Time's Tragedies- The Books Of Beginning [2]

23. Darkness Of The Past

The clothes had been put away and the cardboard boxes unpacked. Eternity was officially moved in, and now that she was, and was sitting cross legged on Lili's bed as the blonde sat beside her, face tense. 

"Story time?" Eternity asked gently.

Lili nodded, "story time."

"Should we ask your siblings to join?" Eternity questioned.

Lili shook her head, "I'd rather tell this part myself."

It wasn't completely fair, she knew. This was Abby and Jake's story, too. But they had never had the same fascination with the past that Lili did, especially when it came to the darker parts. Where Lili held these stories almost sacred, to her siblings, they were just that, a story of the past, done and over with.

Eternity waited patiently for her to begin. So Lili took a deep breath and launched herself into the story. She started with the easy part - the story of her aunt, uncle, and Gabriel's trek across Antarctica, and how they discovered the elven valley and the volcano where the chronicle was held. She talked about Emma being captured by a dragon, and Michael braving the volcano and an insane guardian to retrieve the chronicle. She talked about how he revived a petrified Emma and changed Princess Wilamena (who, she took care to mention, was now married to Michael) back to the elvish form she was supposed to have. Lili talked about all the things the chronicle did, about Rourke and the battle of the volcano, of golden dragons and elf archers and Michael and Emma's dramatic escapes from danger.

As always, Eternity was held speechless, in the way only Lili's stories seemed to make her.

Lili rounded it out with Gabriel and Rourke's duel, and her family's eventual escape from the volcano on the back of the dragon Wilamena. Then she fell silent.

"What happens next?" Eternity pressed, on the edge of her seat. She knew the siblings would survive to find and destroy the books, but she wanted to know how. 

"I'll get to that," Lili promised. Her voice was becoming somber again, "you need to hear what happened to my mom while she was stuck in the past first."

Both girls could feel the atmosphere in the room had changed. Everything that Lili had spoken of so far had been both true and surreal and she had so much respect for her family for going through it. But it was this next part of the story that always seemed to matter most to Lili. This was where the possibility of her had began, because Kate and Rafe had met. This was also the part of the story that held a young Lili wide eyed and still, because this was when the tragedy came in.

"You remember that my mom took the screecher back into the past to save her siblings'," Lili began.

"Yeah," Eternity replied softly, sensing the need for quiet, for softness.

"She ended up a hundred years before her time. In 1899, a few days before the turn of the century," Lili said, "in New York City."

Eternity stilled at the mention of her home, "oh."

"Yeah," Lili continued, "this was right before the separation, when the world had yet to change and conflict between magic users and humans was high. Luckily, mom found herself among a group of other young witches and wizards, orphans and runaways who gave her shelter. When she woke up, she was stuck in the past with two idiots debating if she was dead or alive."

Eternity snorted. Lili smiled slightly, but then became serious again. She kept talking, about how  her mother found herself unprepared to be trapped in the dead of winter without the atlas, how Jake and Beetles (Eternity had heard the names and rolled her eyes then) had been trying to keep an eye on her but she was determined to get back to her family. How she sought out help only to be trapped by a cruel witch and nearly sold to the imps. How after being drugged and taken prisoner, Kate had been rescued by the leader of Jake and Beetles' group, who they had found for help. A sixteen year old magical boy with green eyes, who introduced himself as Rafe and mysteriously seemed to recognize her.