiders. Why, why would you teach me this if it is dangerous?
But it had not taken my anger to heart. Instead, the Creator had looked upon me with undeniable affection and warmth.
Because someday you will have a choice to make. Someday you will face a crossroads, to give or to let go. And now you know what to do. But until then, you must forget it all. You must remember none of this.
I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forget you.
It smiled. You are never alone, my daughter. Not even when it feels like it. I am always there, you only need to listen…
I gasped, suddenly back in the present and shivering as every memory that had been stripped from me came back in a blinding blur. I remembered Ty and Petra finding me, remembered my relief that I was no longer alone. But I saw the memories different now.
I saw the Creator there. Saw it directing not just my path, but Ty’s, too, and the Blue’s. Saw it moving through time and space as it breathed and whispered into the hearts of us all.
Saw memories that weren’t my own, but the Creator’s.
I looked at the figure of white before me through new eyes.
“I was never alone.”
Its smile was serene and heart-achingly lovely. “Not even once. But you remember what we spoke of then? Of the choice you would make? The time has come, my daughter, to decide.”
The music continued to ring out, beautiful and haunting, keeping not only me but the other two souls firmly anchored.
“There is no choice, is there? I have to save them?”
The Creator shrugged. “Do you? The choice has always been yours.”
“Then tell me my choice, because I don’t see it,” I whispered.
“Be free. Free of these earthly constraints of flesh and bone and pain and doubt and sorrow. There is a world beyond this one, a heavenly one, a glorious one. Full of mysteries and light, of wonders never known. Where you can rest and be at peace. All of you. You have earned your freedom.”
And for just a moment, I felt a tugging at my soul for what it offered—that chance at rest, at entering a realm that had no pain, sorrow, or heartache. I longed for it with every fiber of my being.
I shivered.
“Or.” The Creator gestured, in a broad arm sweep, at our surroundings that were bursting with smells and new life. “You can save those that you love. Bring them all back by playing the lines, twisting and turning time to suit your need. But ultimately, you still cannot free them. The choice is still theirs to make. They must decide to leave. All you can do is show them the way. But time will no longer be an issue for you here.”
I swallowed hard, feeling sick and twisted in knots.
“You said there is a price to pay.”
“Yes.” It pulsed with light, and I winced. Even without form it was hard to gaze upon it for long.
“What? What is the price?”
It smiled, and the look was soft, almost sad. “Time, my daughter. You will have to pay in time.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, trembling all over as pain began to engulf me.
It breathed slowly, deeply, and the void burst with the scent of apple blossoms.
“You already know that answer, child. And now, there is nothing left to do but choose.”
I closed my eyes. I suspected I knew what would be done to me. And I wasn’t sure my vanity could deal with it.
But I did want him.
I didn’t know about this other place or if it was real, so surely it could wait a little while longer. What could not wait was Lleweyn. I could not wait another lifetime to tell him what he’d truly meant to me. What he’d been for me. I could not wait any longer.
And yet, if I did this… I might not be the same.
Lleweyn might not see the woman he’d once loved, but another. And if it really was about choice, then he might not choose me in the end. So I might give up everything and still lose it all.
I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and shuddered my breath.
“So much sacrifice,” I whispered.
“Indeed, Pyper.”
I listened to the melody that kept us trapped in stasis, but then I listened just a little bit deeper. And slowly, I began to hear them too. Like a song growing slowly louder until finally, all I could hear was their misery.
Ewan and his beloved Red.
They wept.
The
y cried for what they’d lost, though they could not understand what it was they had lost. They only knew, in a secret part of themselves, that they’d lost a great deal.
I clenched back teeth. I finally knew what I would do. What I had to do.
My choice was made.
“Even if he rejects me, I must do what’s right. I will play the song, Creator.”
The light engulfed me, flaring white hot and brilliant all around me and it felt like a kiss. I cried and fell into its arms.
“You were always one of my favorites.” The Creator’s voice was a mere whisper in the void, but I held tight to its words and thought of that song.
The eternal song of life. The melody shifted, turning light and airy and bubbling over with beauty.
Lights pulsed and sped, whizzing all around me in a colorful blur. Time was speeding by, going backward. Backward. Backward. To bring them back, I needed them to remember who they’d once been, remember what they’d once meant to each other. I needed them to remember…
And as the lights rolled by in a blinding blur of speed, sound, and color, I felt the price of my deeds tearing through me like claws.
A scream sat trapped in my throat, but I did not stop. I kept on singing. I rebuilt the ley line, but I went past that. Even farther back.
Back. Back. Back. To the very beginning of them. Then and only then did I stop.
And when I did, I saw the price I’d had to pay written upon my skin.
“So be it,” I whispered.
Untitled
Act II
* * *
Sadness flies away on the wings of time~
Jean de la Fontaine
Eight
Ewan
I was here. But I wasn’t even sure where here was. I was in the woods again, but not like the ones I’d been forced to walk through every night.