Eclipse: Time Thief (Romantasy)

40. Entanglement

Darkness, as black and inky as the Prophet's eyes, closed in on me.

Where was the white room that the Door of the Gods had always led me to?

My body felt as though it stood in the library with Nash and Piercey, but my mind wasn't there. My mind was floating in the darkness, floating everywhere and nowhere.

This wasn't right.

Panic drudged up in storming thoughts as violent as the worst lightning storms I'd ever seen.

And then, I felt him. My father. I couldn't see him or hear him. But I knew he was here.

No...

The gods had closed the door in my face and abandoned me to slip into the past. I searched for my time, clawing back for Nash and Piercey in the Sacred School, as the void dragged me in the opposite direction. I was slipping in slow motion. Slipping to Dad. To the Eclipse.

The darkness beneath me shifted into shadowy blades of grass until I looked down upon the hill where I'd once stood with my father. In the sky, a ring of light pierced the black moon, arcs of red burst in faint lines, and the earth fell silent as the source of life and light vanished from our sight. The villagers crowded together to watch the totality, their forms blurred in my mind by a dark film, like I could only see them from the furthest edge of my peripheral vision, even when I looked right at them.

I had to block them from my mind, even now.

Dad knelt before the eleven year-old me with his arms outstretched. Like a faint mirage, Nash came into view on the hill with them. There, but not. Fear shot through me. Between the father and daughter, beneath the dark of the Eclipse, Nash lowered to his knees and met my young eyes with pinched brows. "Max..."

I tried to scream. Time and space had swallowed me whole. It wasn't him the girl below saw. Her eyes lit for the man behind him. The one that was really there. Nash was fading, fading even from my sight. He didn't belong here. And I wasn't here. I was dangling between, one foot in the small boot and one on the other side of time.

Pain filled Nash's expression as he watched the old me run right past him into the outstretched arms of the tall man.

"Can you believe it?" The girl I'd once been bubbled with laughter. "The moon swallowed the sun whole."

"It did." My father took my cheek in his hand. "Can you feel it?"

"Feel what, Daddy?"

"The sun." He placed his hand upon her heart. My heart. "Burning in your soul."

"Not yet."

"Focus." He whispered. "Focus, baby girl..."

The scream I couldn't unleash burned in my soul.

I could feel what the young girl felt mingling with my own as she looked into Dad's eyes. We brimmed at once with love for Dad and with the rage I'd been abandoned to carry alone. Two points in time converged into one. It felt like the sun burned within me, ready to burst free.

The bastard.

My dad.

Pure chaos churning in the deep of my soul.

"The light..." My young voice said. "Look, Dad! The light..."

His voice blared, deep and knowing. "Your strength is greater than even an eclipse. Release it. Release it from within. It'll be beautiful, child. I promise. It's okay." A warm whisper fell against my ear my ear now. "Show them the light. Free them."