by Elicia Hyder
“Alis cak esta!” Reuel yelled.
“Come on,” I said to Samael.
Anya and Fury joined us as we walked to meet him. At the top of the hill, I froze when I saw what he’d found.
A gravestone.
Fury’s gravestone, chipped around the edges and covered with moss.
I laughed, just like I had in Theta’s vision. “Oh my god. They really thought you were dead.” I knelt down and traced her name with my fingertips.
Fury walked past me and knelt down to pull some vines away from the ground. “There’s one for Flint. Is his body buried here?”
I felt the presence of death in the ground. “He is.”
“Warren, your marker is here too. And Reuel’s.” Anya was pulling at the vines. “Hey, here’s mine.”
“I guess you weren’t the only one who thought we wouldn’t make it,” I said to Samael.
He looked dazed. Like he wanted to speak but couldn’t.
I stood. “I guess we’d better get word back to Eden that I’ve returned. Can you take—” His bewilderment gave me pause. “Samael?”
“Whatever happened down there…” Emotion choked him.
“What is it?” I asked as all the dread that had preceded this mission returned like a tidal wave.
“Warren, the spirit line is gone.”
I fell back a step.
“We’re completely cut off from Eden.”
“Iru?” Reuel asked, panic clear in his voice.
Torman dropped his head back, laughing at the sky. “I hadn’t even considered this! You used crystal water.”
Fury joined me, and I looked at Samael for an explanation. “It’s forbidden to use outside Eden for this reason,” he said.
“For what reason?” Fury asked.
“Because, in the same way it destroyed the darkness veil around Nulterra, it destroyed the veil that kept the spirit line blocked from the Morning Star,” Torman said. “He created the spirit line, and he has the power to undo it. That’s why it’s been off-limits to him all these many years.”
“Cassiel thought in his new human form, the Morning Star would be too young to breach.” Samael’s face fell. “She was wrong.”
I ran my hand down my face. Everything we’d put all our energy into preventing, we’d caused. I had caused.
With her hands on her hips, Fury shook her head and walked back to our graves. As she dropped to her knees in front of her headstone, I wondered if her thoughts were riding a similar wave as mine.
Earth. Iliana. Jett…everyone would be better off if we had died.
“Hang on.” Fury bent forward, tracing her fingers over her name. “How did they have these made and installed so fast?”
I looked down at Fury’s stone again. “And they’re already overgrown.”
“Oh wow.” Behind us, Torman laughed again. Harder this time, if that was possible. “You didn’t know?”
I turned to face him. “Know what?”
“Time doesn’t work the same in Nulterra as it does on Earth or in Eden.”
“What?”
“The Morning Star created Nulterra after the Thousand Year Prophecy. It was foretold that he would be destroyed after a thousand years, so the Morning Star created a loophole.”
Fury stood beside me, her face pale. “What are you saying?”
“The days are much longer in Nulterra than in this realm. It was how he bought himself more time.”
“How much longer?” Anya asked.
He shrugged. “Every ten years or so on Earth is only about a day in Nulterra. The time you must have spent in Ket Nhila must have been particularly distorted.”
I stopped breathing.
“Warren, we’ve been gone for almost two days.” Fury’s voice was hollow and distant in my ears.
“No,” Samael said. “You’ve been gone for over seventeen years.”
His words sank in as we all stood there in frozen silence.
Fury’s eyes flashed toward the ground and widened. They seemed to be following something across the grass and back down the hill.
“Hello?” I heard Sloan’s voice behind me.
Then I turned, and I saw her.
I blinked.
No. It wasn’t Sloan.
It was Iliana.
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