Time's Tragedies- The Books Of Beginning [2]

79. Resolve Of A Wibberly

The rain was cold and violent, not at all the pleasant summer shower that would be expected around this time of year, and water quickly pooled on the pavement and in the sidewalk cracks. It felt as icy and purposeful as the blonde adolescent slipping unnoticed through the crowd, her eyes flashing poison green, as if they had all the anger in the world contained in their depths.

Lili hadn't been able to follow Robert - she didn't know where he went or even what type of magic he had used to escape. It seemed to be one of his concoctions made from the work of others. So, faced with this roadblock that she did not yet know how to break, she went to New York. The city was, after all, where all things stemmed - it was where her parents met, it was where their lives were ruined, it had seen time travel and devastation and crime and magic. It was where she had met Eternity.

Things were coming full circle, Lili thought, unbothered by the cold of the rain. She had fled to New York city when Robert first emerged as a threat to her life, and now she had returned to the city to plot her next move before hunting Robert down and teaching him the true meaning of pain. There was a symmetry involved, a poetry that Lili couldn't help but feel made this path the right one.

It was in a cemetery that she found herself, an old part of the magical quarter filled with headstones and plaques. Long forgotten names etched in stone, not the names of the rich and famous but the names of the ordinary yet extraordinary citizens, people from all across the globe, come to chase their dreams in the city that never sleeps. Lili's shoes squelched against the wet ground as a distant, month old memory from that very first day she met Eternity surfaced.

"How lost was I about to be if I turned down that street to find you?"

"Very lost. You'd have gone into one of the oldest sections of this place. You'd have found the magic quarter graveyard but no me."

Full circle indeed.

Lili wondered if this was the same graveyard that her grandmother - her dad's mother - had been buried in. There was no real way to tell, seeing as the seer's grave had been left unmarked, mostly because her only next of kin was a mere six years old when she died, and there was no money to pay for a headstone anyways. Still, it was just another piece slotting into place, if her grandmother's bones really did rest beneath the earth she tread upon.

Things were nearing their end, Lili knew that in her very soul. Except she was done letting fate, or Robert Lloyd, or anyone else choose how the story would close. There was only one ending she would accept - the ending she would make, the ending where Robert died screaming and her family was safe at last. 

She was the hunter now, and he was the prey. Lili found she liked the reversal of roles very much indeed. There was something so satisfying about knowing that the man she had spent months looking over her shoulder for now feared her. 

Lili had never wanted to be feared before. She hadn't thought herself that kind of person. Indeed, she had spent a great deal of time wanting to not be feared, not for her unstable magic, and not for the blood that ran in her veins. But it turned out that slipping into the role of the aggressor came easy to her, like sliding on a familiar pair of gloves. A pair of gloves that made her feel powerful, that made her feel in control of her own life for the first time in ages. It turned out that giving in to the rage and the dark desires she had been trying so hard to suppress felt good. 

(Lili had been eight years old when Michael took her out to see a new museum on the history of Dwarfish craftsmanship, not because she was interested in it, but because her brother and sister both had the flu and her parents wanted her out of the house so that way she didn't catch it. Lili had paid no attention to the axes her uncle fawned over, but she paid attention to the streets of Loris as they walked around together, Michael telling her some funny story about Wilamena making several costume changes during a royal Elvish event, while she herself munched on a warm, soft pretzel. She'd finished the street food snack and wiped her fingers on her pants, beaming at all the little stores selling artistic items and magical trinkets or supplies, enjoying the Mediterranean breeze blowing through her hair.