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

87. Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

This story had begun long ago, but this act of it had begun with Lili, that day she opened Robert's letter and set loose a curse long in the making. Kate had the feeling that it would end with Lili too - how could it not? If it was a poet who started this, it was only fitting that the story would loop in a circular shape, coming to a close with the one to first put pen to paper, and the artist who was her perfect match and polar opposite. 

"Eternity!" Kate yelled, "Eternity! It's me! You've been so brave, but I need your help now! Eternity! I'm here! I'm here!"

Only the sound of the wind whipping and the magic swirling through the ruins answered, for one terrible moment. Then, Eternity screamed.

.....................

Eternity Time had spent so long  being numb to the idea of life, and she had also spent so much time being numb to the idea of death. While, in those clouded years, she had never minded the thought of dying much, she had never actively wanted it. Now, however, now Eternity wished that the magic that she had consumed (stolen, like the vampire she was) would cause her broken heart to burst in her chest. She wanted to lay down beside her lover and let the Earth swallow them up, mingling their remains together until they became one, hiding them until, perhaps, centuries later, two girls with a happier ending dug them up and concluded this narrative. Eternity craved nothing less than the fate that had befallen Achilles and Patroclus, but all she could do was sob.

This was, she reminded herself, her own fault. She was a killer, and while she didn't care about the morality of it, she did care, she cared too much, about the fact that it was Lili's corpse laying still beneath her hunched body.

Eternity could have burned the world in that moment, she could have drowned it in her sorrows and let the universe choke with the weight of her pain. Perhaps if she were more coherent, she would have, but as it was, all she could think was that the girl she loved was dead, at her own hands. Though there was no blood leaking out from either girl, Eternity couldn't stop picturing her hands, which had once been speckled with paint and intertwined with Lili's slender fingers, covered in the deep red of blood.

"Eternity!"

The pink haired teen thought she heard someone scream her name, but who would be yelling for a killer? It must have been a trick of her mind, a sign that she was going insane, that something fundamental in her had broken the moment Lili took her last breath.

The mere fact that Lili was gone felt so wrong. Lili was powerful, she was fire and flooding and piano music playing to herald the storm to come. Lili was made of poems and magic, not flesh and blood. Lili was the daughter of heroism and villainy, of the last surviving Dire Magnus and the Keeper of Time. Lili could bend worlds to her whim, could break fate to her desires. Lili loved so deeply, with the force of all the stars in the sky, all the constellations she traced out for Eternity. How could someone with so much depth to her be mortal? How could Lili be anything less than a god, infinite, impossible to kill, larger than life, not this tiny dead thing? How could anything less than a celestial being contain the essence of who Lili was?

"Eternity!" That phantom voice called again, desperate and determined all at once, yet unable to penetrate the now broken shell (broken soul) of Eternity Time. "It's me!"

The voice sounded like Kate's, Eternity thought, somewhere in her jumbled mind. But that wasn't possible - Kate was on the brink of death and could only reach out through dreams. This, no matter how much Eternity wished it were, was not a dream. Besides, even if somehow Kate were here, she wouldn't be calling for Eternity. The pink haired teenager had forfeited any right to have Kate care for her the instant she drained the life from the Wibberly matriarch's eldest daughter.