Eclipse: Time Thief (Romantasy)

61. In Every Life

It had taken me a week to recover from my slips until I could connect with Piercey to share what I'd experienced, and then another week for him to do the same after living through it all with me.

Despite sharing, we couldn't perform each other's skills, though our abilities did improve from the knowledge. I needed more than just to connect with Piercey to become a healer, and he needed more to travel through time or space. It wasn't something that could simply be known, but had to be practiced and mastered.

Though Piercey didn't want to admit it, that limited his ability to try to go to the after-life for me. Would he even make it through the door?

My training turned entirely to breaking into the after-life with my memories, but I longed so fiercely to leave the mountain and battle that the yearning turned into a dull ache that spread throughout my body. The Prophet of the Valley had not dared to cross me, but other Prophets were growing more powerful, and my people had fought several battles without me.

It was difficult to not let it distract me.

Day after day, in the somber quiet, Piercey and I meditated on that moment when death had taken me, Piercey studying it and tearing it apart and breaking it down into binary I'd never really understand, and me instinctively feeling along the jagged boundaries of our world.

I had began to sense it before he discovered it, but in the end, it was melting my instinct and his studies that opened our eyes to the elegant little door that led from our world to the after-life. The door that Dr. Henderson had locked.

Since we had control of the world and Piercey could work in the white room, we had everything we needed for him to learn how to crack the code.

Fortunately, Piercey had also been making rapid progress with the issue of potential memory loss. We'd decided that relying upon only one strategy was not enough. So, Piercey helped me back-up my memories in the White Room in the hopes that it would be accessible from the after-life, considering it was distinct from my world. He'd also helped to compress and store them in my neural implant. But the last line of defense was the self-construction algorithm he'd been teaching me. If all else failed, I had to hope that it would be buried so deeply within me that I would remember to run the code and restore my memories.

As frightening as dying should be, the fear of waking up in the after-life and remembering nothing was much worse. That would mean accidentally abandoning everyone I loved here without any help. I had to master this. So I couldn't worry about the battles happening in the valley or about my guilt for staying here on the mountain.

This was a war only I could fight.

Every time we practiced, Piercey made sure to the close the door to the after-life when were done, because Dr. Henderson couldn't discover what we'd learned if she regained control.

I practiced prying open the door until I could do it without even really trying.

Flare would be in control of our world again someday. I had to be ready and trust that when I escaped to the after-life, I would know what to do. Someone would care about what was happening to us. Even in a young world like mine, there was always someone willing to help. I had to find those people and rally them to our cause.

As challenging as this seemed, I had found my way to people I could trust in every life. I would find my way to allies beyond this world. I had to believe there was good out there, because if not, we really were doomed.

Still, my dread only worsened as Flare made progress with uniting Prophets together. When the Flatlanders and their allies that Flare helped them form on the coast and in lands far beyond their own stole village after village from our Prophet, I could scarcely control the rage. We needed to act as soon as I had mastered these powers. Either, I would kill the Prophet of the Valley and begin the war that would plunge Skia Hellig into darkness or first I would travel to the after-life.