I flopped onto my bed and closed my eyes. How was I supposed to save everyone if I didn’t know how to play the game? It wasn’t fair. Logan kept telling me that I was the one person the goddess didn’t train, and now I had no clue what I could even do. I was being thrown into a game where I didn’t know the rules, but was expected to know how to play. It wasn’t easy. Time travel wasn’t that easy. A breeze brushed across my closed eyes. I had only one guess who it was. The goddess had come to visit again.
“What troubles you?” she asked in her musical voice.
I sat up and stared at the translucent goddess. The folds of her dress flowed around her, but I had no idea how or why. There was no weight to them to make them move. She was basically an image or hologram floating in my room.
“Were you once human?” I asked the first question that popped into my head, and it was not really the most pressing question. I didn’t even know why I asked.
She smiled and floated over to me. Sitting beside me, it almost seemed like if only I couldn’t see through her, I would see a real person. Her transparent body rested on my bed as she turned to me.
“I wasn’t exactly human. I was always a goddess, but at one point in my existence I was more like you,” she replied.
I raised my eyebrows. How was she more like me?
“I was more,” the goddess paused and thought a moment. “Solid,” she answered, laughing at my expression. Solid? Who would call themselves solid? “I was as real as you are. I could touch things, and they could touch me.”
I had felt her touch me several times. What did she mean by that?
For the first time sadness shone behind her sparkling eyes. “At one point in my life I was corporal, physically able to move around the world if I so chose. I could stand in a river and feel the water around me. I could pet the wild animals and bring them the same comfort they brought me. I could hold the hand of a man and feel his fingers touch mine.”
“Logan said you were human once and loved a man,” I added.
She nodded slowly and her eyes glassed over. “I did love a man once, and he was a great man. We spent many years together, but I could never give him what he needed. I might have been the mother of nature, and the living world around him, but I couldn’t do what he needed. He was a leader, and his people looked to him. As he aged, they looked to him to produce an heir to continue on leading them. They wanted someone of the same family line, someone just like him. They wanted his child to lead them. I couldn’t do that. I could bring life around me, but I couldn’t give life to him that way. I am a goddess, not a human.”
“What happened to him?” I asked, slightly afraid to ask.
“I left him alone. He grieved for me, but he moved on. He married. He had children and his children had children and his children had children. To this day, his great-great-great-and-more grandchildren live,” she replied. Sadness filled her eyes as she talked, but she continued to smile. It looked like a painful, but happy, memory.
“He just moved on?” I asked in surprise.
“Like all men do who have a duty to fulfill... He had no choice. People depended on him,” the goddess explained. She wasn’t even mad about it. She seemed sadder than anything else.
“So Logan is wrong about the reason for your rules?” I asked, trying to get off the subject that was causing her grief.
“Logan is wrong about many things, child. Unfortunately, he’s led by his desires, and fails to see the real world. No, I’m not a woman scorned. No, I didn’t do anything to hurt him. I didn’t make the past that haunts him. What he fails to understand is that you can’t change your fate,” she replied. Her eyes returned to their normal sparkle.
“Then why allow time travel at all?” I asked. Wasn’t its entire existence simply to change things?
She smiled more. “It was never my intention to give people the chance to change their fate. I wanted them to be able to time travel to learn, not change what was to come. Letting go of my love, and watching him move on was the hardest thing I ever did, but I knew that it would turn out okay. I knew that one day I’d be sitting with his long distant granddaughter, discussing time travel. I knew that even if I couldn’t love him like he needed that he would live on. I would see him every day in the eyes of his descendants.” She stared into my eyes as she spoke.
“He was my ancestor?” I wondered. I was sitting and discussing time travel with her, after all.
“You have his eyes,” she replied in answer.
I sat and thought about it. She was giving people the chance to understand their fate, not to change it. That made sense, but it was still hard. Ty understood his fate perfectly now. If we hadn’t time traveled, he would have never known. Was it truly better to know?
“And now he can move on. Now he can live the life he should have lived instead of waiting around for something to happen that was never going to happen. Ty has been given the chance to really live his life,” she explained.
“But he’s still a slave back there,” I answered. It hurt to say the words. That was no life for him to live.
“He is, but you don’t know what his fate may be. Once a slave isn’t always a slave. Things can change,” the goddess cryptically replied. I looked to her. Did she know what his fate was? Why wouldn’t she tell me to keep me from making bad choices if it was going to be better for him back there? Was that the reason she wasn’t saying? Was it worse, or was it better? She stood and flitted around the room. “You have more questions, child.” She looked out my window at the icey shoreline and didn’t answer the questions that were floating around in my head.
I did have more I wanted to know, and had to think carefully on what to ask next. We didn’t have unlimited time like I would have liked. I knew at some point Logan would find us in the house talking, and I really didn’t need him to know about the goddess and me.
“He’s off getting into more trouble,” she replied to my thoughts.
“What is he up to?” I asked. That was a good question to ask. I needed to know what I was getting into with Logan, or rather, what he was going to try to pull me into if he got the chance.
“I think you already are getting to the answer for that one,” she replied.
“He’s trying to save people as he says, and let them live in another time. But he doesn’t seem to be saving everyone. I saw the three he keeps as servants in the past. He said they were happy, but it didn’t seem like that. They seemed trapped. And I saw the bracelets. They wear the same one as me,” I blurted out my jumbled thoughts. The goddess turned back to me.
“You’re correct in all of your thinking. Logan isn’t saving a single person. He’s keeping them from their true destinies. What he’s doing is destructive, not only to them, but all the people in their lives. He’s creating a world that’s different than what it should be, one that will never last. He’s destroying life as we know it.”
“But why? Doesn’t he see that? He travels to the future. Kye is from the future,” I added.
“And Kye’s here now trying to get that future changed,” the goddess pointed out. Kye made it seem like he specifically wanted my fate to change so that I wouldn’t be linked to Logan, but was he saving everyone?
The goddess shook her head. “No. Unfortunately, that boy is too much like his father’s family. He’s only trying to save you. Luckily for the world, you happen to be the key. In saving you, he will save mankind.”
“I’m the key?” I squeaked out. I wasn’t anyone special. I was raised by a single mother in a time that wasn’t even her own. We lived well only because a stranger took her in. We were lucky to have found him. In fact, looking back on my life, I was lucky quite often. I was particularly lucky to have found Seth, too. But still, that didn’t make me special.
“Oh, child, you are much more special than you give yourself credit for. You’ll never see it, and that makes you even more precious. You’re so much like him it makes me want to go back and choose differently. I know I must not, and
mankind would have been doomed earlier if I had done that, but you do make me miss him.”
Sparkles trailed down her cheeks. Was she crying? Could a ghostly goddess cry?
“To understand Logan, and what he is doing, I need to tell you how this all came to be.” She sat down at the window seat and patted the space next to her. I moved over and waited for her to begin talking. She didn’t. Instead she took my hand. The slight breeze touched me as her hand went through mine for a second and then I could feel the silkiness of her touch as she solidified and held onto my hand. My room faded, and I felt like I was time traveling again.
“Open your mind and just watch. We’re not physically traveling back in time, just mentally. Let the images play for you so that you can understand.”
“That can’t be true,” a dark-haired man whose eyes were just as blue as mine was speaking to a lady whose back was facing us. He was handsome, and wore little more than a skirt around his waist. His body was well-defined, and his almost-black hair was pulled back and tied with a leather cord. The small circle of metal around his head told me we were watching a king speak.
I had no clue what time period we were in, or where we ended up. We were in an ornate room of sorts. Fluffy pillows and decorative rugs lined the floor like it was prepared for many people to arrive, but only two people stood in the middle of the room. Nothing indicated where, or when, we were.
“If you could see what I see, you’d agree with me, love,” the woman responded in a very familiar voice. The dark-haired woman turned and looked directly at him, pleading with her eyes. I knew those eyes, and I knew that face. It was the goddess. “If you don’t marry and have an heir, your country will die.”
“Then let it.” The man grabbed the goddess and pulled her tightly against himself.
“I can’t let you do that,” she replied, pushing back to make only a little space between them. “This world needs you. Mankind needs you and your heirs. If only you could see.”
“The show me,” he begged, his voice strained. The man obviously didn’t like what she was suggesting. He needed some convincing.
“I would if I could,” she replied, stepping back, but he quickly snatched her hand to keep her from walking away.
“You are a goddess. You are magic. Show me why we can’t stay together,” he pleaded now. Falling to his knees, he grabbed her waist and pulled her tight, pressing his face to her stomach. “I do not wish to live if I can’t have you. Please don’t leave me alone.”
The scene faded and a new one appeared before us. This time the goddess was alone. She was still in the room from before, but now there was half-eaten food on the various mats, and the pillows were more strewn about the room. Whatever party that had occurred was over. The goddess leaned down and picked up an empty glass. She was deep in thought.
The man from before returned and came up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her middle, burying his face in the crook of her neck and into her hair.
“See. No one minds if there’s no heir. We’ll be fine. We can stay together,” he told her. Her face said otherwise and she continued to stare at the cup. “Now come to bed.”
The goddess nodded and looked back at the cup as she set it on the mat. She let him drag her away, and her expression changed from sadness to determination.
The scene ended and again began a new one. The man entered the same room, presumably not long after they had left it.
“Where are you?” he asked, looking around the room as if the goddess would magically appear. Nothing happened. “Love, where did you go?” he asked the empty room. Still nothing happened. His relaxed posture changed. He sensed something was wrong and fell to his knees.
Time sped up as we watched the man. He didn’t move from his spot on the floor, but people came and went in the room. No one was able to get him to respond. He sat and stared at the cup she had been holding the night before until the scene faded again.
I was back in my room. “Where did you go?” I asked. The story was incomplete.
“He could never let me go, just as it was the hardest thing in my life to let him go,” she replied. “I knew the moment you decided to let Seth go to save him that you were the one. You have my willpower, and maybe even more than I have, as I truly have never let go. I’ve watched you and your family for centuries. I can’t help it. You are all that’s left of him.”
“Did he ever figure out where you went?” I asked. I wanted to know how the story ended for the man.
She smiled. “Yes,” she replied as the space next to her shimmered.
The man we had been watching before appeared next to the fading goddess. He looked shocked as he stared at her in her ghostly form.
“Is she the one?” he asked, pointing to me.
The goddess smiled. “She is.”
The man slowly approached me. He looked different in his twenty-first-century clothing, with his hair cut to match. I could still see the well-defined muscles beneath the suit he wore, but it was strange to see him go from being dressed half naked to completely clothed. His face, though, hadn’t changed. The hard angle of his jawline was still there, even with the shadow of missing a day’s shave.
“And she’s the same one of mine?” he asked, stopping before me. He stared at my eyes; it was like looking into a mirror. I didn’t have a hard time believing the goddess that I was related to this man. He could easily have passed as my own father. “And she will change that? She will make it all right?”
“Yes,” the goddess replied.
He looked back to me and then to the goddess. “And you promise she’ll be happier than she is now? She won’t have our fate? She will be able to stay with her love?” He looked pained as he added the last comment.
I was taken aback by that. What did he know about me? How did he know I wasn’t happy?
“When she’s back together with the one she is meant to be with, she will be,” the goddess replied. “If she’s strong enough, she will get the happy ending we did not.”
The man nodded and stepped back. He reached for the goddess and stopped, knowing his hand would go right through her. He looked pained to have realized that. He gave me one last look before nodding to the goddess and disappearing from my room.
“What was…?” I questioned. It was too surreal to have just been in her memories and then for him to show up in my bedroom.
“He needed to see,” the goddess replied “And I needed you to see. That man was the reason I did this. He’s the reason I wanted people to be able to travel. By seeing you and the future, he understood that he had to accept his fate without me. He went back and lived the life he was meant to live before he ever met me. He had children, and they had children, and each generation did what they were fated to do. I gave up my powers the moment that I understood what it would take for him to be happy.”
The goddess had immense love for the man that just appeared, and disappeared almost as quickly. It was hard to imagine she had given him up, and I saw the pain they both were in when they looked at each other. Their love was the kind my mother talked about, and she had given it up. She chose to live with the pain and let him have the fate he was meant to have than to choose her own heart over it. That was amazing.
“How did you give up your powers?” I didn’t see that part of the story. “I mean, you were once real. Sorry. Not that you aren’t real now. You were once human-ish.” I tried to correct my verbal stumble, but really, how was I supposed to describe her? She was basically a ghost now, and fading even more as we talked.
“What you saw was my last night alive as what you’d call human. That was the last time I ever was able to feel the touch of another person. I gave that all up to save him and mankind as I knew it.” That still didn’t explain it all. She could be confusing. The goddess smiled at me. “I put every ounce of my magic into the stones that decorated the dishes in the room that night. Every piece that was there was a piece of chalcedony. Those became the blessed stones when I scattered them th
roughout time, but left just that one cup for him to find. When he finally left his daze, he fell into a rage at not finding me. He cut his hand, and the blood activated the stone I left for him. I was able to come to him and tell him what I did. He didn’t believe me until I took him through time. I showed him what would happen if he didn’t marry. I showed him the world that would exist. He returned to his time and married as I told him to, but he was still not happy. After his first child was born, he used the stone to call to me again. I took him from generation to generation, showing him each of his ancestors. He still didn’t want to accept that he couldn’t be with me until I showed him you. You convinced him that what I said was true.”
“But I didn’t say anything,” I replied.
The goddess smiled. “You did in the future. I showed him all the fates you have gone through, and he understood. No matter what life throws your way, you still find a way back to your fate. You still do what is right, and lead everyone to their destiny. No matter how many times Logan changes everything, you become what is needed. He wanted to see you now before he went back to his life. That’s why he came. Because of you, he went home and lived a long and healthy life. He raised his children to be great leaders as he was, and each generation carried on his bloodline. Your father continued that, and has been a great leader himself. His military campaigns have been second to none. He was a born leader, and so will you be.”
“A leader of what?” I asked. I had no ambitions to run for any sort of office. Running the country, or even just a company, wasn’t exactly my style.
The goddess smiled, but didn’t answer, and left my question hanging in the air.
“And how does this explain what Logan’s doing?” I finally asked. That was the original question.
“Logan’s taking the stones, collecting them for himself,” the goddess replied. As much as Logan thought he was getting away with his plans, it seemed that the goddess knew what he was up to.