Unraveling
I stared at Dru. Her hair was still fully gray, and her face wrinkled—but the nose was different. Her cheekbones were different. Even her chin. Only her eyes were the same as before.
A knot formed in my stomach as recognition hit me. Without the cosmetic enhancements and careful styling the Dru from my timeline had maintained, this woman’s face bore an unmistakable resemblance to someone I’d nearly forgotten—my mother. The woman who had disappeared on a coveted research trip to Europe when I was ten, supposedly dying there.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, barely audible.
A memory surfaced, unbidden—my mother’s warm body curled around mine on our worn couch, a blanket pulled tight around us both as she whispered dumbed-down versions of the Mabinogi into my ear. Her voice, musical and soothing, spinning stories of knights and fair maidens. The scent of her shampoo and the faint trace of pomegranate juice on her breath. It was the night before she flew to Europe. The night before I went to stay with distant relatives where everything—including me—had gone to hell.
“Mommy?” The word escaped before I could catch it. I immediately tensed.
My mouth worked, but I couldn’t make another sound. All I could think was how much Dru looked like an older version of the mother I lost as a child.
Next to me, Raven’s only response was a guttural “Wow,” and something about Jakin being right and how it all made sense now.
“There was strong magic that kept you from seeing the resemblance in your own timeline,” he continued, “and even in the others we’ve been through. But here, in this reality, the person who wrought that spell has been erased.”
I jumped up from the table and ran to the mirror. I hadn’t changed—except now, the rat-tail at the nape of my neck was gone.
My hair was different, arranged in thin braids gathered at the crown of my head with a faded bandana. My eyes looked harder, duller—belonging to someone who had seen too much darkness. Even more than I’d seen in my own reality. The jagged cut of my bangs was rough, suggesting they’d been trimmed with a knife rather than scissors.
I glanced at Raven in the mirror but didn’t see him, even though I knew he was sitting at the table behind me. I made a mental note to grab some food for him.
“I’m still here,” he whispered, as if reading my thoughts. His voice was steady, an anchor in this shifting sea of unreality.
“I know,” I muttered. I tried to sound more confident than I felt. “Just making sure I haven’t disappeared, too.”
I turned my head, studying my profile. “This isn’t me. But it is, isn’t it? Some version that could have been.”
I returned to the table and sat down, but only stared at the meager portions of food.
“Do you remember,” I began, “a man named Terre? Terrence Vanderholt?”
Dru shook her head, looking blank. “Never heard of him.”
“Terre had a tremendous influence on me,” Raven said, “and probably saved my life. But he also had the same kind of gentling effect on Aoife and Dru. He had a lot of influence on the modern priesthood. I’m guessing his page was removed from The Book of Heroes.”
“Does the St. Augustine Special Collections Library mean anything to you?”
Dru shook her head again, frowning. “Why should it? Is it in St. Augustine, Florida?”
“No, on the local campus. Have you ever worked in a library?”
Dru shook her head, then suddenly looked alarmed. She jumped up from the table and rushed around to my side, grabbing my arms and looking for marks.
“Did they get you?” Her voice rose with panic as her fingers worked frantically, turning my wrists and checking for puncture wounds. “Did they inject you with something?”
She pulled my eyelids wider, checking for dilation and examining my eyes. Then she reached into what looked like an emergency medical kit beside her chair, retrieving a small penlight, which she shone directly into my eyes.
“Baby, tell me—I need to know if one of Aoife’s goons got to you with that… whatever it is.”
Aoife. So Terre hadn’t been erased, but his influence on Dru had been. And obviously on Jakin, too.
Her hands trembled as they moved over my skin, searching frantically. “Have you noticed black veins? Inverted sight? Hands that won’t stop twitching? Feathers? Any extra limbs trying to grow?”
I had to press my lips together to stifle the laughter that threatened to escape—not from humor, but from the sheer absurdity of our situation. The laughter would have sounded like a scream if I’d let it out.
“I haven’t been injected,” I assured her, though honestly, in this reality, I wasn’t sure. “I’m fine,” I said, catching her hands in mine to still them. “Really.”
I was struck by how our fingers interlaced—the same shape, the same slight curve to the pinkies. Had Dru and I always shared these similarities? Had I never noticed, or was this new to this reality?
Raven watched us intently, observing quietly. “You have the same mannerisms. The way you tilt your head when you’re thinking, the way you talk with your hands. I never noticed it before. I guess Dru had some cosmetic surgery done before she came to Florida in our reality. Like, a lot of surgery.”
The dining room was dark except for a single candle, and I realized that a heavy tarp had been thrown over the windows. Down the hallway, I could see rubble where at least part of the compound had been bombed out.
I finally got Dru to sit back down and finish eating. It was only then that I noticed one of Dru’s front teeth was missing—the same one the Dru from my reality had planned to see a dentist about after a toothache.
“How long has your tooth been gone?” The coincidence unsettled me.
“Few weeks,” she replied, running her tongue over the gap. “While you were missing. Had to pull it myself when the pain got too bad.”
I winced, imagining her alone, performing such a brutal act of self-care.
I assured her again that I was fine, but that I just wanted to ask questions about different people she might remember.
“Ask about Aoife,” Raven told me.
“What about Aoife? How well do you know her?”
Dru’s eyes widened, and she looked alarmed. “Why would you ask about her? I’ve spent my entire life trying to keep you safe from her.”
“What do you mean?” I pressed, leaning forward. “What did she do?”
“What didn’t she do?” Dru’s voice dropped to a whisper as if Aoife might hear us even now. “She’s been hunting us since you were a child. Since she realized what you might become.”
I exchanged a quick glance with Raven, who looked as confused as I felt.
“Ask about the Daeganean priesthood.”
I followed Raven’s lead. “Do you know anything about the Priesthood of Daegan?”
Dru looked perplexed. She swallowed, then began to speak. “All I know is that it’s small now. They’re far short of the 144,000 they need to prevent the apocalypse. And Queen Aoife is the only one who’s been enough of a warlord, for lack of a better term, to hold the priesthood together. It’s in chaos. She’s the only one who stands a chance of saving the human race… though she might have to kill most of it in the process. Funny, but the so-called ‘greater good’ sure can justify any act of cruelty.”
“But, Dru—” I started.
“Why do you keep calling me Dru?” She cut me off, looking hurt. “That’s not my name.”
I remembered that Dru had another life before becoming the head archivist at the Special Collections Library. Back then, she went by the name Aubrey.
I tried again. “Aubrey?”
Dru gave me a confused look and shook her head. “Why are you calling me by other people’s names?”
“Then what should I call you?”
“What you’ve always called me—Mom.”
The word stopped me cold. In every reality I’d known, I’d always been an orphan—motherless since childhood. What would it be like to have grown up with Dru—with my mother—beside me? Was this reality a reward or a punishment? To finally find my mother, only to know she would vanish again with the next shift? Was Dru my real mother back in my reality?
I walked over to the mirror and stared into it. I casually raised my hands to my face and then turned my wrists for the mirror.
I wore two pewter cuffs—to hide evidence of childhood trauma from when my mother died and I was kidnapped. I looked over my shoulder and caught Raven’s attention.
“You can see in the mirror, too. The scars on my wrist are gone.”
I pushed the cuffs up slightly, revealing smooth, unmarked skin where jagged runic scars should have been. In every reality I’d known, those marks had been my constants—unwanted souvenirs of my darkest days. Their absence was somehow more unsettling than any other change.
Dru watched me, frantic with worry. “Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Surely, Queen Aoife has already injected you, and it’s just a matter of time now—whether you sprout wings or eyes in your skull where eyes shouldn’t be. Only one in a hundred of Aoife’s lab rats survive, and I’ve done everything I could to keep you safe.”
“Oh, Dru—I mean, Mom—”
“We’ll get through this,” she promised, her voice breaking. “We always do. We’ll find another safe house. I won’t let them take you.”
The desperate maternal fear in her eyes made my throat tighten. This wasn’t just the protective instinct of a mentor—this was a mother willing to die for her child. I’d seen her anxiety back in my reality so many times when I’d been foolish.
I kissed her cheek and told her not to worry, but when I pulled away, Dru was gone—as was half the room.
“Mom!” I cried out, reaching for where she had been standing just a heartbeat before. My fingers closed on empty air. I gasped. “Dru!”
Her presence vanished as if it had never been, leaving behind a sudden chill that raised goosebumps along my arms. The light seemed to dim, the single candle’s glow shrinking to a pinpoint.
The mirror was still on the wall but cracked, with large chunks falling out.
I stumbled toward it, steadying myself against the frame as the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet. The glass was spiderwebbed with fractures, multiplying my reflection into dozens of distorted versions of myself.
I could see just enough to know that I was still alive in this reality, hair short and jagged cut.
“But what happened to Dru?”
Raven was quiet for a beat, then sighed. He responded carefully. “It doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist here—just that she might be somewhere else. Maybe enjoying a career as a literature professor in the U.K. Maybe traveling the world with the love of her life. It doesn’t mean she’s dead or doesn’t exist in this reality. Just that whatever brought her to the last reality no longer exists.”
“So… Maybe Terre’s influence is gone? Maybe Aoife’s, too? That would be good news.”
“Possibly,” Raven agreed. “Or maybe in this reality, you were never separated as a child. Maybe she never became Dru or Aubrey because she never needed to reinvent herself to keep you safe.”
I pressed my palm against the cracked mirror, feeling the sharp edges where pieces had fallen away. “I just found her. After all these years…”
We sat in the ruined silence and realized—we didn’t hear bombs anymore. No sirens. Just the wind. Just the rustle of something dry and light brushing across broken floorboards. And outside, the caw of a crow. The night was getting darker, the color of the air bruised and violet, and there was a weird smell—like burnt copper and ozone. It rose off the floor. The candle flickered strangely.
The walls around us warped, seeming to bend slightly, as if seen through heat waves. What had been wallpaper moments ago now appeared to be rough stone in places. Shadows stretched across the floor at impossible angles, disconnected from the objects casting them.
On what remained of the wall, a framed photograph caught my eye—a picture of Dru and me standing in front of what might have been a vacation cabin. As I watched, our faces blurred, features shifting until the frame held nothing but abstract shapes against a blank background.
“Do you smell that?” I whispered.
“I do. And… I think that table was over there before. Now it’s closer.”
We both stood slowly, watching small things change and moving carefully. A shelf disappeared. A doorframe shrank. One of the chairs reverted to a stool.
The candlelight flickered against wood that seemed suddenly wet, glistening with moisture that hadn’t been there moments before. The remaining furniture groaned and creaked, as if adjusting to a new configuration of reality.
“Raven, are we the ones changing, or is it the world around us?”
“I don’t know anymore,” he admitted. “Maybe both.”
I shivered and leaned into him. “You think it’s another shift?”
“I think it’s the beginning of one. Or maybe we’re in the middle and just now noticing?” His voice carried the same disorientation I felt.
Raven glanced down at his left wrist and stilled.
“What is it?”
He let out a soft, bitter laugh and shook his head. “I was going to check the time. Habit. I left my watch behind at least three realities ago. Five? More? Same with our phones. In a Faraday bag at Em—”
He paused, trying to mentally track our journey. Or maybe just stunned at invoking Emry’s name. “How long have we been shifting? A day? Two? It all blurs together.”
I pressed my fingers to my wrist, feeling my pulse race beneath my skin. I frowned. Even my heartbeat felt foreign, as if it belonged to someone else. “Nothing feels real anymore,” I murmured. “Not even us.”
He looked out the cracked window, toward the strange, foggy twilight, studying the sky. It was dark outside earlier, but the lighter skies might have been a reflection of light from somewhere.
“All I know is that night has fallen,” he said, “and before another one falls… our time runs out.”
“I don’t think we’re just losing our way between realities,” I whispered. “I think we’re losing pieces of ourselves with every shift.”
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