Hope for the Past

I

To most people, New Year's Eve was a time for rebirth, rejuvenation—a chance to make amends for regrets and mistakes from the past year. Loves ended, loves rekindled—some born anew under the promise of what lay ahead.

Others used the switching of the calendar as a chance to hide. Who cared if the numbers changed? Let the people who didn't know any better have their parties, drink the night away, and be blissful in their ignorance of the dangers beyond their understanding. This night, along with so many others, was for those who didn't know just how close to annihilation everything was all the time.

I wasn't one of those lucky ones. I was Whitney Tempus, and if you wanted to hang out with me on New Year's Eve, drinking sparkling white wine, because who the hell can afford actual champagne, I'd tell you to piss off. Not because I didn't like you, but that was the best way to make sure you didn't try again. It was nothing personal, but I would always say no. Better to let you think I'm a cold-hearted bitch than to let you down again and again and have you self-doubt yourself.

And so, there I was, New Year's Eve, in exile in the Great Bear Rainforest, as far away from anyone I could get before I fell off the edge of the world. I'd been trapped here for ten years, and my heart cried for news of what was going on beyond the forest.

I wanted to go to bed, but I hadn't slept for a thousand years. Sort of goes with the territory of trading your soul for impossible cosmic powers. All I could do was stare out the window at the blanket of darkness swallowing my cabin—that, and curse the moment I'd let it all slip away.

Ten years. In a millennium of living, it was barely a blink, but to be stuck in a cabin in the woods because your so-called best friends left you there to rot, cut off from the power that made life even remotely worth living, even ten seconds was an eternity.

I thought about that day—every minute of every hour of my suspended existence. The look on Kiara's face, the defiance in Connor's eyes. We had taken on the world, sacrificing everything to save it from itself, and at the last moment, they'd rewritten their own history—conveniently cutting me out of it.

"Bastards."

I raised my mug of wine to the sky and toasted whoever was listening—likely nobody. Even if they wanted to talk back to me, I wasn't ready to listen.

I glanced at my clock—10:58. Just about down to an hour left. In sixty-two minutes, the banishing curse would become stone magic, and there wasn't a thing in the universe that could break stone magic. I would be sealed in this place forever, and I would cease to exist in a matter of seconds. I'd been waiting for this moment for a very long time, but now that it was here, I found myself strangely resigned to it.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't in a rush to die—but betrayal leaves a scar, a wound worse than any other hurt. Cuts, scrapes, third-degree burns—I was burnt at the stake more than once – I could handle every physical pain life threw at me. Betrayed by people you held close as family, as your own blood, that lived forever.

The clock struck eleven, and a scream pierced the night.