The Eleventh Hour [SEQUEL TO THE SAGA] (Formerly Ordinary Day)

The next thing I knew, I was standing in what appeared to be a deep ocean, surrounded by kelp plants that stretched up to meet the sunlight high above. I knew this place well; every turning point in my legend had taken me here. I waited, relaxing, for what I knew was coming.

They came, looking as they always had. There were four of them, impossibly tall men and women with beautiful swords by their sides, edged in the same blue-glowing magic that marked me out as one of their Legends. “Juliana,” they murmured, their voices ringing together and, as always, impossible to distinguish from one another.

I bowed politely. “It has been... some time,” I murmured in reply.

“It has, and this will be the last time you see us,” they told me. Was it my imagination, or had they put a slight emphasis on the word you? “Your legend is almost over. Your star is setting, though your power will never wane.”

I looked up at them. Six feet tall I may be, but I always had to look up at them; they were far taller than I was. “What does this end mean?” I asked.

“You have one task left to complete, and one last adventure to undertake. Once you have done this, you will die forever.”

I sighed and bowed my head, my mind working coolly and quickly despite the shock and horror that threatened to cloud it. I had had to learn how to think clearly despite any emotion; every Battlemage did. There was one question I had to ask, and I asked it: “Is there no chance that I could live?”

“There is one way,” they told me—gently? They were less human than I was, but that sounded like kindness. “It is not within your power to save yourself, but there is one who can save you. You will know who it is, when the power comes to him. That moment is the one chance you will get to influence his choice to change your fate.”

I nodded. “So be it, then.”

They nodded approvingly, and I felt my connection to this place slipping away for the last time. “Trust those you love...” they murmured.

Then they were gone, and I was waking up in the forest outside of the fortress. Around me were the familiar faces of the friends I had been talking to just before I fainted. I got to my feet, accepting the help Kao offered, and was quickly accosted by Risa. “What happened?” she demanded.

With a sigh, I explained, “A vision. Something's brewing.”

My friends stared at me. “Like what?” Kao demanded at last, saying what everyone else was clearly thinking.

“I'd rather not talk about it,” I mumbled.

Trust those you love... the words echoed in my head again, showing me the error in what I'd just said. These were my friends, some of the best I had; if I refused to trust them, who would I trust? “Actually...” The word slipped out before I really thought it through. After that, I had to keep speaking. Besides, these people deserved better than to be kept in the dark. “This will be hard to say, but... I have to tell you, my story is almost over. And... it seems there's a good chance that... in the end... I'll... die.”

That last word seemed to hang in the air like the proverbial elephant in the room. My friends stared at me like they were waiting for me to say “Just kidding” and burst out laughing. The moment stretched out, longer and longer, and still nobody spoke.

Hunter bounced over exuberantly, every bit as enthusiastic as one would expect of the normal little boy he absolutely wasn't. He noticed the mood in our little group and sobered somewhat. “What's wrong?” he asked, gazing around at each somber face in turn.

“Something's brewing,” I explained at last. “The last chapter of my legend is close, and at the end of it I'll... possibly....” The last word was unbelievably difficult to say. It took a while, but finally I came up with a euphemism for it. “I might be gone.”

Even though he wore a hood and goggles to hide his face, I could see my cousin's expression flash rapidly from bewilderment to understanding to disbelief and settle on horror. We had grown up together; he knew me too well to harbor even the faintest hope that this was a joke. “Juliana,” he whispered slowly, using my full first name to remind me of the childhood we had shared, “how do you know this?”

“A vision,” I explained wearily, myself too shocked to hunt down any other way to explain it. “It's... the end...”

The look on Hunter's face when I said that, the look mirrored on everyone else's face, was painful beyond words for me to see. I unthinkingly hugged my cousin the same way I used to when we were children together, before the accident that had left him separated from the rest of the family for five millennia.

So focused was I on Hunter that I didn't notice what the rest of my friends were doing until I felt warmth and weight on my side. Kao had come over, making this a group hug. Slowly, silently, Aeon and Risa followed suit. More of my friends began to notice what we were doing from elsewhere in the woods, and our group hug expanded in utter silence.

I'm not sure how long we stood there, silently sharing that strange moment of deep companionship. I do know that it wasn't until a long time later that I next heard anyone's voice.

“What's going on here?” It was the clan's putative leader, Vamparagon, who spoke. We were really just a tight-knit group of silly but powerful friends, but Vamp was the one who generally ran things.

“Group hugs,” Winnie explained matter-of-factly, as only Winnie could. She would put it that way, too; she never passed up an opportunity to reference one of her beloved musicals.

The silence thus broken, the moment ended, the group hug slowly broke apart until it was only Hunter and I left. “Will you be okay?” I asked my cousin. I still felt responsible for him sometimes—because I had been the older one when we had played together as children, because I was an adult and he might never be, because I had been the one to add the powers of a Greater Called warrior to his already considerable gifts. For his sake and everyone else's, I wanted him safe.

Hunter stared up at me (he had still been several inches shy of my six feet when he had, by means I still had yet to convince him to tell me about, become an unaging immortal) with wide, troubled eyes. "I'm fine—but, Juli, will you be?”

“I'm fine now,” I told him quietly, making the instant decision to trust him with the one comforting truth I had learned. “And there is one thing—there is someone, I don't know who yet, who will be able to save me...”

“How do you know if you can trust that person, though?” he whispered.

“I don't, yet,” I admitted. “But I'll know when I need to...”

Hunter still looked a little dubious, but was forced to let it go when Kao called our names. “Juli? Hunter? You coming?”

I hugged my cousin one more time, and we trotted off towards where our friends were waiting for us.

Hours later, I trudged through one of the many halls on the second story of the Regulars' fortress. The stone walls surrounding me looked darker than usual. Perhaps it was because the darkness of night cloaked them; but then again, perhaps it was all my mood.

“You two seem very close.”

I turned towards the voice issuing from an open door to my right. There were no lights on inside, which I found a little unusual given how dark it was, but I supposed that Aeon would have some reason for not having any light on.

“What was that?” I asked, though I thought I knew what he was talking about. I had just said goodnight to Hunter a short ways down the hall, as his room was in a different direction than mine, and that farewell may well have been overheard.

“You and Hunter. You seem close.” So I was right.

I had the strange feeling that this conversation was some sort of challenge, one that I would have to answer. Probing further, I responded, “True. Is there any reason we shouldn't be?”

“No reason,” Aeon allowed. “I was just wondering why.” He appeared in the doorway, making it possible for me to meet his eyes. Acting on my sense of confrontation, I stepped a little closer while still meeting his gaze. At the same time, I summoned a faint corona of blue mist to surround me: a subtle reminder of my power.

“Would you want to know why?” I inquired politely, hiding my counter-challenge in a detached courtesy. “Would you want me to show you?”

He took one step back, though not deep enough into the darkness to be hidden. Curiosity mixed with apprehension flared up brightly in his eyes. “I think I would, actually.”

“All right,” I assented. “May I come in?

He nodded, opening the door further. I stepped through and closed it behind me—better not to let any passersby see the kind of magic I was about to use; I was willing to show it to Aeon only because my Legend instinct told me that it was safe and that, more, it would put me in a situation that could very well help me dramatically.

Glowing blue mist gathered around my left hand, which I raised to paint a disk of magic in the air. “What you are about to see is not widely known,” I informed him quietly. A gesture of my hand, a simple spell that even the weakest of the Called warriors could cast with ease, and the face of a young boy perhaps eight years old appeared in the middle of my disk of magic. His face was perhaps a shade darker than mine, glowing with the energy of childhood, and his eyes glinted with mischief. Although he was looking straight at our vantage point with the grin of a consummate prankster, it was clear that his black hair was very long and pulled back in a smooth ponytail. “That's Hunter,” I explained. “This is what he looked like when he was a child, before he changed his name.”

“He changed it?” Aeon looked puzzled, and with good reason. “If you know what he looked like—what was his name before that? And how do you know all this?”

I smiled, in a way that may have been more unnerving than I intended. “His name was Hunter Sundry, and he was my cousin. We were best friends when we were little... I was the youngest in my immediate family at the time, so he was almost like a surrogate little brother to me... I was the big sister he didn't have...”

Looking more puzzled than ever, Aeon considered, “That was past tense... Juli, what happened?”

The sound of my nickname brought me solidly back to the present. Though Aeon couldn't possibly know it, I had only been called “Juli” for a very small part of my life. But somehow, I suspected that calling me back was exactly what he was trying to do.

Thus returned to the present, I gestured again to the image disk. Hunter's face was replaced by a tiny bird, its newness made evident by the fluffy golden down that covered it and made comical by the massively oversized ram's horns on its head. “He found this baby chick, named it Tritocry, and started raising it,” I explained. “It was adorable when it was this small, but when people found out about it they ran boy and bird out of town—see, he lived in a very small community, and they didn't trust that the bird was safe to be around.”

“It looks harmless enough,” Aeon pointed out.

“Well, by the time anyone other than me and Hunter found out about it, it was the size of a horse,” I noted fairly. As I did, I realized that I was speaking more as I had when I was a child. “Apparently that species grows to be enormous. But it was very loyal to Hunter, enough so that he could ride on its back. That was how he got away from the mob that ran him out of town... and that was the last I saw of him for a very long time.”

As I'd hoped, Aeon looked thoughtful now. “If you two were so close, wouldn't he have tried to contact you when he reached someplace safe?”

I sighed sadly. Despite all the time that had passed, and despite all the things that had happened to make this part less of significance, the memories that I was about to recount still had a little sting left in them. “He never got to anywhere safe. He ran here, toward Battleon, but...” I gestured to the disk of magic again, and a dark, dirty alleyway with a large bloodstain spreading across one wall and the ground replaced the tiny bird. “Some nutcase apparently liked the look of that bird, and shot Hunter in the head trying to steal it. The bird got away, though.”

A vaguely nauseated expression crossed my friend's face. “So that...” he indicated the picture of the alley, “is...?”

“That's where it happened. It was a baffling case; the blood was definitely Hunter's, and the evidence pointed to a conclusion that he had died instantly, but...” I shrugged. “No body, and the nutcase swore he hadn't moved it anywhere. So I was left to wonder... and that's what I did, for years. The question was always there in the back of my mind, even when I had other concerns. Until last winter.”

The alley faded away, removing a great deal of horror from the atmosphere, and the scene that replaced it was far more recent: a mountaintop, with an impossibly vast, golden-feathered, ram-horned eagle standing over the now-unmistakable form of Hunter Reckoning that lay inside a small structure. The only difference between how he looked in my remembered image and how he had appeared when I had said goodnight to him scarcely five minutes ago was that in the picture, his hood was pushed back to reveal a chalk-white face and a long, sea-green ponytail styled much like the one he had had in the first picture.

“The bird was the first clue,” I elucidated, “but I wasn't sure until I tried confirming it by magic. Then, not too long after, he regained all his memories and started talking about our shared childhood. After that... well, there was no possible doubt left.”

Aeon stared at me, evidently shocked by the story I'd told. “Hang on, why didn't I ever hear about any of this? Hunter's barely even a teenager—wouldn't everyone have heard when he disappeared?”

I smiled ironically. “Sure. Everyone heard. People heard about little Hunter Sundry, driven away by distrust and murdered by greed, but then they forgot. Not all at once, mind you—the memory disappeared as the memories of a society do: bit by bit, covered over, as people went back to their lives, stopped thinking about it, and one by one died without passing it on. By now, there aren't even any records left... I destroyed the last of them myself.”

“Juliana Sundry.”

My name hung in the air for a second before I answered. “Yes?”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen,” I answered automatically, then reconsidered. I had told too many half-truths in my life; I couldn't add another one now. “Just days shy of sixteen, as humans count it. By other measures... I could be counted as forty, or eighty-five, or five thousand-odd.”

“What measures?” he asked, clearly trying to understand something.

“It's been forty years since I first was able to become a Called warrior—forty years I've lived in this era. In total, I've lived eighty-five years in this universe, and thanks to Hunter I've finally been able to calculate that I first came into being just over five thousand years ago.”

“You don't act that old,” Aeon whispered in shock. “Neither of you. Especially not Hunter.”

With a soft laugh, I replied, “In practical terms, we're not old. Hunter's been alive throughout every one of those five thousand years, but his mind is still that of a thirteen-year-old, and a down-to-earth one at that. We're Called warriors: immortal, and with souls so ancient even we have trouble comprehending it, but our bodies are young and in most respects we act more like whatever age we appear to be.”

“How does that work? You're a teenager, mostly... but how are you not?”

“Mostly in how much I know,” I breathed, lowering my voice as I thought very hard about the question. “Not just things like you would learn in school—how to do this or that, the points the author made in such-and-such a book, when certain events in history happened—but I also have... practical experience with things most teenagers wouldn't know. I'm aware of how life changes when you're old, so maybe I appreciate being young more. And maybe I understand the value of life in ways that a person wouldn't get unless they'd seen lives taken. And maybe I'm more aware of the way things have a cost, the dark and dirty side of the glory other kids think of.”

“Juli.” There it was again: my nickname. I wondered if Aeon was doing this on purpose—but that was impossible!—to keep me in a more approachable state than the woman removed by millenia's distance that I would become if I wasn't kept to the present in his mind and my own. “You've just described exactly how a person changes by becoming a warrior. All those things are how most of us here have changed. We've all served in battle.”

I smiled. “We're known as Called warriors for a reason. Clearly, the term fits better even than usual when you describe it that way.”

Suddenly, his gaze caught mine, too intensely for me to look away. I found myself staring back, entranced by his fascination, no longer feeling like words were at all necessary. Between the darkness and the reflection of the still-glowing magic image that hung in the air, I couldn't really see what color his eyes were: this I noticed absently without really caring. We stared silently at each other, enrapt, for what felt like a very long time before he spoke.

“Did you know you're beautiful?”

I shook my head. Me, beautiful? That was simply not possible. I had long been told that I was capable of doing beautiful things with a sword or a pen or a spell, but in my own appearance I knew quite well that I was too severe, too muscular, too scarred, too clearly dangerous to be considered beautiful. “I am not,” I insisted softly. “I could never be.”

“Never?”

I had to look away; the action was no more a choice than my inability to break with his gaze before that point had been. “Never,” I repeated. “Just look at me!”

“I am looking,” he replied quietly, “and you're beautiful.”

“No,” I whispered, afraid to accept that he was being honest. I had spent five thousand years convinced that my appearance was perfectly average at best. No other possibility had even crossed my mind in centuries. And I had depended on it: in this one thing, I was as ordinary as I dreamed of being.

“Yes,” he insisted, lowering his voice to match mine.

I opened my mouth—to say what? I had no idea—but was cut off as, somewhere in the distance, a bell chimed eleven times. “It's the eleventh hour,” I noted. As soon as I had said it, I realized the double meaning in that phrase: I had meant to point out that the time was eleven o'clock, but at the same time the proverbial meaning was just as accurate. It was the eleventh hour; my life was almost over. Judging from the look on his face, I thought Aeon probably understood both meanings.

“You should go to bed,” he began hesitantly. “And... think about this... if you don't have much time left, maybe you should make the most of what you have.”

I made my way back to my own room, strangely confused. It felt like my mind was racing, but it was full of things I didn't understand.

Sleep came restlessly that night. I still felt drawn to sleep naturally, though by now I was a little dubious as to why. Given my state of mind, I thought I would have a hard time falling asleep, but the day had tired me out more than I had expected. I was asleep almost the moment I lay down.

That night, I dreamed and dreamed again.

A painting.

A man and a woman, dressed in clothes unlike any I had ever seen, were painted in the middle of a field edged in trees. Each held out a hand to touch the other's fingertips, but they were just far enough apart that an inch was left between them. In that gap, a tiny sphere of light blossomed. Their faces were painted small enough that I couldn't have said whether or not I knew them, but I had the strange feeling that I did.

I looked away from the painting, to see another work of art beside it.

A picture drawn in tiny points of light.

The same two figures sat side by side, holding hands, on a bench in what I recognized as the Battleon of five thousand years ago. This time, they wore the fashions of that time, though again there was nobody else in sight. They appeared to be talking to one another, and with a jolt I realized that the woman's hair was pulled back in a long, brown ponytail identical to the one I had worn back then.

Mildly shocked, I looked away, and saw a third artwork beside the second.

It appeared to be a low-relief sculpture of the same pair, both wearing what looked to me like patchwork quilts. There was nothing around or behind them. The woman lay on the ground with her eyes closed, while the man knelt next to her. When I looked very closely, I could see a padlock etched faintly on her chest. At that sight, fear crashed into me like a huge snowball, though I didn't exactly understand why.

With a shiver, I looked on. There was only one more work of art left: a stone triptych.

The leftmost panel was a dark cut-paper collage of a scene familiar to me. It was the safe graveyard, the one I slept in some nights when I needed to refresh my mind. Despite the reassuring scene, I was afraid of that one too; there was a blue padlock painted over the scene in watercolor.

The middle panel baffled me. It was a watercolor of six faces I knew well: Kao, Risa, Hunter, Aeon, Winnie, and Spy. They were beautifully painted, with an accuracy and detail I wouldn't have expected could be achieved with watercolor, but all of them looked confused and slightly nervous.

The third panel was a lithograph of me in battle. The only colors in it were in the lines, which were colored true to life. I appeared to be twisting in midair to stop an incoming sword from behind me. Whatever artist had done this had apparently thought I was enjoying myself very much, as there was a small grin on my face and I seemed almost in motion in the still etching.

This piece intrigued me far more than any of the other artwork. A triptych is supposed to tell a story, but I couldn't seem to put together what story these three images together would tell. A graveyard, worried people, and me in battle? In that order? It would tell a story in the opposite order—albeit a none too happy one—but...

I lifted a hand to touch the rightmost panel. The moment I did, everything was cloaked in brilliant golden light. The disorienting light erased every other sensation. At length, new feelings slowly began to creep into my awareness.

Golden light spilled everywhere. Warm hands gently stroked my face, and a voice whispered in my ear, “I love you.” I was lying on grass. It made no sense—how had I gotten here?

This time, I woke without forcing myself to. I was simply aware, suddenly and completely. But the return of consciousness did nothing for my disorientation: it took me several seconds to realize that I was lying facedown on my bed, with the bedspread draped over my head and the sheet somewhere around my feet. I raised myself a few inches off the bed, the bedspread sliding down my back as I did so. “Didn't think that dream was so exciting,” I mumbled as I realized that I had somehow wound up with my feet by the pillow and my head at the foot of the bed. Rearranging things so that I was in roughly the normal position, I settled down to go back to sleep.

A small woman, her blonde hair pulled back in a bun, stared at me accusingly from the relative shelter of the huge, white-feathered wings that appeared to be growing from her back. She was the only clean thing in sight: everything else was scorched or bloodstained or muddy or some combination of the three. A battlefield, then.

The shapes of bodies were clearly present in many places, and some of them looked vaguely familiar. I looked around sadly, taking in everything. Mourning, silently, for the dead.

“You could have prevented this.”

I turned to look at the angel in astonishment. “How? It was not I who wreaked this destruction. I am only one warrior. How could I prevent the carnage of a battle?”

“Not the battle,” she replied coldly. Angry—but why? “You could have prevented THIS!” Savagely, she pointed to two bodies a few feet away from her. I approached them, trepidation welling in my stomach, and stared down at them.

It was Risa and Hunter. Their eyes were open and a naïve expression still marked their faces, as if death had caught them both in a moment of innocent surprise. There was no trace of the retired murderess and the ancient warrior-sorcerer in their appearance now. In death, they were purely children.

I turned desperately to the angel. “But they're immortal! Called warriors—Risa's the next Legend—I don't know what-all Hunter is but he's powerful—they can come back!”

“They were immortal. Had you acted differently, they still would be. But now...” She pointed to a smashed egg a short distance away from Hunter's body. My heart sank: Yolky. The egg was a symbol of Hunter's immortality as well as his companion. “And what about THIS?” She whirled to point to another body. It was Cial, half his face caved in and blood matting his brown hair. “Or THIS?” Weena lay across a rock, his bones broken, his white suit filthy, and blood leaking out of his mouth. “Or THIS?” Kayleen was crumpled on the ground, a dragonspear sticking out of her side. “Or THIS?” Charon's hands were shredded, the scissors he preferred to fight with ripped into a pair of daggers and both stabbed through his chest. The picture was suddenly clear to me. We were surrounded by the dead, and nearly all of them were my friends.

I sank to my knees, beginning to cry with sheer horror and grief. “How did this happen?” I sobbed.

“He could tell you,” the angel snapped, pointing to something behind me. I turned around to see Aeon, lying on the ground and struggling for breath. Numbly, I stood up and stumbled over to him.

“What happened to you?” I mumbled, shock threatening to overcome me despite my training.

“They were so much stronger than us...” he moaned. “Not as individuals, but... I don't know. We lost.”

“We lost...” I echoed sadly.

“You were supposed to save us,” he told me dully. It sounded like he was too defeated to care what he was saying. “Why didn't you? You could have, I thought you could have.”

I couldn't answer through the thick wave of guilt that crashed through me. Aeon sighed, and was still.

I was the only living thing on that battlefield.

I wrenched myself out of the dream and sat bolt upright in my bed, screaming. In the bed next to mine, Risa sat up as well. “What is it?” she asked quickly.

“Just a nightmare,” I panted. The gray light of morning lit up the sky outside my window, telling me that the first early risers would already be up. That was fine with me: I couldn't imagine trying to get back to sleep with the images of my friends dead and dying still floating just behind my eyelids.

“Sounds like a bad one,” Risa murmured respectfully. She never made fun of nightmares, given the kind she had herself. An unusually strong reaction simply meant an unusually strong nightmare.

“It was.” I couldn't seem to banish it. Extricating myself from the tangled covers, I crossed the room to my washstand and splashed some water on my face. That helped some, though I thought it would take more than water to fully reorient myself.

Someone knocked on my door. I opened it to reveal Winnie, whose room was just down the hall from mine. Her black eyes were wide with concern. “Are you all right, Juli?”

“I'm fine,” I replied quickly. “Just had a nightmare, that's all.”

After a moment's pause, she pressed, “Are you sure?”

On impulse, I hugged my friend. “I'm fine, sister,” I assured her. It calmed me to feel that she was solid and alive, reminded me that this was real. My friends were alive. It had only been a dream.

I spent the time until breakfast writing about my dreams in an attempt to make sense of them. By the time breakfast came several hours later, all I had was this:

First dream
Golden light—source?
Someone's hands and voice—but whose?
So nice, but I'm so scared.
Grass, so outside on the ground.
How did I get there?
Come to think of it, where am I?
Is my memory failing? That's impossible.
Why can't I identify that voice? I know it's familiar. Whose IS it?

Second dream
Four works of art, if you count the triptych as one.
Why such different styles?
Why the same subject?
The woman is me. Who's the man? I can't tell.
Three panels: safe graveyard, six worried people, me fighting.
What's the story here?
Maybe all four works tell a story together.
So what's the triptych?
Styles significant? Sequence of events?
This can't be just an art gallery.
First dream triggered by touching artwork. What does this mean?

Third dream
That angel looks familiar.
What did I DO?!
What could possibly kill Hunter and Risa like that?
They looked surprised—what could surprise them?
Everyone murdered rather brutally. Only one person merely dying.
Who/what would want to do that?
Who/what COULD?
Out of all the people who could have been pointed out dead, why Risa, Hunter, Cial, Weena, Kayleen, Charon?
Why that order?
Out of all possible survivors, why Aeon?

When the scent of freshly made pancakes drifted up from the kitchens somewhere on a lower level, I reread what I had. Realizing that I still had far more questions than answers, I gave up and folded the paper I had been writing on. Out of a fairly useless hope, I put the paper in the pocket of my dress before I went downstairs.

I was one of the first down to breakfast. Only a very few people were up this early, and they weren't sitting near each other. Choosing a place at the table that would later be occupied by my friends, I took some pancakes and began to eat.

I had only eaten about a third of the way through my breakfast when others began to arrive. Some exhibited the alacrity and attentiveness of soldiers, while others trudged in with all the alacrity and attentiveness of zombies. Among the earlier arrivals was Kao, who noticed that I was eating alone and came over to join me.

“Morning keeps coming earlier and earlier, does it?” he joked by way of greeting. “I don't know that I've ever seen you here so early.”

I laughed ruefully. “I guess so,” I admitted. “Nightmares have a way of doing that.”

“Nightmares? I wouldn't have thought you'd be one to have them.”

A shrug, and I explained, “I don't often. At least, not until this week.”

Kao paused. “This week, like around the time you've been told you're going to die?”

A leaden weight settled in my stomach. I hadn't forgotten it—a flawless memory was one of the attributes of the Called—but I had somehow managed to not think about the impending doom during the night or any time after I woke. At least, I realized, I hadn't thought about it consciously...

Maybe that was what those dreams had been about.

Quickly, I reviewed my dreams in my mind, casting them in that light. The second dream especially made more sense in that context: I had seen in my vision that there was more than one possible future, which explained the triptych. Either I would die, hence the graveyard, or I would live, hence the battle. My friends and family would be worried until they found out which would happen, thus explaining the middle panel. As for the other works of art... was that how I would get to that point?

Looking back at my friend, I told him very quietly, “Yes, right around that time.”

That thought stifled the conversation, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. More friends began to arrive, a little more somber than the playful bunch they had been the previous day. Winnie in particular seemed concerned about me, which was oddly warming. She and I had been good friends since elementary school, and it was comforting to realize that I still had that friendship in a difficult time like this. Comfort for the dying... I tried to push that thought out of my mind, but now that I had been put in mind of it it was hard to ignore. My legend was ending. It would have to be tied up properly, of course, but it would end. Soon.

“What's this?”

The voice jolted me out of my melancholy thoughts, and I twisted in my seat. Behind me, Aeon was in the action of picking a folded piece of paper up off the ground. What it was, or why it interested him, I couldn't tell. Then he began to unfold it, and I recognized the handwriting as my own.

“Hey—that's my notes!” I exclaimed.

“Dream notes?” he wondered, the page already unfolded. “You must not have had a very good night.”

“You could say that,” I observed equivocally. “May I have that back?”

“Oh! Sure,” he said quickly, hastily handing my notes back to me and sliding quickly onto the bench. Fortunately, it wasn't quite as packed as it had been the previous day. After a moment, though, he inquired, “Did I see my name in there?”

“Yes,” I mumbled, “you appeared in my nightmare...”

“Oh.”

Feeling like I had said something terribly wrong, I explained, “It was the kind of nightmare where I showed up to a battle after we'd already lost.” Grabbing a glass of milk and taking a swig, I added, “I hope I never have to see anything like it for real.”

“Why, what did you see?”

I hesitated, then handed Aeon the sheet of paper. “I'd rather not go into detail; people are eating.”

He scanned the page, then gave it back with what looked like the beginnings of a concerned expression. “That must have been a bad dream,” he commented.

“I've always believed in the existence of fates worse than death,” I replied simply. “That dream featured one of them.”

That concerned look became even clearer. “What's that?”

The cold passion in my voice frightened even me as I growled, “I would far rather die myself than watch my friends suffer that fate. Any pain is worse when it's someone else who has to endure it.”

My friend's concerned look turned to something that might have been horrified awe. “How can you stand it?” he demanded.

“Usually it's easy enough,” I elucidated, struggling to get the unusually strong flood of emotion under control. “I'm a healer and warrior because it makes it easier when I actively try to help others. When it gets to be too much, there are things that I do to remind myself of the good in life.” I ducked my head, abruptly shy for no reason I could think of.

Some new emotion flashed through his eyes, so quickly that I couldn't tell what it was. “And that's your entire life?”

“My life is about what I can do,” I explained very quietly. “There's a reason I'm alive, and until I finish everything I'm meant to do, my happiness is irrelevant.”

“That's not fair.”

I shrugged. “Maybe it's not. It is what it is, though. And then again, maybe it is fair. Because maybe the things I can do make it all worthwhile.”