The Oracle's Prophecy

4

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Acadia asked Mayat to take the girls back to the wagon to dry and change. After they left, he joined Quill at the shoreline of the lake.

"You saw what your daughter did to Riley when she was on the tree?" He asked as both men looked out across the water toward a line of lost civilization ruins that were slowly crumbling into the water.

"I did."

"Do you think we should be worried about snoopers?" The grizzly asked, referring to the Directory's telepathic army that scanned the nation for fugitive anomalies.

Quill shook his head. "It was only a small disturbance."

"Then, do you think the girls realized what happened?"

"No." Quill answered pointedly. "They thought nothing of it."

It was still early in the morning and a thin layer of mist hovered just above the surface of the lake giving it an ethereal quality that beckoned you to enter. Quill wondered what he'd find if he plunged to its depths. In the cold suffocating darkness would he be able to reach across the boundary that separated the living world and the one that existed just beyond it? Would he be able to find her down there, he wondered? Would she come for him?

Acadia's voice returned his thoughts to the present.

"If these things keep happening they're going to get suspicious." When the grizzly spoke softly his voice sounded thick with gravel, as if it had been dragged over the pebbles they stood upon.

"Suspicions can be erased if required." Quill replied stone-faced.

He was a lean man now having lost much of the muscle he'd had in his youth. To look at him you wouldn't think he was only in his forties. His face was too rough, his eyes too sad, his hair too grey. So much had changed in the last seventeen years that he was barely recognizable from the man he'd once been, outside and in.

"I have it under control." He added.

That caught Acadia by surprise.

"Are you sure? Cause from where I was standing, I'd say the box you built to hold them in is starting to come apart."

Quill didn't flinch at the criticism.

"It's time to tell them, Quill. They're ready." Acadia pressed.

"Really? At only seventeen?"

"This nation demands you grow up fast. You of all people should remember that."

"I remember the blows hurting more at their age. And the scars I have from then are deeper, too. That's what I remember."

"Then when?"

"When I say so, and not before."

That made the ursinian growl.

"Like it or not those girls are growing up and soon they're going to want to know what part they'll play in this nation. When that time comes you won't be able to stop them and this land is unforgiving to people who can't protect themselves from it."

Quill already knew this, it was exactly what scared him.

"If I do what you say and they're not careful, the Directory will find them like that." He clicked his fingers. Then shaking his head he added. "It's too big a risk."

"They have a gift, Quill. One they could use to help the resistance win this war."

Quill shook his head. "I've already given this war one person I love. I will not give it any more."

Acadia dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

"I'm going to get some coffee." He huffed after rolling his big globular head around his shoulders to ease the tension in his neck.

Grabbing his coat he made to leave but paused after noticing something unusual. There was a faint message carved into one of the larger boulders on the beach.

It was worn almost smooth by the elements and was just one of many thousands of similar inscriptions littered throughout the nation. They'd been made by a dying group of people trying to leave one last mark on a world that had suddenly grown weary of them.

"Why don't you ask this person how prepared he was to survive?" Acadia asked. "If you search around the void for him I'm sure you'll find him. I doubt he went far."

Then he spoke the parting words they'd once said to each other when they were young and brave. Yet, now they sounded hollow and meaningless.

"Live free or fight on, my friend."

Quill continued to stare at the boulder long after Acadia had gone. The grizzly was probably right, it wasn't carved by a person who expected to live long. It read simply:

There's no one left ... 2025