by C. J. Anaya
“Angie is correct. You are all wrong.”
“You only feel that way because of the blossom, Hope. Your choices were taken from you the moment Tie placed that piece of magic in your hands,” Victor said.
Tie lowered his head, looking at the ground. “I’m making amends for that, Vicky. That’s why I’m here. I promised to see this through, find out if she was still bonded to me, and if so figure out a way to break that bond.”
“It still doesn’t change the fact that her soul no longer recognizes mine,” he shouted.
“It never did,” I screamed in frustration.
“What did you say, Hope?” Victor asked. The hurt on his face made my heart ache for him, but this misunderstanding had gone on for centuries, and I was tired of everyone talking over me.
“The prophecy is flawed, Victor. Do you remember when my eyes were red? My father forced me to heal Chinatsu even though she was meant to die, and as a result my ki was damaged.”
“You willingly saved that hag’s life?” Angie muttered under her breath.
“What?” Tie exclaimed. “That’s what caused the damage to your eyes?”
His fury on my behalf was touching even if it was a little late for it.
“I remember,” Victor stated. “But I healed you—”
“No,” I said. “The day you found me at the temple…it was all a front. I’d been working with the rebels and training with Tie to learn how to fight. He was the one who healed my eyes. He was the one who healed my ki when I irreparably damaged it after saving my brother, Saigo. Tie has always been my soul mate. I knew it long before my death, long before he gave me The Black Blossom. The prophecy got it all wrong.”
My shocking announcement left everyone speechless. I turned to Tie, watching his features as a fear to hope waged war against his love for me.
“Do you remember when I died?”
He nodded. “Not a day goes by that I don’t remember, Hope. It’s like a nightmare replaying itself inside my head.”
“I told you my heart was already yours. You didn’t need the blossom. It already belonged to you. Kenji knew it, Akane knew it, and I knew it. I didn’t tell you right away because I wanted you to push past whatever vendetta you were holding onto and choose me. It had to be your choice. I had to be your choice.”
Tie’s eyes filled with wonder and then tears slowly descended down his face. He fisted a hand to his mouth and hunched himself over in his seat, but it failed to muffle the sobs that soon followed.
I knelt beside Tie and embraced him, pulling him close and giving him the love he thought he didn’t deserve. The love he assumed didn’t belong to him.
Not satisfied with this, Tie lifted my lips to his and kissed me like I’d been longing for ever since my soul became trapped in that stone prison.
“I…I don’t understand,” I heard Victor say. “This doesn’t make any sense.” Tie broke away from me and stood, placing me behind him. He must have sensed Victor’s anger from his tone of voice. I could sense it like wispy black smoke permeating the room.
“Do I have to spell it out for you, Victor?” Angie asked, her impatience evident in her tone. “True love prevails.” She let out a happy sigh. “Am I the only one who saw this coming?”
“But it doesn’t make sense, Angie,” he said, coming to stand next to her. “Why do I love her?”
She smacked him across the head in exasperation. “It’s Hope, you moron. What’s not to love? But if we’re going to get down to it, you’ve been told since your creation that Hope was your future. That’s a hefty amount of brainwashing, with you assuming you never had a choice in the matter. Once you met Hope it wasn’t difficult to love her either way.”
“But what about the prophecy?” he said, taking another step toward her. “How can Hope and Tie heal the veil when that’s only ever been my job? It’s why I exist.”
She rolled her eyes in true Angie fashion.
“Sounds like an identity crisis to me.”
Victor’s eyes flashed with anger. She’d definitely managed to get under his skin.
As far as guys went, that was nothing new for my best friend.
“This isn’t a game, Angie. How will Hope heal the veil without me?”
Tie and I looked at each other in wonder. I think we could both see the space between Angie and Victor diminishing. It was like an invisible chord pulling them closer together.
“I don’t for one second believe that the future of our world depends on forcing a young woman to unite with a man she doesn’t love, especially a man who isn’t her soul mate. True love is the most powerful force on Earth, surely powerful enough to heal a weakening veil.”
My eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets at the familiarity of her words. Akane had said the exact same thing to me when we discussed my future.
Was it possible?
“Angie,” I said sharply.
She raised her hands in defeat.
“All right. I’ll back off. I’m just trying to give our feckless warrior over here a dose of reality.”
Feckless?
I might have commented on her strange increase in vocabulary, but my mind had locked onto an idea, and my attention would not be diverted.
“No, Angie, I’m not getting after you, I’m trying to figure something out. Can I connect with you for a moment and check your memories?”
“Since when are you capable of doing that?” my father asked.
Angie raised her eyebrow at me and gave me a grin.
“Only if you promise to instruct my life force to erase these freckles and enhance my cup size. I’m tired of being a thirty-four B.”
I chuckled for a moment, and then wondered if that might actually be possible. I shook my head, shocked that I’d wasted a moment entertaining such a harebrained idea from Angie. I reached her and placed my hands on either side of her head, doing my best to avoid the frowning look Victor gave me. Apologies were in order on that end. No doubt about it.
The moment I connected with her I began sifting through her memories as I had with Akane, flipping through her past to see if there was more to Angie than, well, Angie. The moment I arrived at her birth, I found more memories predating her life in this time period. I soon came to her last memories fighting off a nekomata. I skimmed backward a little further and watched from her perspective as Tie forced a black flower into my hand.
Akane. Angie was Akane. My suspicions confirmed, I nearly stopped what I was doing until I remembered the previous memories I’d discovered when Angie had first been Akane. Just how many lives had my best friend experienced? I flipped backward again and reached the part where she was pushed off a cliff by a nekomata, and then flipped back a little further, wishing to verify another suspicion taking root in my mind. I stopped at the moment she met with Victor and one word uttered from him was all it took to move the pieces of this puzzle back into place.
I released my hands from her head and took a step back.
Edana. My best friend was Edana.
“What is it?” Victor asked impatiently.
I struggled to breathe, considering the implications if I revealed this information to the group. It had the power to affect my relationship with Tie, but I’d learned from my past the consequences of lies and half truths. I needed to come clean with this information.
“I’m not the only one in this room who has lived more than one life.”
“What?” Tie exclaimed.
“Cool,” Kirby cried out.
“What are you talking about, Hope?” Angie’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
“Before this life, Angie was my best friend and commander of the rebel army.”
“Akane?” Tie asked, shooting from his seat. He rounded the bed and came to my side, looking ready to embrace Angie, but I held a hand to his chest to stop him.
“That’s not the only life she’s had. There was one before that.”
“I don’t think I want to hear any more of this,” Angie whispered. Her
face was white as a sheet.
“They need to know, Ang,” I said, embracing her and then pulling back. “You need to know.”
She studied me for a moment, and then that saucy grin of hers returned.
“All right, then, Hope. Lay it on me.”
I smiled. “Before Angie lived her life as Akane she also lived her life as a Gaelic villager.” I turned to Victor and Tie and let that information sink in. “Angie is Edana.”
“That’s not…that’s impossible,” Victor stated.
The look he gave Angie belied a host of emotions. Oppressive guilt, shame, wonder, and even love. All these years he’d assumed responsibility for her death and now stood face-to-face with her reincarnated form. It was a lot to process.
“There’s more,” I stated. “Are you ready for this?””
“No,” Victor and Tie said in unison.
I continued anyway.
“Edana didn’t throw herself off of that cliff like you both assumed.” I turned to Angie and grasped both of her hands. “A nekomata chased you to the edge of those cliffs and then pushed you off.” I directed my next words to my former betrothed, knowing he needed to understand this more than anyone. “You were not responsible for Edana’s death, Victor. She didn’t commit suicide due to a broken heart. Edana was murdered.”
Tie and Victor stared at Angie with new eyes, attempting to take what they remembered of Edana and meld it with the young girl standing before them.
“She’s the woman you both fell in love with. The woman you’ve been fighting over for centuries now,” I said in a small voice.
Victor and Tie were a collective ball of swirling emotions. Affection for Angie crowded to the forefront, but guilt and shame fought for supremacy. Neither one of them knew how to respond to these latest revelations, and I wasn’t sure how to behave now that Tie faced the woman he had once loved and then lost.
Does he still have feelings for Edana? I mean Angie? Gah. This is super confusing.
I took in all of the people in the room—my father, Victor and Tie, Kirby and Angie—and worried for them and for our future. The issue of whether Tie and I were meant for one another had been resolved, but Angie’s previous lives and the effect that knowledge might have on Tie and Victor would no doubt complicate everything, including my relationship with my soul mate.
There were also inconsistencies in the prophecy to contend with. How much of it could be relied upon and how much of it had been interpreted incorrectly? Where were we in the struggle against Fukurokuju? Was he in prison? Did Hachiman kill him? When would the demon god send more of his assassins, and where were all of the reformed nekomata?
One question, however, overshadowed all of the others. How would we fight against Amatsu’s forces and find a way to permanently heal the veil before he broke through it?
I didn’t have any answers for the troubling issues that beset us, but I knew where to find them. We had to uncover the original prophecy and figure out a way to translate it correctly, and we had to do it as soon as possible. It held answers to so many of these important questions, but I feared that time was not on our side.
Angie glanced between Tie and Victor, swallowing down her anxiety as she took a few steps back. Their hungry stares and desperate desires to pepper her with a million questions weighed heavily between themselves and my best friend. Her deer-in-the-headlights expression was not one I was accustomed to seeing her wear, but I couldn’t blame her. Tie and Victor were fairly vibrating with emotion.
“Wow,” she said, inching herself closer to me. “Tough to be popular.”
Yeah.
As The Healer, I could most definitely relate.
The Prophecy
by C.J. Anaya
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Prophecy
Copyright ©2016 C.J. Anaya All rights reserved.
Published by C.J. Anaya Publishing LLC
Print Cover by JRA Stevens
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
Darkness.
A void so all-encompassing as to be completely without hope, without light, without that vibrant ray of luminescence that signifies the glory of another human being’s soul. A blackness so dense as to dull the senses and strip one of their desire to press forward, to fight, to live.
It felt easier to simply give in to the oppressive atmosphere that weighed so heavily upon me and not bother to search out the answers to where I currently stood or how I’d arrived here in the first place.
I took one shallow breath and then another while panic threatened to choke me into submission. I lifted my hand in front of me and saw nothing but continued to move it forward in search of something solid and sturdy. I gingerly took a step, sliding my foot along what felt like rocky terrain, afraid that if I lifted my foot too high, I might miss a dip in the floor or the eventual absence of it and tumble to my death.
A few precarious steps later brought me to a wall, my hand gently absorbing the shock of its presence. A stone wall then, with deep grooves and taught ridges that felt sharp and somewhat cool. I aligned myself perpendicular to the wall with my left hand lightly gliding against it while my right hand reached out to the empty space beyond. Then I took another step forward, continuing to perform my stilted glide across the uneven ground, waiting for another wall to impede my progress or for a possible turn in the path to present itself.
I kept my eyes closed—they were doing me little good either way—and strained my senses to pick up the slightest hint of sound within the stillness of this prison. For several minutes I heard nothing but the sound of my own clumsy movements and the strangled gasps of my labored breathing, panic having won the battle at this point.
Just as I became convinced that I’d never find a way out of the darkness, a familiar presence tugged on my spirit, beckoning me forward with greater haste. The connection was unmistakable, a heavy yearning that pulled me onward, causing me to move with less caution and more urgency than I had before demonstrated. I may have been blind to my surroundings, but I could never feel alone or afraid when Tie’s soul called to mine, even within the cavernous emptiness of this place.
As I continued my hurried movements, a pinprick of light appeared in the distance, growing eerily brighter with every step. The light wasn’t perfect in its luminescence. It held an eerie green tint to it that caused me to wonder if I headed toward something potentially lethal. I shook myself from such musings. Tie wasn’t someone to fear. He was my soul mate, my other half, my greatest ally in this quest to heal the veil. As the light grew in intensity, I noticed a bend in my path. I hurriedly followed the light around the corner and then stood in absolute shock as it opened into a large cave.
No. Not a cave.
The word was far too crude for the splendor that met my eyes. The stone walls were a shiny ebony hue that glinted against the lamplight of several torches strategically placed along the cavern’s walls. The furnishings were all made from the stone surrounding us, intricately carved and shaped with spiked accents meant to intimidate as well as impress. I might have continued my thorough perusal of every inch of this place if that familiar pull hadn’t drawn my eyes to the center of the room where a figure dressed in white robes stood in front of a massive black throne with his back turned to me.
“Tie?” I said. It appeared to be him, but his style of hair and clothing were so different from what I was used to.
&nbs
p; His shoulders tensed at the sound of my voice, and then the figure slowly turned himself to face me.
I took in a sharp breath as I beheld the man who looked just as surprised by my presence I was with his. He may not have been Tie, but my soul communicated to me otherwise, urging me to rush forward and throw myself into this stranger’s arms—this beautiful stranger who continued to study me with a mixture of utter disbelief and wonder. He took a quick step forward and I nearly fell to the floor as my body and my brain warred against one another for supremacy.
It isn’t Tie, I scolded myself. What is happening?
Oblivious to my internal distress, the man took another step forward, and I nearly wept in frustration as I held myself in check while my entire being ached to throw myself into his arms. One more step from him, and I lifted my hand to stop him.
“No.” My voice came out as a whisper, but it resonated within the vast expanse of the room.
He stopped, finally taking note of my distress, and held up a placating hand, no doubt to calm me. Then he lowered that hand and stood as still as a statue as he took all of me in, drank his fill of me with a look of astonishment and joy so sincere I realized that my presence here, though a shock to both of us, was most welcome to him.
“I’ve waited,” he said in a voice charged with rough emotion. “I’ve waited centuries for this moment to arrive, for the blossom to do what it was meant to do and eventually bring you to me.”
It took a moment for me to respond. His words made little sense to me, and I still failed to process my response to him, a response that should have been reserved for my soul mate. For Tie.
“I don’t understand what I’m doing here. Who are you, and why—?” I broke off, afraid to ask such a disturbing question.
He took another step forward, and I nearly swayed toward him. I tightened my stance and steeled my resolve.
“Why is your soul drawn to mine?” He nodded and then swallowed, clearly overcome with emotion. “I admit when I crafted the blossom to bind your spirit to mine I had no idea…” he cleared his throat. “I underestimated the power and emotion that the bond between two soul mates produces.” He let out a shaky laugh. “I’ve never experienced it before. Love. It explains quite a few human choices and traditions that have always remained a mystery to me.” His eyes zeroed in on me and nearly sucked me forward. “Nothing could have prepared me for what I’m feeling right now. For what I feel for you.”