Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
But she couldn’t hear her beloved owls today. Couldn’t see them. All she could see were the rotting bones of the wings, breaking, falling, spreading more poison. Digging her nails into her eyes, she clawed them out. Blood coated her fingers, slick and iron bright. But it didn’t matter how much damage she did to herself. She still saw. She still knew.
Her owls, distressed, fluttered their wings in an effort to calm her, but still she screamed.
Until . . .
A single thread of the slipstream that glittered with black diamonds. It split off from a thicker line. The main line was coated in the poison and went into the knot that was the end of eternity, the end of everything. The diamond-dark one flowed into a future beyond which lay more endless possibilities, stars blinking to life one after the other.
Cassandra wanted to cup her bloody hands around that single thread of hope, but that wasn’t how her gift worked, how it had ever worked, was why she was always a little mad. “A single crossroads.” Her murmur reached no one, caught in the fires she’d set up to stop her thoughts leaking into the minds of others.
Elena, that mortal child turned angel, she deserved a little peace from the whispers of a mad Ancient.
So it was only her owls that heard her screams, her words.
For the archangels she held in her arms couldn’t hear, couldn’t listen, were in a place far beyond pain, beyond this world, perhaps beyond healing.
Closing eyes that were already regenerating, Cassandra fell back into a fitful Sleep. She would continue to listen for her charges and for the other. Perhaps one would wake. Perhaps she would glimpse a joyous surprise in the slipstream. It had happened before. Some forces were greater than fate itself.
For she had seen Elena alive in only a single fragile timeline.
The mortal had fallen in the arms of her archangel, broken and dying, in every timeline. But in every other one, she’d died. Vanished, and with her, all the timelines that rippled off her, the world a wholly different place.
A place fetid and of death.
A place so terrible that Cassandra had interfered. She’d laid breadcrumbs of foresight that led to actions that led to other actions. Lijuan had woken Alexander because she thought he would wake, but it was the Archangel of Death who’d set that chain of motion into action.
So many painstakingly laid breadcrumbs, so many butterfly wings in the ether.
Because while Cassandra couldn’t change the future, she’d learned that she could influence it dependent on which of her visions she shared. Share that Lijuan would rule all the world and it would be a weight on the shoulders of all those who battled, stealing their will and their strength. Share that she’d seen a scorched and devastated landscape and it became a horror whispering on the back of the neck.
So she’d shared other things. Dark truths . . . but not the darkest.
And today, in her madness, she understood that she had altered the future. But only to an extent. Because in the end, it had come down to a mortal’s will to live and the force of an archangel’s love. That she couldn’t change, couldn’t manipulate. That was where her power ended.
But . . . perhaps it was enough. Perhaps she could live with seeing the future if she could alter it even a fraction.
A fading thought as she slipped deeper into rest.
Yet as she did so, she saw one final image that turned into a silent prophecy: Lovers fall and lovers rise. The river stops flowing. This time will be the end.
The Beginning
4
The boy was born with a cry loud enough to startle the neighbors. They were unused to such disturbance from the home of two scholars known for their calm ways and steady bearing. The scene inside that scholarly home of stone and wood and a reverence of knowledge was one of even more astonishment—and of love.
Neither Gzrel nor Cendrion had thought to have another child after many thousands of years without such a blessing. Why, their son Osiris was already a man of some two thousand years! But now here he was, this boy so fierce and with such strong lungs, his wings nothing but a whisper of translucence on his back.
Gzrel cradled him close to her tender breasts, her tears overflowing as she pressed a kiss to the roundness of his cheek, while Cendrion took their son’s tiny, fisted hand. “Alexander,” he murmured, for they had already decided that their child would be named after Gzrel’s mother, Alexandre, who was the reason that she and Cendrion had come together.
So shy Gzrel and Cendrion had been; they would’ve never made a move that might threaten the quiet friendship that sustained them both. But Alexandre had seen their love for each other, arranged it so that they would be stuck together during a fierce winter storm—enough time for each to see the longing and devotion of the other. Now here they were, thousands of years of love later, with a second living symbol of that love in their arms.