Shards of Kairos

VI - Shards

Evie followed Julian into the darkness and back through the woods in a direction she wasn’t sure of.

Definitely not back to her house. And while that should have alarmed her, it just didn’t. Where could she go now? How could she explain... any of this?

Evie was exhausted, so tired that she couldn’t even keep a sane thought in her head. Like the fact that she should be afraid, that she should be fearing for her sanity. But she just couldn’t do either at the moment.

Katie was dead.

Buried on a bed of glowing pink crystals, the closest thing to a sister she’d ever had, the one person in the world that had understood her. What it was like to be different. And that understanding had made them the same.

They’d had their own private world and everything had been safe and right in it. And now it was gone. It was all gone, Katie was gone. Evie's home, their lives - all but gone. Destroyed. And Julian...

Evie fixed her eyes on his back. He wasn’t in armored form anymore. It had almost ‘broken’ just after they’d buried Katie. It didn’t look like it had been a conscious choice either, breaking apart like ash in a fire, and she could see now that the armor was really just an illusion. It was very much solid and real but formed apparently by the energy generated by the crystal on Julian's wrist.

And it seemed to have cost Julian a great deal to weild it to such an extent. To power the white-pink crystals that would keep Katie in suspended animation, still dead, but from what Julian had said - still with the hope that they could revive her somehow, someway.

Evie could see Julian was weakened and that worried her more than it should - now that her grief was numbing. He was her only protection, she’d never felt so vulnerable and human before - until the glass demons.

“What are they?”

Julian didn’t even glance in Evie's general direction but he did come to a stop. It was a bit sudden. And his voice, she could hear his fatigue.

“The Shard. A product of the Blight.” Julian's voice was quiet when he spoke and Evie wondered just how blind he was. He was still wearing those impossibly dark sunglasses, even though it well and dark now. His armor, that futuristic helmet, it probably gave him some ability to see. But now?

His cane was visible, folded up in the inside of his leather jacket. He seemed reticent to use it around her.

“They came from the Advent.” Julian continued, surprising her with his answers. Evie honestly had expected none. Which was about as much information as he’d been persistently giving her.

"The Advent?" Evie asked.

“A region of space that appeared near our planet, our realm, sixty-seven years ago. And four hundred and fifty years before the second appearance. Which happened in my lifetime.” Julian hesitated, his voice a bit quieter when he spoke next. “We thought it was beautiful.”

Evie swallowed heavily and said quietly. “They don’t seem to be something you can reason with.”

“We tried and a lot of people died. The Advent seems to be a manifestation of energy. It can hold whole planets... but no more than a few. Two moons, one made out of crystal, the other out of ice. We didn’t have the technology to either but when we did... both were barren. Made of crystal and glass. No more than a rock. Nothing habitable.”

Julian’s tone dropped, quieter again, but far less darkly, morbidly wistful. Like it was even hard to say what he was about to. And Evie imagined it was. “They destroyed us in mass numbers before we managed to destroy the Advent. Crystals fell like rain for weeks afterwards.”