Chapter 18 - What Should Never Be
July, 1981 - Atlanta, Georgia
“If you tell it all, you’ll have nothing left to say…” Lucille Johnson
Cil arrived first. The fire crews were still hosing down Miss Elizabeth’s house. Cil kneeled down in the wet glass, closed her eyes, and prayed. After kneeling there for about a minute, Cil said, “Hello, Akina.”
Akina had materialized around the corner and walked up to Cil’s side. “So, you really let this happen?” An incredulous Akina asked.
Cil knew well in advance that this day was coming. Yet, she did nothing to prevent it.
“Akina, you cannot change the future. You can only prepare for it.”
The slender dark-skinned Akina turned her afro-crowned head away and stared up the street.
Cil stood up and said softly to Akina, “Don’t you think if I could change these things, I would?”
Akina remained silent.
Cil spoke again, “How many times have you tried to change the future and how many times have you failed?”
“Many times or, so it seems. Perhaps I am not failing. Maybe I am changing the future, but the time paradox is preventing us from realizing it?” Akina proposed.
Cil smiled, “That sounds reasonable. But, as someone who can travel back and forth in time, wouldn’t you know if you’d been successful? Simply go to the future, observe, return to the past make change, and return to the future and observe again. But you’ve done that, haven’t you? In fact, you’re in the past now trying to affect some change on your own future. But you’re finding that your own efforts are simply a part of what was always to be. Now you’re wondering if perhaps as a time traveler, you are somehow prevented from changing the future by some physical law, and now you want me to explain it all to you. You think that perhaps you are affecting change, but to some divergent timeline which you are prevented from seeing? And if time is indeed an illusion, perhaps this reality is as well, a common delusion between beings which exist between the synapses of a God we cannot see, even as I speak to you now?”
Akina lowered her chin, and answered, “Yes.”
Cil lifted Akina’s chin with her index finger, “Child, you can no more change the future than you can move a star off of its axis.”
Cil said this as a physicist and a believer. In theory the future could be changed, but Cil questioned whether Akina, or most any mortal, had the power to do so. Time was the directional property upon which the heavens were laid.
Cil continued, “The others will be here soon, so unless you want to answer a bunch of questions, you might want to get going.”
“They still don’t know that you can see the future, do they?” Akina asked.
“No, they don’t and I hate hiding so much from them.”
Cil hugged Akina goodbye and thought to herself about how much she’d hidden from Akina as well. There was no mortal to which Cil could reveal everything. Too much was at stake.
As Akina walked away towards her own future, Cil’s attention returned to Miss Elizabeth’s smoldering home. The soft June evening breeze carried some of the ashes back to the earth from which they’d come, that the circle might remain unbroken. Cil who knew the future as well as any mortal, knew that the losing season, at long last, was upon her family again. The loss of Cousin Rob and Miss Elizabeth were merely be the first in a series of losses. A sadness descended upon Cil. She clutched at the cross beneath her blouse that Sarah had given her all those years ago. She released it before turning to see Deborah scampering down the street.
At the sight of Elizabeth’s house, Deborah kicked off her heels and ran in a full sprint towards the burning home, screaming, “Miss Elizabeth, Miss Elizabeth!”
Cil caught her little sister and held on to her tightly.
Moments later, Sarah also approached the house, repeating “No, no, God no…”
Sarah walked past her sisters into the yard and towards the glowing embers. Since the heat and flames could not harm her, Cil made no attempt to stop Sarah. The firemen there had another thought on the matter. Two of them grabbed the star-laden woman to hold her back. In her grief and anger, Sarah began to power up.
Cil called out to her, “Sarah! Let it go. They don’t know.”
Sarah cried, waving her hands back and forth at first and covering her mouth, before turning to join her sisters in the grass on the edge of the lawn.
Ruth Ann was the only sister not to own a car. She was supervising an after school program at her elementary school and could not leave immediately when she received the news that the fire trucks were at Miss Elizabeth’s house. After the last parent retrieved their child, Ruth ran to the bus stop to catch a bus as she normally would before she realized that she needed to catch a cab. She had to chase one down. By the time Ruth arrived, the firemen were packing up. In the evening light, Ruth walked up the street to the blackened house from where her cab had dropped her. Though her three sisters stood in the yard, the whole scene was surreal to Ruth. Silently, she walked past her sisters, her eyes never leaving the sight of charred pine and oak before her. One word did escape her lips, “How…?”
Cil answered Ruth, “A gas explosion. The investigator says it was arson, but you know.”
Ruth staggered a few steps forward and then swayed as if she might fall. She shook her head from side to side as tears traced a path down her angelic face before falling down to the earth below. Miss Elizabeth was the mother Ruth had always hoped for. In the cold reality of a hot summer day, Ruth realized that there was still so much that was never realized between Miss Elizabeth and her. Ruth had dreamed of her children sitting at Elizabeth’s feet as she had done. This abrupt ending was so jarring that Ruth felt her own bones might shatter. She always thought they had more time.
Days later after Miss Elizabeth’s funeral, Ruth and her sisters gathered at Big Mama’s house. The old woman had been the matriarch of the Few clan since the girls were young. She was born in a time before Lola or Elisa, but not nearly as long ago as Uncle Paul. It was said that her birth father was Paul, or that perhaps her mother was Paul’s oldest daughter. When asked how old she was, she would only reply, “Old enough.” She’d been an old woman for several lifetimes when the girls first met her had become set in her ways. Regardless, she had opened her doors to Hosea and his girls. For years, they visited Big Mama and their distant cousins at least twice a year at Christmas and Easter. The house of Few had split centuries ago over a matter that was unknown to Deborah, Ruth, and Sarah. Cil knew but she wouldn’t tell her sisters.
When they asked she always said, “We don’t need to get caught up in carrying on crap started by a bunch of folks long dead and gone.”
The tension was particularly strong between Uncle Paul and Big Mama. To her credit, Big Mama never let that affect how she treated Ruth and her sisters. When Lola was alive, Big Mama repeatedly tried to get her into the drug treatment program she founded and ran. Lola would never admit she had a problem, much less accept treatment. Despite all the history between the branches of the family tree, Big Mama was the one constant for both sides. She hoped one day to bring the sides together again. Ruth and her sisters adored her from the weekend they first met her when they moved to Atlanta from New Orleans.
Big Mama finally passed away in 1973, Ruth’s sophomore year at Spelman College. Since Big Mama’s passing, the house served as a Circle safe house and armory. Each safe house around the world had what was known as a Watcher assigned to it. The Watchers were beings who weren’t powerful enough to be selected to be Circle Knights, but who served in other capacities. Within the confines of the safe house, their abilities were magnified. This amplification was the doing of the Circle Knight Elders. Just as the Elders had bound Elisa’s gifts before casting her into The Pit, they also had the ability to enhance someone’s gifts to a degree. Some of the Circle Knights looked down on these Watchers and considered them almost to be their squires. But, the level of commitment of
the Watchers could not be questioned. Each Watcher was bound to their assigned safe house for the remainder of their days. They were bound to the community, the further away from the home they roamed, the weaker they became. If they ventured too far, they would die. The Watcher assigned to Big Mama’s house was one of her numerous “grandkids,” many generations removed. Her name was Grace Few and her striking green eyes and blonde hair stuck out in the West End community during that time. When Big Mama died and the Elders approached the family about making her home a safe house, Grace didn’t hesitate to volunteer to be the Watcher.
The sisters, now grown, entered the home reminiscing of those days gone by. They hadn’t been in the home in years. The last time they’d been there was when they retrieved Athena’s bow which had been buried in the backyard. That was nearly ten years ago. After Big Mama died, Cil informed her sisters that this matriarch was not just a keeper of family history and heirlooms but of certain family armaments as well. Most were kept in a vault inside the house, but some were buried in the yard like Cil’s staff and Athena’s bow. After finding the bow, Deborah wanted to go on a treasure hunt in the back yard, but Cil demanded that they only search for an item when they had need.
On this day creating, rather than finding, was on the agenda. The sisters had agreed that, while Deborah was quite adept at mixing it up in hand to hand combat, she needed a top notch weapon for in close fighting. She needed a sword, but not an ordinary sword. Those were easy to find and just as easy to snap against the kinds of beings they battled. No,
Deborah needed a sword that would stand the test of time. She needed a sword that, from its birth, would be a legend in the making. What wasn’t discussed was Deborah’s seemingly insatiable need to prove that she was just as powerful as her sisters. The digging up of Athena’s bow had been an effort to fill that need and so was this. The Circle Knight Elders had deemed Cil, Ruth, and Sarah as “A1” knights; their powers were top-rated in effectiveness and scope. They graded Deborah as “B1.” B1 was higher than anyone on Big Mama’s side of the family tree had ever been graded which, in itself, was cause for some friction in the family. This perceived slight left Deborah with a large chip on her shoulder and led to regular discussions among the sisters about Deborah taking chances in battle just to prove the Elders wrong. What was never discussed, however, was the underlying emotional need for Deborah to somehow fix what happened the night her daddy, Hosea, was killed by Chase after he found her at the Council of Nob. Deborah battled the need to prove to herself that she was good enough. The problem of having such a goal is knowing when you’ve reached it.
The ladies moved with a sense of order and purpose even though chaos swirled all around them. Sarah had been raped just one month earlier. She’d not had a night free of nightmares since. Deborah was nearly three months pregnant with twins, but estranged from her own husband who had lured her sister Sarah into a den of wolves and abandoned her there. Sarah and Deborah’s relationship was more strained than ever. Sarah alternated from feeling of rage to intense empathy for Deborah every time she opened her mouth.
The Day of Reckoning, when the forces of darkness intended to open the Omni Portal was less than a week away. They’d not heard from Auntie Elisa for some time. That was not completely unusual, but she had a habit over the years of making contact with them before the big events of their lives. With the biggest of days looming, they’d not heard a word. Miss Elizabeth had burned to death just days before. Ruth was never afraid of dying, but she was terrified that she would let her sisters down. She was so anxious about not messing up that she could hardly keep any food down the last two days. These panic attacks were nearly disabling for her. For Cil, all that can be said is heavy is the head that wears the crown.
The metalworking was a respite for each of them. It took them back to their childhood days of working in the stable shoeing the horses. The metallurgy they were now performing was far beyond anything they even dared to dream of in their youth, but the sense of separation from the world was much the same. They started with a blend of metals – some were common, others uncommon. Sarah melted down a portion of each as Cil directed it into the stone mold. When the mold was halfway full, Cil stopped the process and took a dagger from her waist. She made a small slash across the palm of her hand and allowed the blood from the wound to drip into the mold. Her sisters each did likewise. With each drop, the molten metal glowed brighter still, illuminating the darkened room even more.
When they were done and the sword cooled, Cil took the silvery black sword and stood before Deborah, with Ruth and Sarah taking their places on either side of her. Deborah was puzzled for a moment before realizing what her sisters were doing. Cil spoke, “In recognition of your dedication to the cause and in support of that cause, we present this Ebony Sword, to you this fifteenth day of July, Nineteen Eighty-One. In your hands may it protect the weak, vindicate the innocent, and lay waste to the bloodthirsty.”
Deborah’s eyes moistened. “Thank you,” she said over and over to her sisters as they each hugged her.
The Watcher of the home knocked on the door and asked to come in.
“Sure,” Cil replied.
Grace stepped in and handed a large envelope to Cil. The envelope contained four plane tickets, six signed documents and a single handwritten note. The note was from the Circle Knight Elders.
It read simply, “All arrangements have been made.”
THE BOOK OF
GABRIELLA