A Dance Of Crowns & Thrones | Book I

Chapter 150 | March 31st | Teddy & Toni

Timeline - March 31st ( Teddy's Office)

"You've been coming here a lot." The statement came, it was no longer an observation, and Teddy had been the first to break the silence in the room that afternoon.

His increased session attendance was a testament to that, and Toni knew that his dreams weren't getting any easier to manage of late.

"There's something about it that I still can't shake." Toni

acknowledged, "every time I try to fall asleep, I'm right back there, as it's happening again. This constant loop."

Stretched lazily against the sofa in Teddy's office, Toni stared upward at the dull white ceiling. Fingers were at his collar as he pulled it from his throat in his telltale habit of the pensive state.

"Walk me through it. It's been a few years since we spoke about that night. You're not as forthcoming as the others."

Toni rolled his eyes, "what the hell, right," he agreed, "it's not like I'm not thinking about it." Eyebrows furrowed as he recollected his thoughts.

"I remember have they arrived violently here, well to where I had been living, in moments it felt like our world was upended....forever."

---- Flashback-----

The catastrophe of devastation was immediate, evident from the burning cities and towns; the smoke billowed into the skies blackening their once pristine world.

Having no choice but to inhale the fumes of smoke, coughing involuntarily, the timeskeeper made her way through the debris of this small seaside town.

Her desperate attempt had been rewarded when she found the first boy crouching over a female's body, a scared, trembling child of the right age.

His shoulder-length dark curls were evident.

"Toni!" she called to him, his shoulders tensed, and Emmaine knew she had found him. She dashed to the sooted boy; her arms wrapped themselves around him.

"Toni, we need to go!"

"Get off me!" he thrashed about, "GET OFF ME!" barely able to tell who ripped him from his mother's body in his fight. Emmaine didn't have time to explain; there were moments to save the other children she needed.

Having disappeared with the screaming boy, they appeared in another part of Isadora, another town filled with ruin and smoke, and this time they were met with hooded ghastly ghost-like reapers that moved around the town before them.

Toni stopped instantly at the pull of this new view, and he tried to suppress the scream as he watched these fiends suck the souls of people before him that were caught.

Watery depths of honey brown barely blinked as the Reapers elongated their mouths and drew the life force from those they had captured before one of its hands - scabbed, grey, long, skeletal-like, and clawed - disposed of their bodies to the ground once their energy had been absorbed.

The child swallowed the air nervously before his hand was wrenched forward; the tug told him to run.

Emmaine found another child close to them, a red-haired girl who appeared to be in her pyjamas, sooted from head to toe, bleeding profusely that soaked into her clothing.

She was frozen to her place, having watched the home she grew up in half annihilated and alight in flames.

Emmaine and Toni came to a halt just behind her, she dropped Toni's hand, and the timeskeeper bent down in front of the child, grasping her freckled cheek.