“The only good thing about his selfishness and greed is that he never showed anyone else how to make a portal a temporal one,” he continues, “so that atrocity died with him.”
Okay. Okay, that’s good. Éibhear is dead, Ari never ripped open the fabric of time, and nobody can pull a copycat. I nod, trying to be encouraging.
“After it was discovered that Éibhear was continuing his destruction, he was declared an outlaw, but with the dimension collapsing and people in danger, the authorities had more important things to focus on than hunting him down. A few units were given that task, but they were often recalled for more important assignments. He and those who believed, as he did, that they were above the law, that they were better than everyone else, fled and set up their own compounds with shields to protect them from the anomalies.” He presses his lips together again, then says, “I was born in one of those compounds.”
Ohhhhhh. Relief floods me as I realize where the story is going.
“My whole life, I was taught that we were victims. Persecuted by people who hated us for our superior blood and abilities.” He cringes. “I believed it, and I hated and feared the ‘false’ king. When I was old enough, I joined the militia, and I fought the soldiers who came to arrest Éibhear. I-I killed them.”
I lay my hand on the table between us, palm up. I’d rather hug him, but sometimes that makes a hard thing harder. This way, he has a choice.
He grabs my hand like it’s a lifeline, squeezing. “I hunted those soldiers, Felix. I knew what I was doing, and I killed them. I protected Éibhear. I did it many times.”
“Until you stopped.”
He sucks in air through his nose. “I was hunting soldiers and came across a unit of six camped not far from one of our compounds. I-I’m not sure if they knew how close they were, but I knew I couldn’t take all six of them. I planned to come back with help, but I wanted to listen first, make sure they weren’t going to strike before I had a chance.”
“What did you hear?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Ari
I’ve never saidany of this aloud to anyone before, ever, and part of me is shocked I’ve gotten this far in. That part—the same part that’s been terrified of planning a future—was sure Felix would have left by now, walked out on me and our fledgling relationship. Why wouldn’t he?
“You understand that I willingly worked with the person responsible for the destruction of an entire dimension, don’t you? That countless species and worlds died because of things I supported? That if it weren’t for the pure luck of one of our scouts meeting the right people here on Earth, there would be no dragons or elves left alive?”
Felix’s look is patient and… pitying? “What did you hear, Ari?”
Maybe he wants to know everything before he goes, so he can be sure of his decision. I shove down the hope that hewon’tleave. My Felix is loyal and steadfast, but he’s also practical and intelligent.
“They were talking about what would happen when Éibhear was found. One said he had hope that capturing Éibhear would prevent the anomalies from getting worse.” I shake my head slightly, the words of a stranger from thousands of yearsago ringing in my head still. I’ll never forget them. “He said he thought they could rebuild their society under the current conditions, with shielded settlements, and that our world might even adjust to the new environment. The others were all silent, and it was so—so awkward. And he said he knew it wasn’t possible, but he needed to cling to the hope that everyone wasn’t going to die.” My eyes sting with tears as I remember how his voice sounded in that moment.
Felix says nothing, just keeps his gaze steady on me, so I keep talking.
“I didn’t understand what they meant. I’d never heard that our people had ever lived outside of the shields. As far as I knew, that was just the way our world was—inhospitable. But it kept going around in my head the whole way back to the compound, and when I got there, something stopped me from reporting their presence.” I shrug. “It didn’t matter—they never came to the compound. I’m not sure if they didn’t find us, or if they were called back, or if—” I stop. I can’t say it out loud, that one of my fellow soldiers at the time might have found them and done what I didn’t. I don’t think that’s what happened—nobody I knew then was skilled enough to take down so many alone, and if assistance had been recruited, I would have heard about it. But it’s still a possibility that preys on my peace.
“In the compound,” I continue, changing tack, “we were educated. We prided ourselves on being more intelligent and learned than the followers of the false king. It didn’t seem possible to me that our people once lived outside shields. At first I thought it might be some kind of folk tale or legend passed down through families, but the more I considered what they’d said, the more I realized it sounded as though they were talking about something they personally remembered. And then I realized that my own knowledge of our history was somewhat sparse.”
“There were gaps in your education.”
I nod. “Yes. I wasn’t… concerned. Not really. After all, I wasn’t a scholar. I assumed I’d been given a basic education, which I’d chosen not to continue. But I wanted to understand, or perhaps even find the stories that were the basis of what those men had talked about. So I went looking for information in our libraries.”
“And found that you’d been taught a lie?”
“No,” I correct. “I couldn’t find any history that hadn’t already been taught to me. There were the usual legends and fairy stories, and those referred to a world without shields, but they weren’t histories. That concerned me—why didn’t we have history books? We prided ourselves on our knowledge and education.”
“What did you do?”
I grimace. “I asked one of our archivists. She seemed startled by my interest, which was fair enough—I’d never shown any before. But then she told me that our history texts had been destroyed when the shields collapsed at the previous compound, before I was born.”
Felix huffs in disbelief. “That’s a tidy excuse.”
“I had no reason not to believe her. Shield collapse was something that happened because of the anomalies, and it wasn’t new information that most of the residents had lived in a different compound about sixty or so years before. My parents had even mentioned it. The archivist said they were in the process of writing the history they could remember, but that it was a time-consuming process and needed to be checked by and discussed with as many people as possible to ensure it was factual. She said the history texts I’d been taught from—which were written by her and our other archivist—gave a high-level overview that they were trying to add details to.”
“A high-level overview,” Felix repeats. “That sounds like something that should include a detail like society before shields.”
“My thought exactly. Plus, those soldiers had referred to Éibhear’s temporal portals being the reason for the anomalies. That’s not what I knew to be true, but I did know about the temporal portals. Éibhear cited that ability as one of the things that proved our superiority, and had promised us all that we wouldn’t die with our world, that he was searching for a new place for us to live, and that included a place in our own past.”
