-------------- The Dream – Pt 1

Dove turned and opened her eyes. Baellius was there, sleeping peacefully and quietly. That, in itself, was a surprise. It was a surprise he wasn’t still up with Crystal. The child had no limit to her endurance, or so it seemed.

She slid out of bed and stepped gingerly towards the door. There was Crystal, a little bundle of intellect and energy, sleeping soundly in her bed, a strange twisted look on her face. Dove smiled. The look was nothing to be concerned about. She’d noticed how the child’s shapeshifting powers had already began to manifest, mostly in her sleep. She’d be dreaming about something and suddenly her face would contort. Were she a normal Krell child, that would take decades to start. Born fully aware and with much of Dove’s knowledge, Crystal’s powers were already activating at barely 3 years old. Dove leaned over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. For a second, their minds touched and Dove took the time to bolster her daughter’s courage for the Goblin assault she was dreaming of.

Standing on the balcony with a cup of coffee in her hand, she looked down on Kar’Dhaer. It was barely first light, but the Academy was already awake and starting its day. Cooks and maids were about their chores. Some students were already up, heading off to the libraries or to the labs to get a leg up on the day’s studies. Those, the early risers, they would be the ones that would someday be standing here, looking down on their city, their Academy. But with another eight hundred years in her, Dove knew that would be a long, long time off. That future, that city of lights and wonders, was still to come. But the rest of the nightmare? The rest of the future she had once seen so clearly, once knew to be a certainty,… it had all begun to fade.

The future that would have been, the long, unwinnable war against the Shadows, the glorious expansion of Arrallonian dominion into the galaxy, even her own Godhood,… it was all changed now. They had managed to convince the Ashiri to get involved, to get off their pompous, self-righteous backsides and make a difference. She had shown them the future, the spiraling decent into destruction, the end of all things. Many would not listen. But the seed had been sewn in a distant past and a distant future, trapped within a rift generator and doomed to live and die as prisoners of the Ashiri, when Crystal had killed her mother before she’d even been born. The time paradox shattered their control and destroyed their machines. The future Crystal went back to whence she came. The Silver Gryphon had been freed. And the rebellious forces within the Ashiri had gained a voice. It was they, those who would not stand by and watch the multiverse be destroyed, who had turned on the Shadows. The others had no choice. The Shadows and the Ashiri had wiped each other out. Their war which had lasted since the beginning of the universe was finally over.

But still, out there somewhere, across quantum rifts and time loops, Dove knew another reality had come from those events. Other decisions had been made, and the world had changed. The dark future she had seen had come true and the multiverse was destroyed, only to be rebuilt anew, in a different light. In that new world, the Shadows might have been defeated ages past, Talon the God of Death might still be mortal, some of her friends might never have been born, and she might not even recognize herself. Would that be a better world? She smiled. Maybe. But it wasn’t her world. This was. This was her world and her dream. And like her minor assistance to her daughter’s listless sleep, it was a dream she could still mold.

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