[LEGACY VERSION] The Enemy of Time (Book 2 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 20 - Barenin

Alexi shoved up off the deck and took off at a sprint, wobbling a few steps before he steadied himself on the corridor wall.

"Alexi!" Oji shouted. She huffed to catch up with him. "What the Void are you--"

He slammed into the lift chamber as soon as the hatch opened. Oji dodged in just before he closed it again. He punched for the bridge.

"I remember Andavar," he said. Damon had let enough of him go for him to piece together the last moments before Kaireyeh had claimed him. Urgency rose like bile in his throat, just as it was screaming in Damon.

Oji stared at him. "What? Alexi, what do you mean, what happened at Andavar?"

He closed his eyes to scan the memory.

* * *

At Andavar, while his younger self confronted Edora's younger self, Barenin let go of Damon's mind and threw himself at the Edora he knew.

At first, she welcomed him. Theirs was a familiarity shared for millennia, an on-and-off conflict between two people who simply knew each other. They weren't in love. It was deeper than that. For a moment, he forgot his purpose and took comfort in shared experience.

But this wasn't the Edora he knew. When he'd stepped through the Caelian Time Wall, he'd severed his tether to his own time. Edora had not.

In her timeline, he'd become more of a monster than he already was. He had gone mad and caused the fracturing of spacetime. He had been the enemy, not the Aezthena he was trying to stop in his own timeline. Edora had come back to destroy him, a promise she'd made to his alter-self.

Edora remembered the difference at the same time as he, and shoved him from her thoughts. She gathered the strength of her promise and tore into his mind with her grief. He had little strength left. He was already exhausted, and a battle fought in the mind of another, without the support of his body, depleted his reserves. She would soon finish him off.

Then, something else caught her attention. She sharpened into an arrow of alarm and shot away from him. He was left in the sudden absence of her, drifting in a murky, battle-scarred tide of Kaireyeh.

* * *

"Alexi," Oji prodded him. "We're at the bridge. Are we getting out?"

His legs moved of their own accord, but his mind was still wrapped in the memory.

When Edora had left, for a brief moment he'd felt another presence. Another mind had brushed his thoughts, examined him, and discarded him as too far gone. The Aezthena mind had held the barest breath of familiarity, like a dream he couldn't remember.

Alexi felt the hairs on his arms rise and he quickened back to a run.

He and Edora knew each other, even if the versions they knew were not quite the same. They had fought each other to enough standstills over the years--she couldn't defeat him on her own, and she wouldn't have brought another Aezthena with her. She'd never liked teamwork. She liked control.

Edora would have sought followers among the humans, and that was where her younger self came in, establishing her power base and undercutting Barenin's. But she wouldn't have stopped there. Edora always made plans within plans within plans.

The Aezthena of this time were an untapped resource, because they shouldn't be tapped. They lived in their self-imposed exile behind their own time wall--but had they decided to come out now? What Barenin had felt at Hale had been Edora, but what he felt now through Damon was not. The presence that had brushed against him at Andavar had been wholly separate from Edora, and that had alarmed her. Had she gone to the Aezthena of this time for help, and what had she promised them?

And if she had been alarmed enough to let Barenin go, how had the Aezthena of this time betrayed her? Were they now coming back in force?

And what did they want with him? Their strike at Damon was certainly not random.

Alexi skidded to a stop at the bridge hatch, his socked feet sliding on the deck.

"Let me in," he demanded of the guard.

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