Shadows of the Night (Kingdom Key Book 2)

by TylerRose.

  “Like being in Toledo for the invasion,” she nodded. “I can go. I can be there. I can fight. I can bring together an army to defend Earth.”

  “Yes, you can. But you cannot interfere with anything else. You cannot stop a war in another land. You cannot change laws.”

  “How do I go back? Do I inhabit my own body at some point, like when I’m thirteen?” she asked. “Give myself more time to prepare?”

  “That is one way, but there is the matter of the soul already present. That soul is to become you. If you replace it, you stop everything you’ve already done in your home timeline. You replace everything you’ve done to bring you to this place in your life.”

  “Would I remember Shestna and—“ she stopped herself, unable to say the word daughter.

  “Yes. You would keep your memories. Most of them. All around you would change. You would never have gone to Crecorday. You would never have saved the lives on board that station by replacing the generators.”

  She clamped her mouth shut. She hadn’t said anything about what she’d done on Crecorday, yet he knew.

  “You’ve been following me my entire life. You know everything that has ever happened to me.”

  “We do.”

  “You did nothing?” she demanded.

  “We could not do anything. We cannot interfere. All we were able to do was give you the ring. We could not make you use it. We are glad you finally did, however.”

  “There are multiple time lines, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Parallel universes? Side by side? Each with a version of me in it?” she pursued.

  “Most of them, yes. Not all.”

  “How many of them were given a ring?”

  “One. You,” he said.

  “Of all the hundreds of millions of possible time lines, you gave the one ring to me. There are many versions of me. A hundred million versions of me, but each with a different soul. A different energy. A different origin. But only one can be the Immaculate. Me.”

  She had asked no question, so he made no reply.

  “If each of them has their own soul, I cannot take their place. I need my own physical form. I need to coexist with myself, apart from myself. I have to let myself go on that same path, don’t I?” she asked. “Regardless what happened.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “You cannot change your own path from birth until the moment you said Sanctuary and came here. It is best you do not cross paths with yourself at all.”

  “So I can go back in time and fix it and, so long as I adhere to a few rules about contact and interference, I won’t be breaking any laws.”

  “Correct,” he nodded.

  “Earnol told me he’d throw me in jail if I tried.”

  “Of course he did. You would have ruined all his work. No one out there is your authority, Tyler. I think you have learned that. You may have to follow local laws but does that really count?”

  “Not really. I think of it more as a courtesy,” she admitted, turning to sit on the bench. “What is this place? Really?”

  “Picture the galaxy. How it swirls around that center point? In the center is a black hole. At the center of that black hole, suspended and held in place by all those opposing forces, is Sanctuary. Now picture all the timelines that have ever existed. This is the place where they all intersect. This is the place the previous Immaculate created as her final home when she brought this galaxy into being. She birthed you and we’ve been trying to get you to take off ever since.”

  “I was told I’d had many previous lives. I don’t really remember them. I remember being stung by a bee on my hand and that life ended,” she said.

  “Yes. I was fortunate to get you back in time.”

  “How many Immaculates has she birthed?”

  “You are the ninth.”

  “Oh, god. Don’t tell me I’m the last.”

  “No,” he smiled, glad to see she could find the humor. “There are more to come but they happen several hundred thousand years apart. To take care of you, she released several groups of males into different areas of the galaxy, to prepare for you if you were taken to them.”

  “And they’ve all pissed out,” she grumped. “That’s why I have to go back and fix it. Go back to Earth before the invasion. Pick it up from there, when I had Jerome and Nails. If we survive that, I can eventually find Dorn.”

  “Well…There is another partial team. An Apogee and one who could be a conduit if he was given the crystal energy. But the leader has been reluctant to get involved.”

  “It is safer to stay away,” she had to agree.

  “You know there have been factions for you and against you. The Tao is the Earth team that included the man you know as Nails. The Dautan were the opposing faction, headed by Earnol. Nails made a very bad mistake. He lost his right to be the Conduit several thousand years ago. Another was chosen to replace him. The one who was to be Apogee died. Another man was brought in to take over. If you want to meet him, I can bring him.”

  “No. I don’t even want to know who he is,” she said quickly. “It won’t matter. I’m not going to go forward with a slap-dash team of people I don’t know and don’t trust and would second guess. I never once doubted Nails. I can’t have doubt in my top tiers. Or at all. A man brought in to be clean up?” She shook her head quickly. “I wouldn’t trust him.”

  “Even if you already know him and have been his lover?” Jiogaard asked.

  Her brain stopped. Blinking, she thought about one man and the next and the next.

  “You mean Thomas, don’t you?”

  “Your intuition serves you well.”

  “So did he do all that for me—the apartment, the car, traveling with me—because he knew who and what I was to become and not because he really loved me? Why tell me this stuff now? Do you prefer I not go back in time?” she had to ask. “That I take someone whose motivations I don’t trust?”

  “I prefer you have all the pertinent facts and options before you set yourself to one specific course of action.”

  “My every instinct tells me I must have Nails and Jerome and Dorn. No one else interests me. I don’t want to be with anyone else, even among the lovers I’ve already had. Thomas and Nails know each other. Well. Knew.”

  Her silence was as heavy as her heart to remember Kevin in the past tense.

  “You still miss him greatly, the man Nails. Do you understand why?”

  “I have a very strong bond with him. I think it’s still there,” she admitted.

  “It is. You form a real physical bond with your Conduit, Apogee and Conservator. It’s more than emotional. Almost like a thread of energy between you and them. When he died, that thread was cut. It’s the same as cutting a blood artery, except it is energy based. You felt it to a degree with Jerome when Shestna took his energy from him.”

  “I did. I was furious that Sta had done that. Inordinately so.”

  “Now you know why. You may only have had one night, but that night set the bond between you and Jerome,” Jiogaard said, watching her rub her fingers across her eyes and forehead. “Maybe you should put off your meeting until tomorrow. You are getting tired again from the weight of our atmosphere.”

  “You’ll bring him first thing?” she asked.

  “He will be here shortly after you next wake up, whenever that might be. I give you my word.”

  Tyler stood to go in, halting when she saw a muscular pair of arms carrying in a pile of empty boxes. For the first time since Solomon stole her from Voran, she felt sexual interest in someone.

  “Zamren, thank you for coming so quickly.”

  “I’m happy to change out the flowers if the Resident is not happy with her yard decoration,” the dark haired, dark eyed man in work clothes said with a nod to her. “I’ll remove as many as I can now and bring flowers with the sunrise.

  He was nearly as big as Jerome’s friend had been. The one in the video store whose name escaped her. But she was in no condition to do anything
at the moment. She was swiftly becoming more and more tired.

  “Not meaning here, right now…why am I always so tired?” she asked. “I sleep too much.”

  “You do not sleep enough,” he told her. “Several reasons. First, you have an immense personal energy that is shoved into a very small vessel. The constant and intense activity of the mind is physically draining. Second, when you dream, you aren’t just dreaming, are you? You see visions from the past, the present, the future almost as clearly as if you were living it.”

  “Yes, I do,” she agreed.

  “Because you are living it. There are two things you are able to do. One is called remote viewing. That is when you look through the eyes of someone else and see what is happening around them. You know you do that. The other you don’t realize is the same thing Earnol could do. Remove himself from the timeline to view what he wanted to see in the past or the future. Not many people in the history of this galaxy have been able to do that. I can count them on one hand. It is why he was part of the Guardians of Time.”

  “That’s a silly name,” she interrupted. “So is Ambassadors Administration for Space and Time Travel.”

  “What do you think it should be called?” Jiogaard asked, going with her subject change rather than persisting in his explanation.

  “Just call it the Celestial Congress and leave it at that. I’m going to bed.”

  She had to, her eyelids becoming heavier by the second. She barely sighed out a breath before she was asleep.

  She woke feeling much lighter. Changing into a dark blue outfit, she went outside into her garden to find Zamren already there. He was planting Psala flowers. Short red blossoms only about six inches tall. She decided to help. She’d not worked in her garden for months, and missed the feel of the soil on her hands and the accomplishment of finishing a bed.

  He glanced up, fingers in a freshly dug hole pressing sides firm to make a stable pocket for the next blossom.

  “I thought you would like the Psalas,” he said. “These are a shorter variety that won’t block the rest of the garden, like the tall stalks of the yellow would do.”

  “They’re lovely, she said, picking one up to smell.

  She froze in place, memories rushing forward of the day he’d given her a red Psala and helped her escape Earnol. She relived their entire relationship. Every meeting, Gramma Addie’s house and collecting the crawdads from the traps with an alligator over her shoulder. The torn up white Psala from their week-long marriage. The first time they made love. She relived every minute up to her waking up to see him being shot and dying while she lay on his lap.

  The grip released her and she did what she had not allowed herself to do. She cried. Violent, soul-jarring sobs that blinded her mind and her senses. She expended her grief for him, for their lost daughter, hurling out everything she’d been holding onto all these months.

  Zamren was there, gathering her into his arms so she could have something solid to hold onto while she was lost and out of control hurricane of grief, anger, and utter anguish. In this place that had no time, she rolled through wave after wave of pent up sorrow and heartache that exploded out of a bottomless black hole.

  All at once she woke up, her soul lighter than it had been the first time she’d awakened. She had an inner sensation of relief. She was wearing the dark blue dress, remembered changing into it; but wondered if she’d dreamt the rest.

  “It was no dream, child,” Jiogaard said from a nearby chair. “Your emotional outpouring exhausted you and you lost consciousness. I do understand why you found it necessary to conceal your grief, but you did yourself a tremendous harm. Your physical form cannot withstand the forces of containing that much emotional energy. That is another reason you are so often tired. Rather than holding in your emotions, you need to find a way to vent them. You do need to give way to the tears when they come forth.”

  “My music has always been my emotional outlet. I couldn’t sing while I was trapped with Solomon. I didn’t have my music even if he would have let me do it. Then on the Drakkorian ship I didn’t want to. I was being taught to contain myself, and singing lets it all out,” she explained.

  “Well, you may certainly do so here. There is no one to hear anything, even with the front door open as it is. Sound will not carry outside of your residence. You can sing for as long as you want, as loud as you like. Are you hungry? I’ve brought a meal.”

  She was, sitting down to a fantastic cut of steak cooked perfectly on the rare side of medium rare. Salad and bread accompanied it so she would fill up on the protein and not a potato or other side dish full of starch.

  “I still want to speak to Keto Dyren,” she said, smashing the melting garlic butter over the steak. “When I’m done eating. Is he here?”

  “He will be by the time you finish eating. We had to wait until you woke so he wouldn’t be waiting.”

  “This place is at the point where all time and all parallels meet,” she said. “Does that mean I can be here for five days and when I go back, five years will have passed?”

  “No. You would be returned the same minute that you left, but in any place you wanted.”

  “But do I have to be returned to that moment? Can I re-enter the timeline five years down the road if I want to?” she reiterated.

  “You can. It is not recommended.”

  “Can I ask for you to bring Julian from five years in the future from where I left?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he had to say, not particularly liking that she was already capable of reading between the lines and getting into the very specific details. She was tapping into levels of intuition and knowledge that were beyond her current self.

  “I want to meet Keto Dyren a year after he expelled the emotions,” she declared out of the blue. “So he’s had time to understand the changes but not so long that he’s forgotten how he did it.”

  “As you like,” Jiogaard responded. Intuition, indeed.

  He stopped talking so she would eat more steadily. When she had finished her plate, she went out to the garden to see how much had been changed.

  “What are those?” she asked of the delicate little pink and silver blossoms that looked rather like pansies.

  “Akoristas,” Zamren told her, firming the soil around one he’d just planted. “They are native to Sanctuary. When the wind blows, sunlight dances off the silver petals and reflects around the garden. That’s why I’m putting them toward the middle.”

  She lowered to her knees to help with the last ten plants.

  “What else are you going to plant?”

  “I don’t know. What are your favorite colors?” he asked in return.

  “When it comes to flowers, I love them all. Just don’t do topiary.”

  “No fanciful shaped shrubbery. You got it.”

  She laughed, hands shaping the walls of a hole.

  “It’s good that you can laugh so soon after you’ve had such a hard and profound emotional purge,” he said.

  “Being sad and angry doesn’t mean I can’t see and appreciate the humor in something else,” she shrugged her shoulders.

  “That’s mature of you. Do you perceive the changes within you as compared to a year ago? Or two years ago?”

  “Of course I do. I’m a pissed off fuckin’ bitch ready to go on a rampage through the Congress and kill every fucker who has conspired to keep me from being what I’m supposed to be.”

  He stopped his work to look at her. Her eyes lifted sideways to him hands continuing their work.

  “But it seems people frown on that kind of thing,” she continued. “So here I am doing my best to get a handle on my emotions before I do go totally postal.”

  “Have you met this other part of you that is the Immaculate? Has anyone told you how it all works?”

  “Sort of and not really. Just that I have Widening after Widening until I take my final form,” she said, backfilling the plant and pressing it firm.

  “That would be the briefest of answe
rs,” he agreed.

  “I think if it’s going to take that long that I shouldn’t worry about the day to day minutia. Whatever happens is what happens and the endgame will arrive whenever it happens to arrive. I keep thinking about the people who have died so far. If it’s a thousand years, there are many thousands more people who will die. I need to find a way to be okay with that. I can’t grieve for everyone.”

  “Do you realize how ill you were making yourself by not grieving for your husband and daughter? How ill you are making yourself by not even allowing yourself to think about the son you’ve had to let go?” he asked.

  “I cannot think of him. I have to let him go,” she said, flat and emotionless. “For his own safety. Regardless the pain to myself.”

  “If you cannot grieve for him, you will not be able to expel grief.”

  “Why not?”

  “In order to thoroughly expel an emotion, you have to thoroughly express and release it,” said a male voice behind her.

  Tyler looked over her shoulder to see a nearly middle aged man in the robes of the Dastoor.

  “If you refuse to thoroughly and completely express an emotion through every instance it comes to you, you will not do whatever it is you want to do,” he said. “What is it you want to do?”

  Tyler finished her second flower and stood to be properly introduced by Rengaard. Jiogaard was nowhere to be seen.

  “Immaculate, this is Keto Dyren of the Extirpationists of Sistair. Keto Dyren, this is the Tyler, the next Immaculate Doyen.”

  “I am honored to meet you, Ma’am,” he said.

  “I don’t know why. I’m intrigued to know how you managed to be rid of whatever emotions you rid yourself of. What were they?”

  “What the specific emotions were doesn’t not much matter. How I did it is the important part.”

  “So how did you?” she asked, leading him to the bench so they could sit together.

  “Meditation. Hours and hours of it, determining instances of an emotion and exploring them one by one until I was reconciled with them. Then I let them go. Eventually, there were no more memories related to that emotion and I cast it out entirely. After that, I no longer felt that emotion in new situations.”