CHAMPIONS (The Lost Chronicles of Eden, #1) [Published]

EPILOGUE: WHEN THE VISIBLE BECOMES INVISIBLE AND THE END STARTS TO BEGIN AGAIN

EPILOGUE: WHEN THE VISIBLE BECOMES INVISIBLE AND THE END STARTS TO BEGIN AGAIN

There’s a demon beside you right now.

But don’t worry, because where there are demons, there are…

Wait.

Solenn had said that before already, right?

So there’s nothing left for me to say about us, I guess?

OK. That’s fine with me.

So I’d just go back to watching over my charge. And it’s not the kind of “charge” that Solenn and Solomon had, not long ago (namely, me). I don’t have a “charge,” really, because I’m just visiting to see what had happened to the people I’ve left behind.

They are… OK, I guess. Father Andres has not mellowed one bit, but sometimes, I’d catch him looking far away, as if waiting for somebody to arrive. I get a small ache in my heart every time I catch him doing that. Sister Margie cries in her sleep sometimes. But when she says her prayers, I hear her say that she never really expected me to stay long, anyway. I had a feeling she had known I didn’t belong to this world. I miss the kids the most. They were my mini-me’s, the ones I was going to conquer the world with. But they’re children. They don’t forget, but they easily forgive. Their wounds heal quickly.

It was funny, how things panned out from beginning to end. And how there are many beginnings and many ends.

In the beginning, there was a boy, walking alone in an alley with nothing but his name and a note on his pocket and a pendant on his neck. In the end, that boy disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared in their lives.

In the beginning before that, the boy was actually a part of a makeshift family of adopted orphans, a loving mother who took in and raised strangers in her home, and a father figure who dropped by every once in a while to check in on the four hellions the woman he loved was raising. In the end, one of the children was sent away, the mother died, three children became soldiers. One of them defected, and the father struggled to raise the ones left behind.

In the beginning, there were seven angry, uncaring, violent, belligerent, sarcastic, dishonorable, disobedient, and disrespectful young men and women. In the end, they became a team. They became Champions.

Not perfect. Far from it, actually. and they’re going to fail many other times, because when you put together an alpha with an anger-management problem, another Alpha with a sister complex coupled with failure and trust issues, a trigger-happy Zeta, a Beta with approval and worth issues, another Beta whose hobby is to aggravate volatile situations and emotions, and a healer who, upon going back to the Citadel, had surreptitiously gone back to petty thievery, fake potions and conning, they are not just a team. They’re a chemical combustion waiting to happen.

They’ve still got a long way to go before they could win this war. They’ve closed Gate Pandora, but the Sword of Sargatanas is still with Xandros. War is still brewing. The end is still coming.

They’ve failed, yes, but they’re still alive. and as long as they’re still alive, then there’s still hope.

They’d live to fight another day.

And what was I doing, becoming all serious and referring to us in third-person? Must be all that reading I did to catch up on Cielterran History. I had to take courses in the Initiative to be on par with the other Champions.

Well. I’m not a Champion, but after everything that has happened to us?

I feel like one.

In the end, that’s all that really matters, right?