Time - Chapter 1
In the ashes of her past, she will rise, and her death will save us all.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.
In the ashes of her past, she will rise up, and her death will save us all.
Lizzie ran from her past for ten years, zigzagging across the United States every few months, trying to outlast the prophesy that an oracle gave to her when she was just sixteen years old.
But nobody can run from their destiny forever.
After watching her friend brutally gunned down by a group of ruthless demons, she had no choice but to protect the woman’s child, and there was only one place where Lizzie knew the girl would be safe.
Bronard, Missouri.
Home.
She stayed away to protect her parents, but the girl needed mystical protection.
Her parents had taken in magical strays their whole lives, including Lizzie. If anyone could save the poor child’s life, it would be her mother and father.
But will returning to her home doom Lizzie even as she works to save the child she has vowed to defend?
My mom thought getting a psychic reading would be a good birthday present. After all, I was constantly worried about the future ever since my adopted sister disappeared through a portal into another world and never returned. Even though the pixie Kimberly came back and told me that Anjelica was just fine on whatever planet she’d ended up on, that didn’t make me feel much better. I mean, I was happy she wasn’t dead but—well, I didn’t even know being whisked across the universe was a possible future for somebody. I was only twelve and hyper-impressionable, so I became rather obsessed with the idea that something I couldn’t even fathom would come out of left field and suck out my soul, or vaporize me, or turn me into a toadstool for the rest of my life.
No matter how many times my mom, Junebug, told me, “Lizzie, you’re being a drama queen,” I had one irrefutable piece of evidence that proved my worries were warranted. After all, it happened to my sister, or at least the closest thing to a sister I ever had. We weren’t blood, and I only knew her for a week, but Junebug and Carl adopted her all the same, just like they had me, and that made us family. They never made that mistake again, unfortunately, which made me an only child, at least on this planet, what with Angelica living her life somewhere across the galaxy.
The town we lived in—Bronard, Missouri—had a lot of weird people in it. Some might even call them monsters. I don’t know what drew so much fairy folk and monsters to our little piece of America, but Mom liked to boast that we had the most fairy folk per capita anywhere in the contiguous United States. I didn’t know if that was true. It’s one of those unverifiable pieces of Americana, like the world’s biggest ball of wax or the biggest ham sandwich. Sure, maybe even Guinness would back us, but there’s no saying somebody didn’t make a bigger sandwich just for laughs. It was a big sandwich we had in Bronard though, and fairy folk were the meat inside of it, that much I knew. We weren’t cannibals or anything, I’m just bad at metaphors.
One of the most unique of all the fairy folk that lived in Bronard was the Oracle, just like the ones that used to reside in Delphi. They said this one was a descendant of theirs, but that was just hearsay—little towns ran on gossip, and Bronard was no different. Nobody really knew the truth about the Oracle for sure. Most people kept clear of her since she rarely gave good news. The best you could hope was that her prophecy had nothing useful in it at all and just said you were gonna be a boring sod plowing sod for the rest of your life. That’s what I was hoping for, at least, when I’d gotten my reading.
Mom had thought it would be a good idea to get me one, even with all the warning signs, if for no other reason than to prove that I was destined to live a simple, old life, helping her with the bakery and helping Dad with the farm. Might seem like a boring life to some people, but that’s all I wanted. I didn’t need to become a space pope. I just wanted a little piece of Earth and a little peace of mind.
That’s not how things worked out, though.
I remembered every moment, every aching syllable, of our interaction. It stuck to me like a wet shirt.
Mom brought me to Starr Wolfsong—what a name for an Oracle— a couple of days after my sixteenth birthday in 1990, back before cell phones or AOL, when we still had to play phone tag to catch somebody instead of checking their away message. It was a simpler time, though maybe it was just simpler for me.
The Oracle lived in a trailer park, in a double-wide that sunk as we stepped up to it, creaking at us to stay away. We didn’t listen. It was double for Mom to sit and listen to the fortune, and when she asked if I wanted her to stay, I shook my head. I was a brave girl. I could handle it, or so I thought.
“Would you like half my grilled cheese?” Starr asked with a hoarse voice, her gray-skinned hand wobbling as she held out her bony arm to me.
“No, thanks,” I said.
Starr looked unhealthily gaunt, skin hanging off little more than bones as if the muscles underneath had melted away. She lit a cigarette and took a deep inhale, and then blew it out the open window next to her. The whole of the trailer reeked of smoke and misery which, even without the woman looking like she would keel over any moment, was enough to make me lose my appetite.
“I sense apprehension in you,” she said through her thin lips. “If I may offer you a piece of advice. You will not like what you hear, so I suggest you leave now.”
“How do you know?”
She ran her bony fingers through strands of thinning hair. “I have lived too many years and performed too many readings. Were I a charlatan, I could pretend that I don’t see the death of every soul that walks through my trailer. If I were a better showman, I might be able to imbue my prophesies with an ounce of hope.” She coughed a wet cough into her hand for a long moment before catching my eyes again. “People do not want the truth. If they did, I would be as rich as Miss Cleo or any of them who prey on the insecure. People pay for comforting lies, not harsh truths.”
“My mother seems to think it will help me.”
Starr flicked the cigarette out of her hand, and it landed in a puddle of muddy water. She turned to me, setting her hands face up in the middle of the table. “Place your hands in mine, and your fate will be known—though I warn you: None get out of this world alive.”
“Are you saying you will see my death?”
She took a shallow breath, wheezing as she let it out. “I do not know what I will see. That is the nature of my power. I am a slave to it.”
I nodded and slowly, gingerly placed my hands inside hers. The moment I did, a shock jolted through my body as if my fingers were touching an electrical wire. I opened my mouth, trying to scream, but before I could, the sensation passed, and my body relaxed.
Starr was still, her eyeballs rolled back into her head so that only the bloodshot whites were visible. She muttered under her breath for a long moment, her voice barely audible. With every loop of her circuitous words, I made them more clearly until they filled my soul with dread.
“In the ashes of her past, she will rise, and her death will save us all,” the Oracle gurgled like her mouth was filled with water. “In the ashes of her past, she will rise, and her death will save us all.”
She continued in that manner until her words boomed against the walls, echoing off every surface. I tried to pull my hands from her clutches, but her weak arms held me tightly, no matter how hard I pulled back.
“Stop!” I shouted. “STOP! MOM!”
The door slammed open, and my mother saw what horror she wrought on me as she heard Starr’s screaming words. “In the ashes of her past, she will rise, and her death will save us all!”
Seeing the dread in my face, Mom reached forward to pry me free from the Oracle’s fingers. When her hands weren’t strong enough by themselves, she ran to the kitchen and pulled a butter knife out of the drawer. She wedged it under the woman’s knuckles and wrenched me away, one finger at a time.
When I was finally free, Starr’s shrieking stopped, and she fell onto the table, limp. She wasn’t dead, but she had been knocked unconscious.
“Should we call an ambulance?” I asked.
“Don’t bother.” A woman stepped out from the hallway. She had big red hair like Reba McEntire and a gruff, gritty voice like she gargled with rocks. “Happens three times a week, and she couldn’t afford the ambulance ride even if you did call.” She brushed past me. “Just go. I’ll take care of her.” She turned back to me and narrowed her eyes. “I hope it was worth it.”
It wasn’t, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I looked over at Mom, who made her way out of the trailer. There was a deep shame in her eyes like she’d known what would happen. Or maybe she knew what I would do next.
In the ashes of her past, she will rise, and her death will save us all.
I spent the next week thinking, ruminating over those words. I went back to the trailer park, looking for the Oracle, but she had packed up and left town. I was the straw that broke her back, apparently, and I didn’t quite know how to feel about my prophecy causing such a reaction in her that she had no recourse but to flee town.
The only thing I knew for sure was that Carl and Junebug, my parents, were in trouble. They were my past and they were my present. I did not want them to turn to ash so that I could rise. I didn’t want any of it, and I especially didn’t want to be a savior.
I did the only thing that I could think of to save my parents. I ran away and didn’t stop running. Maybe it was a rash decision, but it was the right one. I was sure of it. It was hard at first, moving from town to town the minute I caught feeling for something or someone, desperate not to have a past, so there would be nothing to burn.
Over the next ten years, it got easier, at least that’s what I told myself. Nothing like a comforting lie to help you sleep at night.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.