You Are My Anchor
We went through woods and bramble, walking for miles. We got lost at times. My stomach cramped with hunger, and each step felt heavier than the last. Hours had passed since we’d left the compound—how many hours did we have left before The Wards of Braided Light failed completely?
We passed the place where we remembered seeing an old statue of Aoife—but it wasn’t there now. Just a patch of dead moss and a few shattered stones half-buried in a snowdrift. Yes, snow. Real snow. It never snowed this far south in Florida.
Holding my palms out, I watched as black-flecked snowflakes landed on my skin. They didn’t melt immediately, instead leaving tiny dark marks before dissolving.
“This isn’t right.” I pulled my sleeve down over my hand. “It stings.”
This was no ordinary snowfall. The flakes were dense and strangely heavy, flecked with black grit that clung to our clothes and hair. The air smelled faintly of sulfur. The forest around us was disturbingly silent—no birdsong, no insects, not even the rustle of small animals. Only the crunch of our boots in the icy underbrush.
We passed an abandoned car frozen in place, its doors yawning open. Snow had drifted across the dashboard, and rust had eaten through the frame in places. I wondered who had abandoned it here, and why they’d left so hastily.
“When I was a little girl,” I said suddenly, watching my breath cloud in front of me, “I used to make snow angels with my mother. She told me snow angels were the purest kind of angel because the angels in the Bible were scary, powerful creatures.”
Raven glanced at me, a sad smile touching his lips. “That’s kind of unnerving, considering I carry a dormant archangel in my crown chakra—the Sleeping God, Daegan himself. Not exactly the snow angel type.”
“No. Definitely not the snow angel type.”
Many of the trees had begun to die—gray limbs tangled like skeletal fingers. Others were already downed. They rotted in the snow. The grass on the outskirts of the forest was patchy, brown, and brittle.
Raven paused to touch the bark of a crumbling tree I couldn’t identify. His fingers traced a line through the frost. “It was just starting to bloom when I saw this tree earlier,” he said quietly. “In our reality. Little green buds everywhere.”
The tree beneath his fingers was dead. Its bark sloughed off like diseased skin. Nature itself was out of time here—just like us.
We found buildings we’d seen bombed out in other realities now still intact, but structurally unsound. Walls leaned like drunks, windows missing or smeared with soot. We passed through different Daeganean settlements—factions still clinging to ritual but fractured beyond repair. I should have been able to sense the emotional residue of these places, feel the desperation and fear that clung to them, but exhaustion had dulled my abilities to a whimper. All I felt was cold.
The apocalypse was already underway in this reality. Famine was widespread. Crops had failed. The sky had dimmed. We stopped to rest by a broken fountain, the basin filled with black snow.
“Listen to them” I jerked my head in the direction of voices from a nearby settlement.
People talked of “dry fog,” of multiple volcanic eruptions years ago, of sunlight that barely filtered through. The priesthood never united, and no one knew who the Last Priest was. There was no cohesion, only chaos, famine, serious climate change, and the likelihood of a second era of the dark ages.
Raven walked in silence for a long while. Finally, he said, “I always thought it would be a pole shift. That that’s all the apocalypse could be. Magnetic collapse, solar ejection… That’s what Veronica and others who could see the future predicted. But it’s different in this reality, isn’t it?”
I looked over. “What do you mean?”
He stopped and stared at the ground. “I mean, we failed. In this reality, we didn’t lead the world into the next age. We fractured. Lost focus. The world needed the priesthood, but we weren’t there. We let our internal politics rule, and we became our worst enemy.”
Without warning, he punched the wall of a collapsed farmhouse we were passing. The sound of bone meeting wood echoed in the silent air. I flinched instinctively at the violence of the gesture, so unlike him. Blood bloomed immediately across his knuckles, bright red against winter-pale skin.
“I’m still alive, Lilah. I still feel pain. But the rest of the world has forgotten me.”
I took his injured hand with ritual gentleness. I cradled it between both of mine. The skin had split over two knuckles, blood already beginning to congeal in the cold. I brushed my thumb lightly over his wrist, where his pulse raced.
“I’m a scholar of apocalypses, you know. It’s part of our first training when we’ve been the Last Priest for at least seven days. Terre himself taught me. Do you know how many times the human race has almost died out in our own reality?”
I could hear—feel—the controlled anger in his words, even though he kept his voice low and taut. I couldn’t recall ever sensing despair in Raven, not even when Emry died or when his parent’s library near St. Patrick’s Cathedral imploded.
“They called it the Year Without a Summer. I studied the texts in the library in Dublin. Gildas, the monk, wrote about it. Other accounts came from Daeganean priests of that era. No crops. No warmth. Ash in the rain. People in a much less populated world starved by the thousands.”
“And that’s what’s happening here,” I whispered, suddenly understanding. This wasn’t just a timeline glitch or an alternate reality—it was a vision of what could still happen in our world without the people who had been erased. Maybe most of them I didn’t know and would never know, but they had affected the world, through leadership or perhaps just a single, crucial interaction that altered the course of history.
“This is the apocalypse. Here. But for us, it’s like a preview,” I said softly. “Of what we could become.”
“Yes!” He punched the wall again, other hand. His knuckles bled immediately. “We were supposed to be the bridge into the next age for humanity. We were the only weapon our God left us against an extinction event. And we… we squandered it.”
I gently took his injured hand. “Please stop doing that,” I said softly, looking at his bloodied knuckles. “I get that the pain is the only thing making you feel alive right now. I do. I really do, but I need you to stop beating up buildings that might fall on us, okay? And maybe we still are that weapon against an extinction event. At least in our reality.”
If we could find our way back, but I didn’t say it aloud.
He squeezed my fingers back. “You always did believe in lost causes.”
“No, I never believed in lost causes. That was you. When you met me, I was the lost cause, but you believed in me. You and Dru. No one else. Especially not me.”
We finally reached the university campus. It looked worse than we imagined—overgrown, half-buried in snow, a few towers still standing. The Jaryx-Daegan faction had taken it over. Their wolves roamed freely, loping silently through the drifts. All this time, in my reality, I had been waiting for Florida and most of the Southeast to be underwater as result of a pole shift and tsunamis and stuff, but in this reality, it was still warm enough to survive with properly thought-out shelter. For the moment, at least.
“Look at this place.” Breathing in measured gasps, I took in the devastation.
The campus building jutted from the ground in front of us, shrouded in fog and lit by the occasional blue flicker of solar-powered street lamps—most were dark, starved of sunlight.
A massive oak had grown through the frame of an old dormitory, splitting the concrete like paper. The building was still partially inhabited; faded blue tarps were draped across broken windows, and smoke curled from a makeshift chimney.
“Nature’s taking it back,” Raven observed quietly.
“Or, maybe, this is what happens when there’s no one left to tend it.”
One of the wolves stopped suddenly. It lifted its head and sniffed the air. It growled low in our direction.
I started to speak, but Raven clamped a hand over my mouth. His gaze never left the wolf. The beast’s eyes seemed to glow in the dim light, intelligent and searching. My pulse stuttered harder as the wolf took a step toward us.
The wolf’s head tilted as it studied the space where we stood. It could sense something—our presence? our energy?—but couldn’t quite place what it was detecting.
Then, confused but not alarmed, it turned away. Raven exhaled. The campus was unguarded because the wolves were its sentries.
“If it had seen us clearly…” I whispered once Raven lowered his hand.
“Then we’d know we were no longer erased in this timeline,” Raven finished for me. “Although for me, that’s unlikely. My parents have been erased, so I’ve been unmade. For you, I’m not sure.”
I watched the wolf lope away, its movements eerily silent in the snow. “Magic watch-wolves,” I muttered.
“In Veronica’s previous life—a thousand years ago when she was Queen Jaryx of the Daeganean priesthood—she had wolf protectors,” Raven reminded me. “According to legend, she fed her enemies to the wolves. Even if the Veronica we knew has been erased, her legend from a thousand years ago predates The Book of Heroes. What we’re seeing is a version of that legend playing out before our Jaryx reincarnated as Veronica.”
We slipped into the old library building and up the stairs to the second floor. As we passed a corridor, two bedraggled priestesses stopped and held out their palms, sensing.
Their robes were patchworked, sewn together from various fabrics—some still bearing university logos or sports team emblems. Their eyes had the haunted look of people who had seen too much. One wore a necklace of broken glass shards, glinting dangerously at her throat. Normally, I would have felt their emotions like a tide—the grief, the desperation, the thin hope that kept them moving. Now, drained and hollow, I caught only fragments.
“Feel that?” one said. “Residuals. From the ones who walked here before. All that student energy, thick as old soup.”
“They walked here,” the other agreed. “And not just once. I feel old footsteps beneath the new. Layers upon layers.”
“They say this place used to be sacred back in the 1960s before the splintering of the priesthood. Full of books and learning.”
“Blessing or curse?” the second one said. “Feeling things no one else does?”
“They’re sensing us through time, not space,” Raven whispered to me. “That’s how thin it’s gotten. It’s like how you empaths in our timeline feel energies you don’t understand.”
I whispered back, “You have no idea,” and kept walking.
We reached what was the St. Augustine Special Collections Library. Gate 1—the reception area—was just an open room with faded maps and random books. No bulletproof glass. No archives. No sign of the priesthood. In this reality, Dru didn’t exist, nor Terre, nor Aoife, nor Siobhan, maybe not even Lady Moira, so this place was never a Daeganean library.
Slowly, I moved through the reception area. My fingers trailed along dusty shelves. Half of me still hoped to see the circulation desk or maybe a forgotten bookmark tucked into a copy of Daemonology. Some sign, no matter how small, that this place had once been what we knew.
I ran to the door that led to Gate 2 and all the highly classified vaults. Holding my breath, I yanked it open.
It was a supply closet.
The sharp smell of cleaning fluid hit me first, followed by the sterile emptiness where wonder used to live. I blinked rapidly, expecting—hoping—to see the series of increasingly secure vaults materialize before me. Instead, there were only metal shelves stacked with paper towels and toilet paper, a mop bucket pushed against the wall.
As I stood in the doorway, I felt a strange pulse through the wall, a subtle shift in air pressure—as if the place in our presence remembered being magic, even if it wasn’t anymore.
I stared at the mop bucket, the shelves stacked with paper towels, the container of bleach.
Raven cupped his hand on my shoulder. “If this place was never a Daeganean library, then it was never altered. No expanding vaults. No magic. Here… now… it’s not the place of power that we knew.”
My voice cracked. “So how do we get back? This was where we stood. Right here. In here. Where we did the spell.” Feeling dizzy, I leaned against the wall. “I’m a ghost here, Raven. We both are. The world has forgotten us.”
“No, this world never knew us.”
“I’m going to disappear, Raven. You’re the only thing anchoring me.”
He looked at me, eyes burning with something more. “‘You are my anchor,’” he said softly. He frowned and stared back. “Isn’t that what the spell said?”
The words resonated through me, and I remembered not just the moment the words had written themselves in The Wards of Braided Light spell book, but why they’d done it. In the worst times over the last year, Raven had been my tether. When I’d felt lost, when I’d doubted everything, his steady presence had given me something to hold onto.
“Let thine circle be drawn with solemn intent, not with unseemly dispatch,
For three days hence shall it abide unshattered.
Let there be ward against enchantments wrought by foreign hands,
Be they familiar or concealed, ally or adversary.
All who standeth within receiveth sanctuary,
Held steadfast beneath this sigil until the appointed hour.
Only words born of the heart’s true chamber shall complete the circle.”
Then I added with my heart filling up with affection,
“You are my anchor.”
As we spoke the words, a humming vibration filled the closet. Pressure built beneath my feet, as if the floor itself was breathing. Light seemed to crack at the edges of my vision, time folding around us like paper.
Our fingers intertwined as we stood in the empty closet. I searched his face in the dim light. It wasn’t this place or being in Gate 4 that mattered.
“Jakin said we needed to get back to the right spot,” I said softly. “And I know exactly where that is.” I stepped closer, studying the familiar lines of his face. “Don’t you remember?”
My memory sharpened—that day in the library when I’d teased him, when I’d set his hair between the pages like a challenge. The moment crystallized in my mind, clear as glass.
I marked the spot to come back to. I touched his cheek, then a long brown hair—a single hair—that hung across his forehead. I twirled one finger around it and smiled.
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