Her Merciless Prince

by Daniella Wright

  Eron wasn’t quite awake yet, and I lay beside him, enjoying his presence, the warmth of his body. The curve of his lips. His eyes closed. He was perfect in every way. I’d always known he would be.

  I don’t know if I believe in soulmates. I mean, I’m a scientist. I wasn’t brought up to believe in fantasy, or stories from across the ages, but my world had exploded so much, was still exploding so much. Things that I never considered could be true suddenly seemed truer than the things I could see and touch and quantify with my own senses. If I couldn’t trust my own ability to observe and detect things around me, then how could I trust that my own theories of time and space are true?

  The world was so big all of a sudden— and yet, so small. Shrinking down to the size of my village. My village, that I would never escape. My village, which might be gone as soon as the ship arrives.

  Eron stirs awake, opens his eyes and smiles at me. I lean over and kiss him, gently. Not with the passion of last night, but with comfort from knowing that we were together. That we’re meant to be together.

  The cave shakes and trembles as something passes overhead. Something big. Eron’s joy dissipates into sadness, even grief.

  “I guess Starz reached the ship,” he says.

  “I guess so.”

  Our eyes meet for a few moments. I see in them an eternity. I see in them a future that could now never be. A future that I wished could be. I see in them possibilities and worlds that I would never see. And I also see in them eternity— that I would live long, within him, forever. That he would continue to dream of me, time and time again. Every night. Every time he closed his eyes, it would be my lips that he imagined, touching his.

  But I don’t want to trap him. Trap him waiting for me to return when I would be nothing but a time remnant somewhere in the world. Unreachable, gone forever.

  As though reading my mind— which, as far as I know, he might be able to do— he reaches over and takes my hand. He meets my eyes, brings my hand to his lips, and kisses it.

  “I won’t forget you,” he says, “And I promise if there’s any way to find you again, I will find you.”

  I look at the lightning dancing on the waterfall. It’s a pure color, like the color of our love. When I look back at Eron’s orange eyes, the color dances there too, mixing and making them softer, more amber than they were before, and more powerful.

  “Don’t do that,” I say. “I will always be with you— a part of me will be. Hopefully, I will always be with you in your dreams. But you have a planet and a people. Live the life that I wish that I could have. Somewhere, I might yet. If any of what Starz says is true, then we know that various timelines are possible. Maybe I’ll just continue on in mine, and we’ll still meet in our dreams.”

  Grief shadows his face. “We’ll meet again,” he says, making it clear that he would accept no other argument. That there is only one truth for him. And that truth is that we’re meant to be together. I remember what he said about his parents— seeing them entwined together, their corpses holding onto each other, even in death. They mate for life.

  In Eron’s heart, and in mine we’ve already done that. We are one. And no matter what happens to me, I think Eron’s will be just as trapped as I am.

  “Let’s go see the ship,” I say. I stand up and we get dressed in silence. He embraces me, gently, before the yellow waterfalls. And as we climb the steps back out of the cave, the waterfalls turn to a deep green.

  If pure love can change to sorrow, then the lightning understands my heart more than even I do.

  The ship is a giant. I wouldn’t have expected anything so big to ever be able to pierce the clouds up above. It is at least ten times the size of my village. It hovers over one of the grassy plains, the yellow grass not at all disturbed by the ship— just standing there over it as though an invisible hand holds it up. I can see no propulsion devices. It’s sleek and black and looks more like an arrowhead than what I imagined a ship to be. It’s amazing.

  My entire village gathers around it. Even if a radiation storm struck right now, I think none of us would leave. It’s like something out of a story. The lightning up ahead dances. It’s green and dark purple and blue. It’s quiet, almost silent. The entire world seems to be holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen in the next few moments. It isn’t just me that’s leaving after all. It’s all of us, disappearing or rebooting, coming back as someone or something else… I don’t quite know.

  I haven’t even told my parents. I squeeze Eron’s hand and leave him as he heads to the Time Agent. I give him a sad smile, and I head over to my parents. I put myself between them, and link my arms with each of theirs.

  “It’s alright, sweetheart,” my mom says. “We’ll get through this together.”

  She has no idea how much we’ll have to get through. For her, she just has a love-sick daughter, with an off-world lover about to depart. But for me? I know what’s about to happen. I know that this timeline is about to disappear and everything that we know is about to vanish.

  “I know we will,” I say, and then cradle them. It surprises my parents— I’m not usually affectionate. But they hug me back.

  “I’ll be back.” I walk towards Starz, and I look back at my people.

  “Should we tell them that everything they know is about to vanish? I mean, how long will it take until it all reboots?”

  Starz puts his large hand on my shoulder and looks down at me. I’m comforted to see grief in his eyes like we matter to someone other than an errant prince from another planet. We matter to a Time Agent as well. A Time Agent who’s probably seen things like this before. Who’s reset entire timelines and destroyed entire peoples to things back where they were meant to be.

  “It won’t matter if you do,” he says, “and it won’t take long. Do you want them to vanish afraid of everything they’ll lose? Or do you want them to vanish in a blink of an eye, not knowing their entire world was being pulled out from under them?”

  “If it doesn’t matter,” I say, “I guess we might as well just let them go on, and wait for the end. They won’t know, they’ll be happy— I’ll be the only one who knows.”

  I look back at them all, lined up there, laughing, pointing at the spaceship, some of them with jaws practically unhinged with awe. The young and the old. Pregnant women. The wounded. The new lovers. The ones who’d been together for decades. All of them had buried people, said farewell to them in the lightning. They all had hidden from radiation storms and shared bread, dreams, and hopes, and fears.

  “Will Eron still dream of me when I’m gone?” I ask Starz. “I need to know.” An eternity in Eron’s heart. It wasn’t a bad endgame. “If I come back, in one form or another, will I still dream of him?”

  Starz’s eyes widen. “You dream of each other?” he asks. I nod.

  “We have been, for years. Both of us.”

  He looks over to Eron, who’s chatting with some of the ship’s crew. Then he looks back at me.

  “This changes things, Sybil.”

  Up above, the lightning turns to yellow.

  Chapter 21

  Eron

  “Prince Eron!” Starz says, racing up to me. I’d never seen the large man move so fast. “You have been dreaming of Sybil since before meeting her here?” He grabs my shoulders as though this is the most important thing he’s ever asked me.

  “I have… and?” I say and look to Sybil, who walks up behind him, looking about as confused as I feel.

  “This changes things,” he says. When she joins us, he puts a hand on her shoulder too, keeping one on mine. “That means you are time-locked!” He looks to Sybil. “You were time-locked beforehand. That explains why this world doesn’t feel right to you, Sybil! It explains why you’ve been dreaming of someone who’s in the regular timeline! It means that when the timeline was reset, you were still locked to time flowing at a regular pace outside of the time trap!”

  “What does that even mean?” Sybil says. She takes my hand.
I hold it tight.

  “It means that we may be able to take you out of the time trap! This may not be the end of you, Sybil!”

  She squeezes my hand more tightly. “What about my parents? What about those that I love? Do I just leave everyone behind?” I want to hold her. I want to hold her and never let her go. To dissipate her fears away with my love.

  “I don’t know,” Starz says. “But if we bring them with us, we may be able to save other villagers, too. We may be able to save everyone.”

  “I don’t think everyone will go,” Sybil says. “But some will.” She sounds more hopeful now.

  Hope grabs me again, too, and this time I won’t let it go. I won’t let her go. We will figure this out together, one way or another.

  “Let’s talk to them,” I tell Starz. “Let’s talk to them, and encourage them to come with us. And then we’ll take to the stars, and reset the timeline, and wait.”

  “We’ll do more than wait,” Starz says. “If we want to be safe, we’ll go back a few years, even, back to your people, Prince Eron. Back to the blood moon. And we will wait. The time trap may trigger again and capture you in it, Sybil. But there’s a chance it won’t. If you’re willing to take that chance, we will bring you aboard the ship with us.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance,” Sybil says, staring into my eyes, “But let me see if others will as well.”

  She walks away, making it clear that she intends to speak to her people herself, to explain to them the situation. I don’t know if she’ll convince them. I don’t know if she can convince anyone of a story so strange. And only Sybil is time-locked. So, for the others, this world has always felt right to them. This is all they’ve ever known. They’ve never imagined the blue skies or the green grass. They’ve only ever known this earth. It might be too much for them to bear. I watch as Sybil speaks with them. Some people listen intently, her parents included. But others, like Glast and Jordain, they just look at her like she’s insane. I stay with Starz although I want to go to her. She doesn’t need me now. She needs to do this by herself. Her last attempt to save her people, so that she knows, no matter what, she did everything she could. I support her. But I don’t interfere.

  “She’s a brave girl,” Starz says.

  “That she is, and so much more.”

  Thunder rumbles up above.

  The villagers staying behind stand quietly by the ship. Only about fifty are coming with us, but that’s quite a few, considering the size of the village.

  Sybil’s parents are also joining us.

  “We’re going to stay together as a family.” Her father had said, shaking my hand as though welcoming me to their clan. I certainly intended to welcome them to my clan.

  “Some of this technology is amazing, especially the genetic modification you’ve brought to plants and to animals to help them survive the radiation,” Starz says, walking with Sybil’s mother. “We’re going to put them in the time vault. The time vault is where the Time Agents save any technology that’s different— anything created outside of the regular timeline that might be useful to study or use later on.”

  “Your people will not be forgotten— their technology certainly won’t be. You’ve had brilliant minds here.”

  She laughs and answers something and they both vanish inside the ship. I wait for Sybil. She’s still exchanging a few words of goodbye with some of the villagers.

  Jordain takes her hand, as though trying to convince her to stay. I take a step forward, and he glances at me. She pulls her hand away and he lets her go. She turns without another word and walks towards me.

  “Let’s go,” she says. “I’ve done all that I can here.” I follow her into the ship. Behind us, the ramp closes.

  Chapter 22

  Sybil

  I’m not even sure that the ship’s taken off. I can’t feel it moving under my feet. I imagined there’d be some kind of pressure pushing down on me, but there’s nothing. It’s like floating away into the sky. The only way that I know that we’re moving at all, is that the people on the ground— who I’m looking at through a viewing port— are becoming smaller. They’re vanishing beneath me. Not yet because of the time that will erase them, but because of the growing distance.

  I try to capture my village for one last moment, try to imagine the falls beneath the cliffs, my home beneath the mountains, the forest where I ran as a child, our labs where we did our research. I picture it all and commit it to memory. That’s all it would be now. My parents stand beside me, and Eron holds me as we watch together.

  Our world grows smaller and smaller beneath us.

  Lightning crowds the view and then the clouds as we enter them. The ship rumbles now with the force of the lightning dancing around us. It’s not just one color now; it’s all of them. There’s dark purple, magenta, turquoise, yellow. Orange… There’s the black lightning that I’ve only seen a couple of times. Even some bright white lightning, so rare to see. It’s like the world knows that it has one final farewell to give, and it intends to make it spectacular.

  Earth will live beyond this moment, yes, but it will not be the same. It will be the way it was meant to be. And I have to make peace with that, to make peace with saying goodbye to everything I know. To learn of the worlds that I should have known. Of the places, I should have had a chance to see.

  We clear the cloud cover and soon the atmosphere. We’re moving so fast. The earth below us an orb of black and red, anger and destruction. Wisps of light seem to hug it, as though a fine mist has taken residence around it.

  “That’s the time trap,” says Starz as he walks up beside us.

  “What do we do now?” Eron asks, looking down at the earth. “I assume that’s not how it’s supposed to look.” Like he’s waiting for it to change.

  I’ve never seen the earth from here. Maybe I could get used to how it’s meant to look, not the way I’ve known it. Still, I stare at it for as long as I can. My earth. My village. My people. My people would return to the fields now, to the hunts, and cooking of the day. They would continue under the lightning-riddled skies that were never meant to be. My people, who would vanish at any moment.

  Starz’s voice almost assails my senses, more than I want to hear, more than I can take.

  “We have the bones of your parents, who were in the time-trap, and as soon as we clear the mists and the trap itself, with you here on board, the DNA should line up and trigger a time-annulling explosion.”

  “An explosion? Will it be dangerous?” Eron asks.

  “Not at all.” Starz answers. His voice is softer now, “and, within an hour, we’ll reach that point where we free ourselves of the time trap. I need to put the items in the vault. Just in case.”

  “May I see it?” I ask.

  “It’s amazing,” Eron says. “Sybil, I’ve never seen anything like it. You have to see it first-hand to really understand it!”

  Starz sighs. “You know, Prince Eron, we don’t like to show too many people its location.”

  He grins at me. “What if we blindfold her? I mean, we don’t even have to. I couldn't tell you where it is.”

  Starz smiles. “We are wily, we Time Agents.” One long-suffering sigh later, and Starz is chattering happily as he brings us to the time vault.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. So many cultures, civilizations, and worlds gone. Books in languages no longer spoken. Never spoken?

  My mind reels at the endless possibilities. Pocket universes of what have been, and yet had never been. This vault was more like a crypt of things that weren’t. That had been but were out of this time.

  An effigy to times not meant to be.

  Like my world.

  Eron thumbs through the books and I follow Starz. Eron has been here, once. He’s not trapped in the awe that I am; he can look at the granular. I can’t see the trees for the forest right now.

  “We have many samples of botany and technology from various timelines,” Starz says. “Entire branches of the Tim
e Agency are dedicated to their study and preservation.”

  “It sounds like a lonely job,” I whisper as I look around me. “Studying something that no one is even aware exists.”

  He ponders my words for a few moments. “Not really. No more than an archaeologist finding an abandoned planet and exploring its secret passages and temples.”

  “I suppose so,” I say, though I’m not convinced.

  “We’ll place your radiation rods here, near several smaller time-rifts in a solar systems not too far from your own, and then…” his voice drifts off.

  I look over, where nearly identical radiation rods lean against a wall. Starz frowns and looks at their label. His snake-like skin seems to grow paler. If that’s even possible.

  “Are you all right?” I ask, take a step forward.

  He quickly deposits the rods and walks toward me, guiding me away by the elbow.

  “Let’s speak to Eron, shall we?” he adds in a whisper, “and try to escape this trap.”

  I keep looking at the earth below. At those red, angry colors. I wonder what it will look like. I wonder, but I also know because when I close my eyes, I see it. I see it! And I wait for my open eyes to see what my mind’s eye tells me is the truth.

  The ship shakes. A murmur ripples through it. Not one speaks, and yet my mind feels like billions of voices are speaking at once— like souls trapped out of step with this timeline waiting to be unleashed. Reborn, back onto the earth. Reset to what was meant to be. The entire earth sways before us like it’s dancing in a mist that we cannot see. And suddenly, it is no longer red and black. It is no longer covered by that mist.