The Us We Never Were
After arranging the laptop on the dining table, Raven opened the device and quickly found the search engine that, yesterday, in our reality, had given hundreds of millions—maybe even billions—of results for any query. Emry and I stood over him, watching as the icon for the Daeganean Library Network pulsed in the top right corner of the screen.
“You have access?” He pointed at the ominous, glowing icon and clicked it. The screen bloomed to life with a log-in page.
“Limited. They’ve been restricting more sections every month. It started the week after Terre was stabbed in the courtyard outside the library. Veronica tried to come back for his funeral, but I warned her, like you asked. Probably saved her life.”
Raven reached to log in, but Emry lunged to stop him. She flattened her splayed hand over the keyboard. “Don’t. You can use my laptop for basic searches, but not for the library’s network. You’ve already been flagged. You log in again, they’ll come for you. You’re lucky Aoife hasn’t stripped you of your title.”
Raven froze. “Wait—what?”
“I mean, we all know it’s coming. Veronica remembers the future, and she swore to all three of us that Raven would be The One. Still, don’t get yourself thrown into some offshore gulag to rot because you pissed her off.”
“You’re saying I intentionally upset my Ranking High Priestess?”
“You called her evacuation plans unethical because they mean she gets to pick who lives and who dies when the pole shift happens. You publicly questioned the triage system. She hasn’t officially removed you yet, but she will. One wrong step, and she’ll take your position as the Last Priest. She’ll initiate the first healthy male she sees on the street to take your place.”
Evacuation? For what?
I wanted to ask but stayed silent. My voice was barely a whisper, just in case someone—I didn’t know who—might be listening. “Raven’s still the Last?”
“In name only,” he muttered. “Apparently.”
I struggled to process this. In our reality, Raven was respected by the priesthood, and his position was secure. He was the most recent male Initiate into the priesthood, which meant he was the coveted Last Priest. It was a position of great honor and power, but it also meant that he carried the dormant god Daegan in his crown chakra and would one day be called upon to sacrifice himself—if he was still the Last Priest when the apocalypse came. He’d never been particularly loyal to or fond of Aoife, but he was committed to fulfilling his responsibilities for as long as he was the Last Priest or until someone took his place in this insane game of end-times musical chairs.
Emry sighed. “Move over. Here. I’ll use my access.” He pulled back, and she began typing. “What are you looking for, Rav?”
“A spell book. The one we were authenticating in Gate 4. It’s called The Wards of Braided Light.”
She found it, then frowned. “It’s locked above my clearance. That’s new. Looks like I no longer have access to Gate 4 and above. Until this week, I had full access.”
Strange, I thought. In my world, she’d never had full access. She hadn’t even known about the higher classification vaults.
“What changed?” I asked.
“Everything.” Emry’s gaze fixed on the screen. “About six months ago, Aoife began restricting access. Said it was for our protection.” She tapped the keyboard furiously. “Hang on. There’s a backdoor I used to use, if Aoife’s IT team hasn’t found it yet. Ah, here we go! The Wards of Braided Light is a grimoire written by Lord Mythryx, mostly protection spells. It’s a companion book to The Wards of the Inward Path. Written a hundred years apart by different incarnations of Lord Mythryx.” Her lips moved as she silently skimmed the text. “Oh, this is good. Both grimoires are considered extremely fortunate. Currently, both are held at the Darbyshire Memorial Library in Dublin, Ireland.”
Raven jerked his head up. “What? Are you sure?”
“No, but that’s what it says in the library database.”
“Then the Darbyshire Memorial Library is still standing?”
Emry scrolled through a menu of locations of libraries and rare bookstores that served as outposts for the priesthood. “Why wouldn’t it be?” She landed on a familiar building in Dublin that caused Raven and me to sigh in unison. The last time we’d seen it, the building had been rubble. “See?” Emry said brightly. “Still there.”
Raven stared at the screen for a solid minute before he spoke. “So the spell we did has only positive effects. It’s not causing any of the reality shifts we’re experiencing.”
Emry’s frown relaxed as if she suddenly understood the changes in us. “You’re moving through time.”
“More like moving through realities. But we don’t know why.” I leaned in. “Try The Book of Heroes.”
Her arm against Raven’s, Emry pecked at the keyboard.
“Here it is. Published in 2015. Covers influential Daeganeans from 1915 to 2015. Currently in the Darbyshire Memorial Library, the Omega vault.”
Raven zoomed in on the text. “The most secure vault?”
Raven would know: he’d been one of the librarians there, along with Nike and Illyria, when I’d first laid eyes on him. When Rune’s ring of artifact thieves had tried to steal The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks, they’d triggered the safeguards in the Irish library, and it had blown up, with Rune’s husband inside. The books in the Omega vault had survived—because they were in the Omega vault. The most dangerous or the most precious of all their holdings. Those books had been shipped to the St. Augustine Special Collections Library, and most of them resided in our Gate 9. Or did in the reality we left behind.
I braced against the table with one hand. “I don’t get it. The Book of Heroes was like a who’s who compendium. Just somebody’s opinion of which priests and priestesses were special. How right can it be if Raven’s not in there?”
Emry’s smile matched my own. “I’ve studied Daegan’s sacred texts since I was a teenager,” she offered. “I’ve never even heard of these books. And look at the color coding on the entry. Mythryx’s grimoires were coded purple.”
What color-coding?
I squinted at the small text. Apparently, in this reality, books were color-coded by their impact on the priesthood. These were assets, after all. Important information that could be carried into the post-apocalypse to help the human race find its feet again. That was the whole purpose of the priesthood—to guide humanity into the next age after the next extinction event. According to the legend in the corner of the screen, a purple dot meant high-impact positive results, blue was positive, green was neutral, red was high-impact negative results. A black dot meant—
“The Book of Heroes is a weapon,” Emry continued. “If we—” she clicked on different boxes, and a details screen appeared with CONTROLLED ACCESS across the top—“look here, we see that this book was designed so that realities could be reshaped based on removing a single page about a single priest or priestess. The idea was that you could remove them, and it erased their existence and everything they influenced. Think how much you can change the world by erasing one person. Then how different it would be if you erased three or four. Go back fifty years, and the erasure becomes exponential in impact. Going all the way back to the priesthood of 1915 was probably overkill.”
I just stared at her. I tried to take it all in, but the room seemed to tilt around me.
“We like to think that we have an impact on the world, but we’re told that in the grand scheme of things, we’re actually insignificant. Some religions reinforce that perspective. We’re not insignificant. You’ve heard the saying about people coming into your life for a reason or a season? Think of all the people who’ve been in our lives for the reason of a five-minute conversation that changed the course of our lives. Most of them, we probably don’t remember their names. Someone sped through a traffic light, and everything changed in the blink of an eye. Or someone stepped in our path and delayed us for five minutes, and we were never in a car accident that killed our family and left us maimed.” Her voice was raw.
“What would happen if someone destroyed The Book of Heroes?” I asked.
Raven’s answer was immediate and grim. “Reality would change. A lot.”
“Different from how it already is?”
“Change time starting in 1915? Yes, very different.”
Emry scrolled deeper into the metadata. “It hasn’t been destroyed. It’s been very tightly controlled. But it was created to be destroyed only as a last resort, and we all know that there are several Daeganean books created as a self-destruct mechanism in case the politics of the priesthood got out of hand. That’s not the intention behind The Book of Heroes. This book was meant for removing single pages to remove a single person’s influence. Think of it as a surgical strike.”
“Someone’s using it to erase people in our reality,” Raven explained. “The braided light spell is protecting Lilah and me so that we still remember our reality and remember those people, but the world is different here because people are being removed from existence.”
Maybe it didn’t take a magical book to erase a possibility—just a moment of hesitation. Just a self I hadn’t yet become.
She nodded, eyes narrowing slightly. Silent equations ticked behind them. “That explains what I’m picking up from you two. Reality is being reshaped around you. When the protection spell wears off, your reality will look like wherever you are then.”
I swallowed. A chill spread through me. “What happens to the people who get removed?”
“They’re gone,” Raven said. “No history. No memory. Their influence erased—past, present, future. Even people they changed for the better aren’t aware they ever existed. At least, that’s true in their reality.”
“That’s horrifying,” Emry whispered. “And dangerous if anyone any of us was significantly influenced by is erased. But this book is safe in this reality, so whoever is erasing these so-called heroes must be doing it from your original reality, not this one.”
Raven leaned forward. “Try searching for Nike Jung.”
Nike—the Daeganean priestess who’d helped me near the Cliffs of Moher after discovering Charlie’s betrayal. Her small, strong hands had steadied mine. She and Illyria had joined me in a ritual with Raven that had given me the strength to calm my broken heart.
“She can’t be gone,” I whispered.
“I don’t know that name.” Emry typed quickly. “No results.”
Raven’s hands curled into fists. “What about Illyria Persopoulos?”
“She’s a chemist in Greece,” Emry said after a few keystrokes. “Living quietly with her family. No library work, no record of the priesthood.”
“So Nike’s been erased, and Illyria is living a life that never had a Nike.” Raven hesitated. “What about Veronica?”
“She’s alive, like I said. Or was, and if I remember her, I’m guessing that means she wasn’t erased. But I don’t have any current information on her since that one conversation with her at your—the other your?—request. But let’s see what we can find out.” Emry typed again. “Yes. She’s here. She’s… married? Vail, Colorado. Husband named Shelby. Last record is a wedding announcement. No contact information.”
Raven exhaled through his teeth, jaw twitching. “So Veronica has been changed, but not erased. We know her mother, Siobhan, and grandmother, Moira, haven’t been erased or she wouldn’t be alive.”
“Terre Vanderholt?” I said softly.
“Deceased,” Emry replied. “We all remember him, so he hasn’t been erased.”
Raven stared at a spot on the wall, then at something on the bookshelf in the corner of the room. Face pale, he stood abruptly and almost ran to the shelf. “Is that what I think it is?”
He pulled down a slender volume bound in blackened leather. Even from across the room, I felt a chill emanate from it.
“Liber Umbrae Nominium,” he breathed. “The Book of the Shadowed Names.”
Emry moved quickly, snatching it from his hands. “Are you crazy? Even John Dee’s collaborator said this book sucks light from the room!”
“Where did you get this?” I asked, stunned. “Dru’s been trying to acquire it for years.”
“I found it through a dealer in Prague.” Emry carefully returned it to the shelf. “I haven’t delivered it to Dru yet because, well… I’m concerned she’ll give it to Aoife, who will misuse it. I suspect Dru’s been compromised, but she’s so passive that it’s hard to tell.”
“Some believe it’s not just a book,” Raven said quietly. “But a living catalog that reshapes itself to hold names erased from every timeline. Speak one aloud, and it might return—along with everything that erased it.”
“Which is why you shouldn’t touch it,” Emry snapped. She gave him a gentle push away from the bookshelf, back toward the table.
“That’s exactly why I need to see it! It’ll tell me if Nike and the others have been erased. Maybe how to bring them back.”
Our Emry wasn’t erased, I wanted to remind him. Dying is not the same thing as never having existed.
“No, Raven! You stay away from that book. Now, shoo.” She waved him back toward the table. He moved backward reluctantly until he bumped into its edge.
Emry twisted around him to the laptop and closed it with a sharp snap before either of us could protest.
“All right,” she said. “That’s enough. You two are going to get me killed.”
I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “In our reality, you’re already dead.”
Emry blinked—then laughed. “What?” She plopped down in the chair across from me.
“You drowned,” Raven said quietly. “Well, not exactly drowned. I pulled you out of the water at Dru’s pool. I tried to save you. I thought I had. You were breathing again, but the protective sigils I’d drawn on your arms washed away and… and something pulled your soul from your body before I could. You were reborn in the future—elsewhere—but Emry died. My Emry. You died in my arms.”
He choked up.
“I couldn’t save you.”
The room went still.
Emry looked at him. “You’re serious.”
Raven nodded.
And then—softly—she said, “Okay. I believe you. I felt the grief in both of you, but I couldn’t understand what it was.”
We all sat in silence for a long beat. Then Emry sighed and got up.
“Let me show you something. Both of you. So you understand what the three of us have. Had? I don’t know. But I can tell it’s something the three of us in your reality never had, and something, Raven, that you and I never had. Maybe I wouldn’t have known it either if Veronica hadn’t told you that you would be free of your commitments as Last Priest. I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time when she told you, or what a difference it would make, but what’s missing in your energy is, well, you’ll see.”
She opened a cabinet, turned on the television, and navigated to a locked folder. She entered a long password, and then clicked a video file.
The screen filled with images. Raven, me, and Emry, lying in a tangle of blankets in a bed I didn’t recognize but matched Emry’s furniture. Laughing. Raven kissing me, Raven kissing Emry. Emry and me giggling as we plotted our next moves to delight Raven.
My mouth dropped open.
Warmth flooded my face as I watched the three of us on screen—intertwined, intimate, affectionate in ways I’d never imagined. The Lilah in the video moved with easy confidence between Emry and Raven, her fingers in his hair, her hand on Emry’s shoulder. They looked comfortable. Natural. Like they’d been this way forever.
But that wasn’t me. I’d never felt that way about Emry—my love for her had always been deep but platonic, sisterly. And with Raven, we’d been circling each other cautiously, neither willing to risk our friendship on something more. Me, terrified of making another mistake, given my awful history with choosing partners. The idea of the three of us together was… unfathomable. Foreign. Even the idea of just him and me was more than I could expect in my world, for so many reasons. And yet, there it was, playing out before my eyes.
We’re a throuple?
I’d had enough of sharing a man with other women, especially ones I didn’t know about, but from what I saw on the screen, I wasn’t feeling left out.
She played a second clip—intimate, sensual. Beside me, Raven groaned and turned away, face red.
“Emry,” he hissed.
“Yeah, my Raven watches this when he can’t sleep,” she said, not at all sorry.
I laughed before I could stop it. “That answers one question.”
“Which is?” Emry paused the video.
“Whether you and Raven were—” I gestured vaguely. “Before. In our timeline.”
“We weren’t,” Raven said firmly. “Never.”
“Because of you.” Emry looked directly at me. “It was always about you and your and Raven’s destiny after The Shift. And then one day, Veronica—she can see the future, you know. Anyway, Veronica told him he wouldn’t be the Last Priest by the time the apocalypse came and he could have what he really wanted without breaking any oaths. That all three of us could. And that’s when everything changed. Like somebody set our Raven free.”
“So we weren’t a love triangle?”
“We were a triad,” Emry said. “Are a triad. In my reality.”
I stared at her. I didn’t want to believe it. But the videos, the photos, the shared space? They were too much to ignore.
My thoughts whirled, struggling to reconcile what I was seeing with what I knew of myself, of us. In my reality, Raven and I had been growing closer since Emry’s death—tentative, careful, neither of us willing to acknowledge the pull between us. But this? This was something else entirely. Something that felt both intimate and alien.
“I don’t—” I started, then stopped. “We were never—”
“You loved us both,” Emry said simply. “And we loved you.”
None of us spoke after that. I squirmed in the silence.
Finally, I asked quietly, “What’s happening here? In this reality? You know, outside of our triad and the paradise we’ve built here?”
Emry shrugged. “Aoife’s President now. Not just Secretary of State like her mother was. She doesn’t govern. She rules. Like she’s trying to win a war. We’re moving all the Daeganean libraries inland. Building bunkers. She’s discreetly selecting 144,000 people to be evacuated to safety when the shit hits the fan and the poles shift. She says it’s about the apocalypse and preparing to colonize Mars. Quietly, slowly. But she’s edging toward martial law.”
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