Heir Apparent

Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

Thea

Scrolls piled up around me in barely stable pyramids. Beside them, haphazard stacks of leather bound books. Each one had held promise, but none of them could quite elaborate on the truths my mother had dumped on me. My own power, The Sight, was passed down through stories in my family, it seemed that so, too, were the legends of the Timewalkers, which meant finding them in a book that much harder. These were not stories meant for pen and parchment.

According to my mother, Timewalkers were just as their title suggested: walkers who moved through time. It wasn't clever but it was, at least, descriptive. They were prominent during the Scourge several generations back when they had aligned with Seers to try and avoid the annihilation of our kind, walking us through the paths of our own timelines to avoid death. But once the Empire had learned of their power, they had joined the executioner's block with the rest of us. No one had seen a true Timewalker since. The last one, my mother had told me, had held the power to reshape the timeline. When they severed his head, the world shook. Why he had not simply walked away from his own death, I couldn't fathom. Perhaps he wasn't as powerful as the story suggested.

Oh, their bloodlines existed, of course, much like my own. Hiding in plain sight, quiet whispers around the firelit tables of families to preserve the old ways. But unlike Seers, they were powerless. They were Timekeepers, they called themselves. In my mind, I called them story tellers. There was no power in them to do little more than sense where the old cracks had been formed those generations ago. Nothing what I could do. Or apparently what the young Empress could do.

But Jade. Jade was somehow different. Jade rippled through time without a conscious thought. Like me, she was something no one had seen before, and that was a bigger threat than I had originally taken her. It meant that I needed every ounce of information I could find from the Scourge and before about Timewalkers if I was to keep her at bay. For all I knew, she was honing her skills in whatever time she had fallen into and was planning her attack. Perhaps she was even talking with the great Timewalker himself.

The Empire had the largest library on the continent housed within the Capital walls. With the Empress-Mother suspicious of me, she had called on me less and less. It gave me more space to dig through the towers of parchment housed in the stone library.

No one manned the library, so I had set up a small table in the farthest corner, piling stacks of scrolls and books around me. A lantern was flickering beside my elbow, the candle growing small. Already I had exhausted at least two over the course of the day and a half I had buried myself within, but I had barely touched the surface of the books the library had to discover. No doubt one of them would produce what I needed. It was only a matter of time, time I wasn't sure I had until Jade, in one form or another returned.

With a growl, I tossed a scroll to the side, hearing the wooden ends plunk against the stone wall, then floor. It noisily rolled to a stop far quicker than I had anticipated. I turned my attention to it to find a thorn in my side.

"Gil." I forced a cheerfulness into my voice.

The former commander of the 51st bent to scoop up the discarded scroll, opening it just slightly before letting it curl back up. "Looking for some light reading?"

"Anything to find Jade." Which wasn't exactly a lie. I did need to find her.

"Of course," he remarked, coming closer to hand the scroll back to me. Jade's second didn't sound as convinced as I had hoped. Perhaps he was catching on after all. I would certainly applaud him if he finally did; it was about time.