Tears spilled down Serena’s cheeks as she watched the impromptu ceremony. I fought back some of my own and nodded slowly, catching a glimpse of the others in the process. They all agreed, smiling broadly with a twinkle in their eyes, as Draven was offered the position of Master Druid of Calliope.
“You have already done your mother proud, Draven,” Viola continued. “I say this on behalf of the Daughters of Eritopia: Calliope would be most fortunate to have you as its Master Druid. Will you accept the honor?”
Several seconds passed before Draven was able to formulate a response. He took a deep breath, then looked around at all of us—the alliance he’d put together, the unlikely friends he’d made along the way. I was proud to consider myself one of them. My sister loved him, and he was head over heels in love with her too. I could tell from the way they looked at each other that in recent days, they’d taken their relationship to a higher, deeper level.
Sure, I’d have to have that stern talk with him at some point and warn him that if he so much as made my sister cry, I would break every bone in his body... but that talk could wait. This was Draven’s moment, and, after all the years he’d spent in isolation, hidden beneath the protective shield of the mansion, deprived of family and friends, he deserved the recognition and appreciation of the world he was willing to die for.
“I accept,” he finally said, his voice thick with emotion.
Viola beamed at him in response, and took out a large gold seal from the folds of her colorful silk layers, handing it to Draven. He held it with trembling fingers, turning it over a few times. It was a beautiful sculpture cast in gold, in the form of a serpent eating its own tail, adorned with ancient runes and dozens of small diamonds along the length of its body. It reminded me of the Oroboros, part of earthly lore.
“The Nathairos,” he muttered, unable to take his eyes off it.
“The Nathairos, known as the Seal, is a symbol of the Druids,” Rubia said, recognizing the curious looks on our faces. “Each of Eritopia’s planets has one as a sigil, adorned with its representative gemstone. Calliope’s is a diamond.”
“Persea’s is a sapphire,” Draven explained briefly. “The ruby represents Purgaris, and so on. The Nathairos is a sigil given to the Master Druid of a planet. It stays with him until the end of his reign, and it is then passed on to his successor.”
Viola nodded, then came back to my side. I held her close, dropping a kiss on her temple. She had this way of switching so fast from the innocent and fragile ingénue to the godlike creature that was able to change entire species and save my friends’ lives. I was truly in awe of her.
Serena waited quietly next to us as Draven looked up, his gaze meeting hers.
He smiled, then came forward and took her in his arms. He kissed her intensely, then paused to look at her, his forehead leaning against hers. Love flowed between them like an endless stream, and I knew, then and there, that Serena had found her soulmate.
“I have you to thank for this… For all of this…” he breathed.
“Well, yeah, I did help a little.” She gave him a playful smile, making him chuckle.
It was the first time I was seeing Draven thoroughly happy, and I had to admit, it looked good on him. Rubia then cleared her throat, demanding our attention once again.
“Peace in Eritopia has now been restored,” she said. “And in part it was thanks to strangers from out of this world, who had no business here or reason to help, other than defending themselves from a mad Druid who sought to abuse them.”
She focused on me, Serena, Aida, Vita, Jovi, and Field as she spoke.
“You were brought here by force,” Rubia continued. “Others would have looked for ways out, running away without looking back or, worse, hiding somewhere and hoping that it would all pass. And you would have been right to do so. This wasn’t your war. And yet, you all stood up. You came together; you were one of the primary forces behind this alliance of the free nations, and you fought for Eritopia as if it were your own. The least we can do in return is make sure that your families and friends back home in The Shade get to remember and see you again.”
My heart leapt in my throat.
This was it. We were going home.
Serena and I glanced at each other. Aida, Jovi, Vita, and Field came closer, excitement glimmering in their eyes. Anjani and Bijarki stayed behind, a mixture of happiness and sadness passing over their faces. They were most likely worried, unsure of what Vita and Jovi would do once they saw their parents again. I wanted to tell them that everything would be okay, but Ruelle broke my ecstatic train of thought.
“I should warn you, though,” she said. “When we placed the shroud over Eritopia, it changed the passage of time between our galaxy and the rest of the worlds… It slowed Eritopia down because we hoped it would give the universes enough time to advance and be able to one day withstand Azazel’s darkness if he ever broke out.”
“Wait.” Serena shook her head, a confused frown pulling her eyebrows closer. “What… What do you mean, ‘it slowed Eritopia down’?”
“Time has flowed differently here,” Rubia explained. “From the moment you came in until now, it has been weeks in Eritopia... but twenty years have passed in The Shade.”
The information crashed into us. I didn’t know what to make of it, or how to react to it. Our parents had forgotten about us. Twenty years had gone by for them.
What would that mean for them? For all of our friends and family? For The Shade?
Or for us, for that matter, once they remembered us?
“We will restore the normal time flow now,” Rubia added, aware of our shock and confusion. “But we cannot retrieve the years that have already passed. I am sorry. We are all deeply sorry…”
“You’re saying our parents, our families and friends… hell, our entire world is twenty years older now?” Aida asked, still having trouble digesting the news.
Rubia nodded in response, then slowly raised a hand, revealing her gold diamond rings.
“It is time,” she said, then snapped her fingers.
Hazel
Forty years had passed since our Nevertide excursion. Forty years since Tejus and I had tied the knot and settled into a beautiful and tranquil life. Not a day passed that I didn’t marvel at the wonderful creature I’d been lucky enough to cross paths with in Nevertide. He worshipped me, and I adored him, and boredom was never part of our lives.
We were both busy with GASP, mostly involved in training new recruits, but also embarking on the occasional mission, and I couldn’t wish for a more rewarding occupation.
It took us a while to start talking about having a child. Looking back now, I didn’t know what I’d been thinking during our first twenty years together. We’d turned into vampires to extend our lifespans, but I lived with a constant feeling that something was missing, that we were, somehow, incomplete.
Tejus felt the same way, so we took the cure and returned to pure sentry form so that we might conceive. For a while, I thought one of us was struggling with fertility issues, but Corrine was quick to brush that concern aside. Then, on our twenty-first wedding anniversary, I was thrilled to give my husband the best news ever. I was pregnant, and I couldn’t think of another time when I’d seen Tejus so happy, other than the day I’d said “Yes”.
Harper was born nine months later, and we were fascinated by the wonderful creature we’d brought into the world. With sentry blood running through her, Harper quickly developed her mental abilities and barrier-building skills. Her True Sight was spectacular, as good as Tejus’s, in fact, covering an impressive number of miles in range.
She was relatively quiet and kept mostly to herself, but she was always a ray of sunshine around Tejus and me. When she turned eighteen, Harper wanted to be turned. After lengthy conversations about what life as a vampire involved, both my husband and I agreed that our daughter was mature and strong enough to understand and transition successfully, and we decided to turn back a few weeks after her.<
br />
Her first year as a vampire sentry was a bit rocky, but, with careful guidance from all of us, including Great-Great Grandma and Grandpa Sofia and Derek, she quickly grew into it.
As our only child, she was the focus of Tejus’s and my attention, and as a newly anointed GASP cadet, she was trained in the best tech and gear available, ranging from weaponry to recon devices, and we equipped her with state-of-the-art protective plates that kept her extra safe during training—for now. Soon, Harper would start participating in field missions, and I dreaded the thought of something happening to her. For that reason, I never crinkled my nose when Tejus showered her with the latest in army gear and gadgets.
At the same time, Harper was well looked after by her adoptive uncles—the Hawks were always around, from her first day in this world to her first steps and well into her maturity as a vampire sentry. This was mainly because Harper and Caia, Grace and Lawrence’s daughter, pretty much grew up together from day one, and the Hawks were particularly attached to the little fire fae, thus ending up as Harper’s guardians, too. Fly, Sky, Rock, and Blue had played a big part in honing the girls’ fighting skills, not just during practice but also through surprise tackles whenever they had their guard down.
Our daughter was sharp and fierce, making my heart swell with pride whenever she came back with a grin from a GASP training session, hiding whatever bruise she’d acquired in the process so I wouldn’t worry in the least.
Harper was the center of our universe, but, after all these years since Nevertide, I still felt like there was a void inside me, waiting to be filled. Just… something missing. I couldn’t explain it, but to my surprise, I discovered that Tejus had been feeling the same way. We often looked at Harper and experienced a mild form of guilt because we still felt… incomplete, despite having raised an extraordinary young woman.
Oddly enough, it seemed to be a common feeling among us Nevertide survivors. It had taken Lawrence and Grace well over twenty-one years to conceive Caia, and it had all been thanks to Corrine’s full moon ritual, which gave Grace a boost in fertility.
We’d all wanted children, after all. We’d been looking forward to growing our families and bringing wonderful beings into this world. For a while, we thought that our delay in conceiving might’ve had something to do with the Nevertide Oracle and the way in which she’d touched Grace, Victoria’s, and my, bellies four decades ago. But we had no way of finding her. All we could do was learn to live with the quiet idea of something still missing from our lives. Grace and Lawrence had felt it, too—as had Victoria and Bastien. The latter had Dmitri around the same time as Harper, leaving us all wondering as to why we’d gone twenty years without children. These births came across as a strangely timed coincidence.
We never let this void get in the way of our lives, though. I watched with joy as Harper, Caia, and Dmitri grew up. They did pretty much everything together, and occasionally dragged the Hawks into their mischief, too—not that Fly, Rock, Blue, or Sky would ever shy away from a challenge. Harper and Caia had been the first to join GASP, followed by Dmitri a couple of years later. He’d struggled with the decision, as he’d been spending some time in the human world and had been contemplating a career outside The Shade for a while.
In the end, Dmitri came back into the fold after a teenage heartbreak and asked to join GASP. He was keen to catch up with Harper and Caia, after having found his place back among the Shadians. The girls had been the first to endorse him, and, soon enough, Dmitri was learning to control his instincts and improve his attacks, with Harper and Caia, his best friends, guiding him along the way.
It was a calm and quiet Sunday morning in The Shade. Late spring had finally brought the cherry blossoms out, patches of pale pink blooming in between the redwoods, brightening the otherwise dark green forest of The Shade. Arwen, Corrine’s daughter, had been quite adamant about cherry trees over the past couple of decades, after an extended vacation with Brock in Japan.
I could only thank them for her persistence. The Shade had a little bit more color in it, and we’d each planted a cherry sapling next to our tree.
It took me a while to get out of bed, that feeling of emptiness bothering me more than usual. I found Tejus in the kitchen, waiting for me at the table with two hot coffees. Sure, we didn’t need coffee, but we still enjoyed the taste, so we’d kept it as part of our intimate morning ritual. He’d been looking out the window when I entered.
He turned his head, his dark brown eyes burning hot into my soul. He’d been having an equally difficult morning. I could feel his emptiness through mine, like a mirror image of a hole that refused to go away.
“Rough night?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
I smirked, then proceeded to sit in his lap. He wrapped his arms around my frame and rested his head on my chest, listening to my heartbeat. I ran my fingers through his long, russet-brown hair. He always made my heart skip a beat, and I knew he enjoyed it. In return, I had a similar effect on him, his body heat spiking and his pulse racing whenever we got close. It never got old. I loved the chemistry between us.
“I could say the same about you,” I replied gently. “But we only have each other to blame…”
“Sorry, I can’t help myself when you saunter into our bedroom wearing that flimsy piece of black lace you call a nightgown.” He looked up, his gaze dark as he licked his lower lip. But there was something else there, a tinge of sadness he was trying to mask, similar to what had made me dread getting out of bed in the first place.
“You’ve been feeling that hole again, haven’t you?” I sighed, changing the subject. I would’ve loved nothing more than to continue that conversation about my lace garments and his natural reaction to them, but I knew something was bothering him. He nodded slowly. “Me too…”
“But why?” he asked. “Why are we feeling like this? I mean, why do the first twenty years of our marriage seem… like an unfinished painting?”
“I don’t know, Tejus.” I shrugged, leaning my head against his as he tightened his grip on me. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not happy or thankful to be with you, to have Harper. And yet, there isn’t a day that I don’t put my head down and feel like there’s something missing.”
“What I’m finding to be truly weird and a cause for concern is that Grace and Victoria are dealing with the same emotion…”
“Maybe we could grow our family a bit more?” I asked with a half-smile, relaxing against his firm body. He reacted instantly, pulling me closer and looking deep into my eyes.
“Do you think it would fill the emptiness? Harper didn’t, and I sound like such a horrible parent for saying this…” He groaned and hid his face in my chest.
I held him tight, feeling his anguish as it poured through me. He didn’t deserve to struggle like this, and neither did I. It had been going on for too long, and it had to stop.
“You’re a wonderful father, Tejus,” I said soothingly. “Don’t ever think less of yourself over what you’re feeling. It’s not your fault.”
“Do you think we should talk to Corrine about it?” He gazed at me, his dark eyes hopeful.
“I don’t know…” I exhaled. “I mean, we could try—”
Something broke inside me. Like a thick sheet of glass that had stood between me and the emptiness I’d been facing, the unknown mist shattering and dissipating.
A tidal wave of memories crashed into me, leaving me reeling, breathless.
Suddenly… I remembered. Everything. Things I’d never even thought I’d lived through and yet… had all been there.
Phoenix, our first child. Serena, our second. Watching them both grow into the spectacular creatures that they’d become, both capable sentries with effervescent personalities. Vita, Grace and Lawrence’s petite fire fae daughter. Jovi and Aida, Victoria and Bastien’s children. Field, the Hawk brother.
The first twenty years of our lives together had been more than eventful. They’d been downright extraordinary, and we hadn�
�t even remembered them.
I gasped, tears springing to my eyes as I realized that a little over twenty years had passed since we’d last seen our children, our beloved Serena and Phoenix. I looked at Tejus and recognized his horrified expression because it mirrored mine.
“Tejus, w-what’s happening?” I gasped.
“I… I don’t know.” His voice was trembling. “Hazel… We had a son… and a daughter before Harper… What… What is this?”
I stood, wobbling on my legs from the shock. Memories continued to roll over me like waves of ice water. One after another, each second that I’d been missing from my life. This was the truth hiding behind the emptiness I’d been feeling.
How could this have happened?
My breathing accelerated to the point where I feared a panic attack was imminent. I felt unable to control myself anymore, tears streaming down my burning cheeks. “Tejus! We have children we haven’t seen or heard from in twenty years! We have children we didn’t even know we had! What the hell is happening?!”
“Mom? Dad? What’s wrong?” Harper’s voice from the living room broke my focus.
I stilled, staring at Tejus with wide eyes.
“Tejus… What… What are we going to do?” I whispered. “Where are Phoenix and Serena? How… How do we tell Harper what happened? I mean, we don’t know what happened, so how do we explain this to her?”
A moment passed, and we heard Harper’s feet approaching. She found us holding one another, our faces pale and eyes glazed with tears, as we became more and more aware of the first twenty years of our lives together and the children we’d somehow… forgotten we’d even had.
“Mom.” Harper stared at us with her big bluish green eyes and long black hair caught up in a loose bun. She was almost identical to Serena, though her jawline and shoulders were a bit sharper. But she was just as tall, and her lips and nose and stance all reminded me of her sister. Her frown and the shape of her cheeks and chin reminded me of Phoenix, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
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