My Pa went silent, ignoring my words and brooding over…something, and even though I stood stock-still, my breath barely fluttering from my nose, everything else on the inside of me squirmed like mad, the sticky anticipation and anxiousness crawling up my spine like spiders of frost, piercing and degrading and making it hard to swallow. Then the tension snapped inside me as I watched the earth tear itself to make room for an eerie stream to flow through, dancing with things I knew, and didn’t know what the same time (Time is everything and nothing at all.).

Watch, he says to me. I come to his side, my eyes glued to the churning of the time stream.

The things we saw….well. Technically I shouldn’t have been able to understand the shit; it felt like I was looking into things that were taboo, because it was a paradox, wasn’t it, for me to see the world I lived in so altered by the past (but how can the past alter when it’s a record of what used to be--)? I watched the scene fly by my eyes with bated breath—and (shut up) I felt a blatant chill of horror erupt inside me when looked upon Drolgatha’s face (come, come comma--), at the strangeness of her red eyes, the maliciousness in her grin, the delight she had in the destruction that reigned all around her.

Turns out my Pa’s a cocky bastard. But could you blame him, with the brilliance he wielded against such a scary-ass hag? Because the Sparkmarrow in his grasp was a totally different thing than the rusted pile of bullshit I had pulled from the ice (--a record of what used to be--), totally decked out in every hue of blue and white light that could possibly be imagined by the eye. It didn’t look like metal, or a blade, or any of that shit; it looked like he was wielding the most radiant shard of lightning ever wrought by the huge metal smith in the sky.

My Pa went hard, and so did Sparkmarrow.

But of course it didn’t end with his eventual victory over SpookyBitch, because nothing can be easy and the world makes it a point to be as shitty as possible. By this point I was almost suffocating; I had been holding my breath for so long that I had started getting slightly dizzy, and when the world sped forward to our present era, you could feel a weave and a wobble in me from where you were perched on my head. Then we saw the glacier, sitting exactly where I had found it, where I had chipped into its center to retrieve a prize I shouldn’t have been able to find in the first place. And there was that strange red eye again.

I can’t even begin to tell you how horrifying it is to hear a GOD admit that they’re a fucking idiot. That’s what jumpstarted my breathing again—when he said that shit and I burst out two quick barks of laughter, both of them loud and bitter and unsettled and totally unintentional, but there they were, free and foolish and flying out of my mouth before I could reign it back in. And—no, I wasn’t laughing at my Pa. I was laughing at some cosmic joke that had haunted me from the very beginning, the punchline of which I had learned when I woke up one day, and I had grown.

But the laughter was gone just as soon as it left me, because it was misplaced from the start and the chill inside me was getting so much worse. He looked at me, blue eyes hard and piercing and unmistakable in their message—and I looked back, and I can’t even say what was going on in my own gaze.

*”We have to find her.”*

My mouth creaked open—empty of words, of air, of anything, and even you were frozen to my ear, petrified by the same ice that was sliding down my throat, piercing enough to rebound against our link. “Pa…” was all I could squeeze out—and even I didn’t know what I meant by it.

It was so soon after the complete and utter failure that was the Moonlit hell that we had all been subject to—a hell that not even god’s blood could escape. Did he not remember how I fucked up THAT task? Did he not remember the sacrificed my Toto had to make because none of us were competent enough to bring the Moon bitch to her heels before his blood was needed to be shed? But now here was an ancient threat that even put my Pa on hold just to talk about her—and here he was, looking at me with that look, that look that screamed and shouted and asked and demanded and expected and scrutinized and and and—

And it’s not like I had a choice, did I? (--whether you believe it or not, you are powerful, strong enough to change the course of history if you wanted--) It’s not like I could just let this threat slide by and ignore the shit with a clean and clear conscience. It’s not like I could look at those strange red eyes and sleep easy knowing that she’s somewhere out there, lingering in the darkness and in the hearts of all the people I—(--red tips, silver lights, blue eyes, gold trim and the heart of it--)

…but still.

“I’m 0-3, Pa,” I said quietly, my voice just as serious as his, even if it was subdued. Was it cowardice? Was it laziness? Nah, bro; that shit was honest. The Darkness, the Infection, the Murders—all of them had dropped on my watch, and I had utterly failed my part in all of those things. There can only be so many chances before something has proven its failure, completely and totally.

I was thinking for the future, and what it would mean if this was just one more thing I failed.







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