“Only one way to find out!” Met wriggled in, unclipping his harness once he was safe on the ledge. I heard shuffling noises as he moved into the cave, then, silence.
“Met?”
My voice echoed around the cavern.
He didn’t respond. It only took a second of silence - but the darkness overwhelmed me. We were a thousand feet down, and suddenly I was all alone in the void, with a crushing weight of screams bearing down on my head. My will wobbled; my barriers fell for a split second, the shrieks of pain tore through my head.
Immediately, I let go of the rope and put my hands up to my temples. Concentrate, concentrate. With enormous effort, I forced the cushion of air around my head, and the screams muted immediately. Panting, I leaned my whole body against the rock wall, eyes squeezed shut against the blackness, trying to recover.
“Are you coming?” Met’s chirpy voice forced my eyes back open, and I looked down to see his happy face poking out of the hole.
“Y-Yes,” I stuttered. “Give me a second.”
His head disappeared. With enormous effort, I managed to hoist myself over to the platform. I lowered myself down, so my head was in line with the hole, and I pulled myself in. As soon as my body rested securely on the little ledge, I unclipped my harness and wiggled in further.
It was hard going. The short tunnel into the cave was only around a meter in circumference, and it was enormously uncomfortable trying to wiggle through on my belly. Panting, already exhausted, I rested for a second, tilting my head up so I could see how far I had to go. Up ahead, I could see the beam of light from my headlamp hitting the back of what looked like a big cave.
At least, I hoped it was much bigger than this tunnel I was struggling to get through. Met was already in the cave - I could hear him up ahead, chattering excitedly to himself, and I could see the light from his lamp flashing around. From where I was it gave me the impression of strobe-light in a dark club.
It would have been much easier for Met to wiggle through this opening - he was about the same size as me, but he didn’t have the belly that I did. He would have just shimmied through like a lizard.
I groaned, and decided to flip over, so I was on my back, then I edged through that way. Inch by inch, I pulled myself through the tunnel, scraping my elbows as I went. It hurt, but I ignored it.
“Eve. You have got to see this,” Met said in a deep, awed voice. “I think I’ve got it.”
“I’m trying,” I said through clenched teeth. The top of the tunnel curved inwards just a tiny bit, and the rock was brushing the skin of my tummy. It was going to be a tight fit. Sending an apology to my unborn child, I sucked in and shuffled another few inches.
“Oh,” Met’s voice floated to me again. “You’re stuck. Let me help you. Give me your hands.”
I had to rest my whole body down on the rock so that I could wiggle my hands upwards and stretch them out above my head, but as soon as I did, I felt Met’s warm, dry and slightly gnarly fingers grip mine. With surprising strength, he pulled, and I shot out into the cave.
My headlamp lit up the whole cavern. “Wow.”
The cave was small, about the size of a little bedroom, and every inch of the smooth, undulating rock was covered in perfect little drawings, each distinct and separate from the other. The art was perfectly preserved - not disturbed in any way by the elements, or by man. They were black and white, deep reds and ochre colors, the shades of the earth.
“There’s magic in these drawings,” Met whispered. “The artist was definitely accessing some of their greater powers.”
Slowly, I got to my feet, inspecting each drawing in greater detail.
I recognized the drawings of humans - women with the jutting breasts, men with stick penises, long and almost touching the ground.
“The artist was a man, clearly,” I said, too loudly, and winced at myself. This cave felt like a church, a sacred space, and I immediately quietened my tone. “It’s very gender-specific.”
“You don’t understand,” Met said, eyes round in awe. “He’s done it for us. So we can understand it.”
“What do you mean?
“Look.” I followed Met's hand as he pointed around the cave. “He needed every square inch of this cave to tell his story. It starts here, as is tradition, in the lower right-hand corner.”
I went closer, and saw a little depiction of some brown and red people, making fire and hunting. Met kept pointing, and I followed his finger. “It tells the story of where the artist came from, which was not far from here. Then, it has his visions of the future of his people.” He quickly passed a couple of drawings that arched over the top of us. I saw chains there, and lots of deep-red spatters, and I swallowed roughly. “Then, there’s the modern times.” Met shrugged. “Or, what he could understand of them.”
The drawings on the other side of the cave were hard to decipher. I didn’t recognize the individual figures. There were lines and dots, and some whirls that I couldn’t figure out.
“And then…” Met pointed to a small drawing down on the bottom left of the cave, near the tunnel I’d just come out of. Right there, there was a stick figure, drawn in white, lying down, encased in a brown circle.
The stick figure had a big, round belly.
“He saw this,” I whispered. “He saw us here.”
Inspecting further, I spotted another little figure standing beside the picture of me, lying down, a black one with a white dot on his head. I frowned for a second, confused. Then, I glanced back at Met, who turned and met my gaze. His headlamp made a perfect white dot on his black figure. “Oh, my God.”
“It’s incredible, isn’t it,” Met let his lamp travel around the cave again. “A perfectly executed and preserved prophecy. The artist was a Seer beyond compare.” He shook his head, amazed.
“But what does it all mean?” I wondered. “Can you understand it?”
Met scrunched up his face. “Sort of. There,” he pointed to the left wall. “That’s where we are now. You can see the grey splotches - those are the tormented souls.”
The artist had depicted them straining at a circle that bound them together. I nodded.
“The bigger figures are the angels and demons,” he went on. “The little stick ones are humans. There’s a battlefield, and it’s full.” He stopped, and frowned.
“What is it?”
“A choice,” Met murmured. “There are two branches to the prophecy, and in between them is-”
“What is it?”
Met pointed.
I inspected the spot. All I could see was what looked like a crude drawing of a constellation, with a funny little red splodge inside of it. Looking harder, I could see that the red splodge had tiny black dots on it, and a green v-shaped slash on its tip.
“What is it?” I asked, confused.
“The geometric pattern is the tree of life. It represents the building blocks of the universe. It highlights the connection of everything,” Met said, his voice hushed. “Above,” he pointed to the pattern. “Below. And further. It represents everything; the connectivity of everything in the universe.”
He turned to me, and his eyes were serious. “Look closer,” he said.
I crept forward until I could see the pattern clearly. “I still don’t understand. What is that funny thing in the middle…” My voice trailed off as I inspected the red splodge in the middle of the Tree of Life. “Is that… is that a-”
“It’s a strawberry,” Met nodded.
“That’s me?” My mouth fell open.
“It’s how the artist saw you. You’re the Tree of Life. You’re the connection with everything.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Well.” Met took a deep breath and pointed down to either side of the geometric pattern. “There’s a choice. A path that you have to take. The lines either side and the drawings that follow depict what will happen if you make that choice.”
I followed his pointer finger. On one side, there was just a gre
en circle, with white lines extending out from it. “Is that Earth?” It certainly looked like Earth. I wondered how the First People knew that the world was round, but then I remembered that they did see the moon, and watch the stars in the sky. “So… Does that mean life will go on?” I asked him.
“That’s what I think it means,” Met nodded. “That side, anyway. But then…”
On the other side, the hazy grey splodges drifted over a sea of blood-red.
I took a sharp breath in.
“Pretty self-explanatory,” Met whispered.
“So, what is it? Does it say what I have to do?” I asked desperately, suddenly frantic to find out.
The more I looked at the two depictions on either side of the Tree of Life, the more I understood exactly what I was looking at. On one side, Earth, vibrating with pure light.
On the other, it was Hell on Earth.
“Please, Met, tell me that it gives me a little instruction.”
“It does,” he reassured me. “It’s pretty clear.”
“What? Where’s the picture?”
Met pointed. Just below the Tree of Life, there were two more tiny etchings that I couldn’t decipher. One to the left, and one to the right. I could see now how they linked into the prophecy; there was me, the reluctant Tree of Life, and two choices on either side. One led to Earth, whole and complete, and the other one led to the death of everything. “What do they mean? Those little symbols?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Met stuck his hand under his helmet so he could scratch his head. “The symbols are a bit abstract. But I think they mean faith.”
“Faith?”
He nodded. “Specifically, faith in mankind. I think.”
I furrowed my brow. “That’s not very specific.”
“Well, on one side, you make a decision to have faith in mankind, which leads to you uniting all the creatures of the universe together. The angels, the demons, the half breeds, the humans, the guardians. As well as the various other creatures that populate the other realms. Vampires, fae. All of them.”
I took a quavering breath in. “Well, that’s not happening. I don’t have any faith in men,” I muttered. "Demons, sure. Angels - well there's you, Met..." I trailed off, thinking of how Malach seemed to have abandoned us to chase his daughter. “I’ve never met any werewolves or fae, let alone any vampires.”
“The faith that you have spreads like ink through water,” Met continued perkily, as if he hadn’t heard my grim statement. “And it causes the unification of all natural and supernatural creatures. Which, in turn, leads to this.” He pointed to the whole, round green Earth. “Earth survives. We all evolve. The Path continues.”
The foreboding rushed through me like icy water in my veins.
That path wasn’t happening. I had no faith in men, considering my history. And we only had a few species on our side. I wasn’t uniting anything.
“Wha-” I swallowed to clear my throat, which was suddenly awfully dry. “What happens if I have no faith?”
Metatron pointed. The strange, dotted symbol on the other side had a red slash through it.
“Oh, God,” I breathed out. “We’re dead already.”
Met frowned. “We’re not.”
“We are. On the other side,” I said, my voice unsteady, “I have no faith in mankind, and there is nothing but Hell on Earth.”
Chapter Eleven
“Well,” Alex said moodily. “That was a waste of time.”
“Hush your mouth, Sorensen,” Met waggled his finger at him. “That was not a waste of time. It was absolutely one of the most wondrous things I’ve ever seen in my whole lifetime.”
“It was kind of a bust, Metatron.” My voice was flat. “We didn’t learn anything that can help us.”
I was exhausted. The trip to the Devil’s Drop had drained me almost dry, and my mood wasn’t improved by the fact that it was, indeed, an utter waste of time. Once Metatron had taken photos of every single little figure in the cave, the despair had set in. It was made even worse by the fact that it was far harder to get out of the cave than it was to get in. I didn’t have Met helping pull me out, so the short wiggle down the little tunnel had taken me almost an hour. Twice, I’d lost my willpower, and the screams from the depths of the Devil’s Drop had overwhelmed me. I’d sobbed in pain before I'd managed to get control again.
I was silent on the trip up, the winch whirring slowly, dragging us upwards. Met chatted brightly the whole time, trying to help jolt me out of my mood, but all I could feel was the weight of sadness bearing down on me.
There was no action I could take. There wasn’t a thing that I could do, no special rock to find and destroy, no artifact that would give me unique powers. It was just me, having to have faith in men.
Men hadn’t had any faith in me. My history had been littered with the awful experiences with men attacking me. It was my destiny, the surging and pulsing energy within me compelled the weaker creatures to attack me, to use me to gratify themselves.
Every time I thought I could trust one, every time I let my guard down and let a man get close to me, they ended up trying to attack me. My father. The guardian at the children’s home, who, coincidentally, I had run to when a boy there had tried to force himself on me. Then, a long time later, my friend at school.
I had no faith in men.
I stayed away from them, choosing a workplace with a female manager and all-female staff. A workplace where I was bound by the conditions of employment to keep behind the desk. I avoided men. The safe space I’d carved out, in a little office behind plexiglass, was supposed to protect me.
Until that salesman caught up with me in the car park.
No. I had no faith in men.
Picking up on my thoughts, Alex tightened his arms around me. Nate, sitting opposite, caught my gaze and held it. My own eyes shimmered; tears threatened to overflow.
How could I have faith in men? Alex and Nate didn’t count - they were supernatural creatures. It was little wonder that the only man I could love in the entire world wasn’t a man at all.
I thought I’d left my past behind me, but it was really never going to go away. The prophecy said that I had to have faith in men, but there was still a dark memory in my heart that would never ever go away.
I was ruined, tainted. Destroyed. Having faith meant being strong, and I wasn’t strong. Not physically, and not emotionally either. The tears in my eyes spilled over, and I let out a sob.
“So, the whole fate of the universe rests on me having faith in men,” I whispered, my voice quivering. “And I don’t have any faith at all.”
“You do,” Alex said roughly, squeezing me gently. He placed his hands on my belly. “You have faith in yourself, and you have faith in your baby.”
I shook my head. “Let’s be honest here, Alex, that certainty comes and goes like sunburn on a Scotsman,” I snapped. “One day, I’m feeling determined. The next, I’m battered down by all the awful things we do to each other, and I think we should all die.”
“You’re pregnant,” Nate patted my knee. “You’re bound to be emotional.”
“Don’t.” I glared at him. “You can just fuck right off with that bullshit, Nate. I’m not emotional because I’m pregnant. I’m devastated because the fate of the world rests on me having faith in men, and I have none,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare reduce this,” I pointed to my teary face, “to just pregnancy hormones.”
Nate looked away, but I caught a twinkle in his eye. “And now you’re not sad anymore,” he murmured under his breath.
I let out an exasperated groan. “Don’t manipulate me like that, you bastard. I’ll destroy this planet with a click of my fingers just to get even with you, so help me God.”
I felt Alex chuckle behind me. “That’s my girl.”
I sat fuming for a few more moments, but Nate was right. He’d successfully jolted me out of my despair. Trouble was, now, I was furious. “So, what now?” I snapped at Met. “What do we d
o? What do I have to do to have faith in men?”
“Oh, Strawberry,” he gazed at me with wide eyes. He was still wearing his climbing gear, but he’d taken off his helmet. It had flattened his hair down on the top, but it stuck out like a pyramid at the sides. He looked ridiculous. “I have no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not something you can do. It’s something that you should have already done.”
“What?”
“The timeline pretty much said that you should always have had faith in mankind. Anything less would lead to total destruction.”
I fell back into Alex, exhaustion overwhelming me again. “This was a bust. We’re all going to die.”
Met shrugged. “Maybe. That might be the path.”
“Why are you not more upset about this?” Nate asked him suspiciously. “You just got confirmation that there's nothing that we can do to stop the apocalypse.”
“It’s not over yet, young Nephilim,” Met cackled. “I don’t know about you, but I can shake a flaming sword with the best of them, and I’m going to go down fighting.”
Alex stirred underneath me. “That’s the most sense you’ve made in a decade, Met,” he rumbled. “And I’m right with you. I don’t care how futile it is. I’m going to protect my woman and child until the very end.”
“I, too,” Nate said, his voice ringing like a bell. “I’ll protect my family, until my immortal soul is just a figment on the winds of the stars.”
“Dramatic,” I snapped, still glaring at him.
We sat in silence for a long time, the despair and anger churning inside of me. I didn’t think I’d ever felt worse. Fate was compounding to lay all responsibility of Earth at my feet - I was going to be the one who gave birth to the apocalypse. I could stop it, but I would have had to be a perky little Earth-cheerleader from the very beginning, despite being subjected to trauma, after trauma, after trauma.
We were doomed.
There was a bang on the door. I barely stirred.
“I hear someone is a bit blue!” Zel’s bullhorn voice bellowed, echoing through the bungalow.
“Eve!” Dale’s voice was closer, and in an instant, both of them had barrelled through into the living room. Their faces were bright, and they both held several small boxes in their hands.
Revelations: The Last War Page 12
