with a cloth belt, dressed the way my father had dressed. I was in half-form and carried a knife at my waist, one with a deer antler handle.
The domed ceiling rose over me, pale gray and feathered.
Hayyel’s wings were draped on the roof and down the depth of my soul. He was watching over me. Or just watching me. “What do you want?” I asked him, the words ringing. “Is it to kill the last son of Judas Iscariot? Do you want the blood of the Son of Shadows on my blade? Do you wish me to destroy the maker of vampires? Will you be done with me then?”
Something stirred in the air behind me. I turned but no one was there. A familiar voice spoke into the silence, melodic and lyrical; unlike the dripping water in the distance, it didn’t echo. “Walk into the dark of your soul home. Walk into the passage.”
I peered into the tunnel in the far part of the cavern, a long curving hallway. I had made my way into the dark here before. There had been a waterfall in the distance, but I didn’t hear the roar of the water now. I stepped into the gloom, following the snaking tube-like tunnel, darkness all around me, my feet sure in the perpetual night, Beast’s eyes glowing, the world appearing in deep shades of greens and charcoal and black, my paw-feet-pads steady on the cold floor.
Within a few yards, the roar of water came to me faintly. I rounded a curve and the air grew wetter, the rumble a vibration beneath my paw-pads. The tunnel narrowed and twisted. It opened out into a bigger room, the floor littered with cracked and broken stone. A stalagmite had fallen and shattered and now blocked my path. An underground stream gushed from a hole in the rock wall just ahead and to my left. The cascade sent plumes of mist and water droplets into the air. Each was pristine and perfectly round.
I stepped over the broken stone and stopped at the edge of the underground river, the water a good ten-foot drop below me. Downstream, I saw the presence of future time in the water droplets. I saw war among the arcenciels, war with lightning, storms, eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes. There was fighting in the heavens like angels and demons in battle. Human jets and bombers circled among them, firing weapons that did nothing to the rainbow dragons, passed through the demons without effect. Nuclear bombs detonated in the atmosphere. The droplets grew crimson and vanished. Instead of battle in the droplets, I now saw a dry and barren world. A war-ravaged world with craters and rents deep into the Earth’s crust. The crimson tint obscured the timeline. In its place, I saw droplets depicting a wet and dripping world covered with mold and slimes and colonies of bacteria the size of dinner plates. In the next spray human bones were piled high in desolate and broken cities, as if thousands of bodies had been shoved out of the way, to rot. In other droplets and sprays, I saw emptiness, no living humans, no mammals, no birds, no reptiles, no insects. Not anywhere. I understood that every single droplet vision was a variant of the world after arcenciel war. After human war. After destruction on a scale I never dreamed even in nightmares. I closed my eyes and forced the visions away.
When I opened them again, my gaze traced the passage of water from upstream, between the rocks, where the water roared from the chasm, above the waterfall, high into the past. My childhood came alive in the droplets. Edoda, my father, teaching me to throw an ax. His body, on the floor of our cabin. The sensation of cold as I painted my face in my father’s blood. My five-year-old hand clenching the knife that killed my first man, Edoda’s murderer.
I followed the trail of my life in the droplets back along the flow of the underground river, downstream into my own future. Seeing death and war, seeing hope and love. Seeing my future evil as I killed and ate humans, then my death as a liver-eater at the hand of an elderly Eli. His rage and sorrow and determination as I tried to kill him and Alex and three small children.
My entire life was death and destruction. And each droplet of my future was a world of even more horrors if I didn’t fix what was happening