Kaelen reached the small bridge first. He had covered about eight miles without stopping, walking alongside the river. Now, he sat down on a patch of grass to catch his breath, placing his shepherd's staff beside him. He had carved strange symbols into it during nights spent by the fire under the starry sky. His companions had laughed at him, even mocked him at times, but none of that bothered him. He always did his job thoroughly, without emotions, without desires. He knew he didn't belong here, and while watching the sunsets, he imagined himself in another future. He had been waiting quietly for two years, hiding in insignificance, until one day he received news from the woman who had finally obtained the missing information. They could finally set off.

  Now the time had come. He was passing through this valley for the last time, and only a quarter of an hour separated him from the sunset and the beginning of the journey. He, who knew the secrets of life and death, and who could grasp the moment when existence shifts poles, could hasten or reverse the natural course of death, had not used his abilities for two years. These two years had passed between sunrises and sunsets, like grains of sand falling from an outstretched hand, indistinctly, one grain after another, but while the falling grains of sand brushed against the palm, allowing them to slip down to the earth, the days that had passed had not touched Kaelen's soul. They had all remained equally meaningless and insignificant to him. Endure, endure-that was his motto. With the uncertainty of not knowing which day would be his last.

  He no longer needed to wait, but he had grown used to waiting. No one would miss him. His companions might search for him, but before they left, he would remove his coarse peasant shirt and leave it, along with the shepherd's staff, by a stone a few paces away. If they did look for him, finding this, they would conclude that he had gone swimming and drowned in the river. His body would be carried away by the water, never to be found. Only his flute, which he had carved out of boredom during the long days, would be with him now. He had created strange melodies on it as he closed the endless days.

  It was more likely they wouldn't search at all. Who would miss him? He had to remain unnoticed, gray.

  His companions would decide he had grown tired of the shepherd's life and, just as he had once exchanged his wandering life for a shepherd's role, he was now returning to the wanderer's staff. He had to think simply. No traces left behind.

  He still had time to take one last dip in the river, the small stream whose winding paths and hillsides he knew well after having passed through them countless times over the past two years. He also knew the oak forest at the top of the hill, whose trees had often provided him with cool shade. He had a favorite tree. He had carved his shepherd's staff from one of its thinner branches. He had rested under that tree when he first saw the massive flock of sheep. Not that it had been unexpected.

  That day, a lady traveling alone had sought refuge at the lord's castle, and that was the day he had joined the lord's service. The lord's eyes lingered on the lady asking for shelter, but he never met the new shepherd.

  Kaelen dismissed his desire to bathe. With furrowed brows, he looked to the east, up the path, where he heard the sound of horses' hooves.

  "She betrayed us," he muttered, clenching his fist. "Mirael, your emotions have caused the fall of the Company."

  That was when he noticed the woman in the purple dress approaching calmly, and nothing made sense anymore. If Mirael was here, why was that rider coming?

  "Hurry!" he called out to the woman, but it was in vain, for she acted as though she hadn't heard him.

  A few minutes later, the woman stood beside Kaelen. Though he was angry, he didn't express his emotions in any way.

  "We must wait for the sunset, and then he'll be here," she said, her voice suspiciously indifferent.

  "How do you know?" Kaelen asked, his eyes flashing.

  "He's suspected for a while, ever since she caught me reading in the hidden library room. I had to be careful, you know, since she kept an eye on me, and if I had acted suspiciously, I could never have gotten the symbol," she replied calmly.

  "That's why we stayed here for two years instead of two months, because you messed it up," Kaelen shot back.

  "Two months, or two years, it doesn't matter to us. Our time is endless," she replied, admonishing him.

  "Sure, sure, you were enjoying your time, but I was out in the wild," Kaelen grumbled.

  "I risked the most, don't forget, what would I have paid if they'd discovered my secret?" Mirael responded calmly.

  "You would've been stuck in this time, and at the end of your life, you'd have lost all memory of yourself, of us, and you'd have been reborn as an ordinary mortal, with the light no longer preserving this form, and you couldn't assume this shape again," Kaelen retorted.

  "Right, in short, I would've lost everything. And the Company would've suffered that loss, too..."

  "Because without you, we can't precisely aim for the future and the past," Kaelen continued.

  "And if one of us gets lost in the whirlpool of time, the Company's consciousness weakens," Mirael picked up the conversation again.

  "Until we take the Oath again and initiate someone else into the Company...

  "If we both know so well what would have happened if I'd messed up the search, why are we arguing over meaningless years?" Mirael asked, growing tired of the debate.

  Kaelen, too, was tired of the endless back-and-forth between them. They always argued over something when they were alone together.

  "Pfft! It was your meaningless years that made me fear betrayal," he muttered, throwing it at her, but she didn't reply to his remark. Silently, they watched the rider approaching at a gallop, the dust cloud trailing behind.

  "It's not him," Kaelen spoke up.

  "Let's begin, the sun is setting," the woman suggested.

  Kaelen nodded silently.

  "Focus your mind on that point."

  "Xewith is keeping the mind awake from afar, and we leave this form behind, bathed in Light."

  The transition points, and the moment of transition... Kaelen used everything that helped him concentrate. They would vanish from this place with the sunset, as if they were becoming air. Their consciousness would be preserved, and they would be reborn in the era to which their task called them.

  "Xewith is galloping toward us! Without her, we can't do this!" Mirael exclaimed, losing the calm she had maintained throughout the argument.

  "We're going to miss the moment," Kaelen lamented.

  "Xewith is approaching, but she's urging her horse forward so hard, she won't make it in time. This means more than a day's delay. This is Xewith's time, and if she doesn't stick to the plan, it means something happened... Drakthor knows more... Drakthor knows about us and has already found her... Drakthor..."

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Aisling sighed in frustration.

  "We still don't know exactly what we did back then. Without this information, we might be able to take on the preserved form of light with Rhys-we already know how to do that-and even find Xewith in another time. But even this is too risky. Without him, we'll lose this knowledge again, and we'll have to start over in another time, in another form, in another family. It's not even certain if it will happen in their current timeline," she mused, pacing back and forth in the room without realizing it.

  Rhys and Aisling suspected that the world in which they were born was not the only one. With every decision they made and would make, reality split and duplicated itself. They believed they had to live out every path of all their decisions. Perhaps. According to them, countless distinct and slightly similar versions of Rhys and Aisling existed across divergent and parallel realities. Instead of a timeline, they envisioned a time tree when they secretly met and practiced together. Each branch... a shared trunk leading to different offshoots... The linear and split realities formed a fascinating tree-the Tree of the Whole World.

  They suspected they were experiencing one of the shared Shadow-Lines of their branches. On another branch, the Brotherhood had never weakened. They didn't even dismiss the possibility that there existed a reality line where the Brotherhood had never existed or where Aisling and Rhys had never even met.

  "Reality plays out every consequence of every decision and its opposite, splitting itself anew with each choice," they once discussed long ago, starting from the philosophical dilemma of "good" and "evil."

  "No, we can't do it yet," she decided. Not until they found out exactly what had happened to them and until Xewith woke up somewhere. "We can certainly awaken the others," she thought hopefully. "The bond, the Brotherhood, might still be strong. If a few of us are waking up-just Rhys and me-perhaps we can trigger the awakening of the others as well. Xewith is crucial. Without him, we cannot travel while retaining full consciousness of who we are and why we're traveling. We need to know more about that event," she thought with deepening despair. "We must gain all possible information about that moment, that starting point."

  "I want to see Drakhtor again; everything else is just a farce," she admitted to herself with passion. "This reality and Drakhtor are my shadow world. I made a wrong decision back then, and so did he. I want to live in that other reality; instead, I'm stuck in this shadow world."

  "Drakhtor..." she whispered the man's name longingly, but it was futile. The man she yearned for wasn't even the monstrous Drakhtor of her timeline's past.

  In Aisling's opinion, everything began with Drakhtor. Somewhere in another timeline-not even here, where Drakhtor was a monster. She had to find the very first moment they met.

  She was also curious-how could she not be?-about what symbol she had to retrieve from Drakhtor, even through deceit and manipulation, where she was the bait and the executor of a nefarious plan. Why was this symbol so vital to the Brotherhood? And most importantly, why was this symbol in Drakhtor's possession? To fully understand the truth, they would have to achieve travel within the timeline and across its branches, retaining all their knowledge and identity. For a split second, Aisling understood why-but she had not yet succeeded in grasping and unraveling this critical piece of information.

  "We can't go, not yet," she repeated her earlier decision.

  The door's caller chimed again.

  "Activate," she commanded automatically.

  Before the hologram appeared, she managed to force a perfect calm over herself.

  "Fionn is waiting in the tablinum," the white-haired woman stated without any preamble.

  Aisling's mother had an unusual hairstyle. She wore her long white hair in a tall updo, claiming that such a style best suited white hair. In her opinion, long hair was pointless to pin up unless it was white, as it wouldn't look good otherwise. Had she been born in an era without pigment-erasing techniques, she might have powdered her hair with rice flour.

  When she shared this opinion humorously, a larger gathering had convened at the family villa. The audience thought Lady Lívia had a wildly vivid imagination. Powdering one's hair with rice flour? Most people didn't even use pigment-erasing techniques on their hair or skin.

  The memory of that evening returned to Aisling. She no longer dismissed the possibility that somewhere, far beyond countless time branches, there existed a timeline where certain decisions led to powdered, towered hair becoming fashionable. Perhaps in such a reality, people would also adopt near-identical appearances based on popular designs. All it would take was a demand for mass-transformation institutes and a few predefined "acceptable" nose and lip shapes, alongside aesthetic palettes for other facial and body features. Such a world would be even stranger than the powdered one. On the streets, one might see only three combinations of nose, mouth, and eye shapes. Aisling struggled to imagine a world where such transformation became a trend. What kind of decisions could lead to such a reality?

  "I'll go down to him," she replied simply.

  Why is he waiting in the tablinum and not socializing in the peristyle with tonight's guests? Or why doesn't he come up? Aisling wondered to herself.

  The hologram didn't disappear.

  "He wants to talk to you about subordination. He said he didn't want to disturb you recently so you could prepare peacefully for your exam," Lívia Domina explained further.

  "Ah, so it's an official visit disguised as a meeting," the girl concluded.

  "An ephemeral-duty visit. I don't care how you complicate each other's lives, but make sure to join the guests tonight. Rhys's parents have already arrived, and Sophia and her family are also in the peristyle."

  Aisling didn't mention to her mother that she had spoken to Rhys earlier.

  "I'll change and go down to him, then after our discussion, we'll join the guests in the peristyle," she agreed to her mother's request.

  "How are you progressing with the study of the Twelve Paths?" her mother asked.

  "I'm currently researching the consequences of Drakhtor's reign of terror," she answered briefly and superficially.

  "You're starting with Drakhtor," Lívia observed. "The Brotherhood of Twelve is more intriguing."

  "Not to me," the girl muttered quietly.

  "We rarely talk, my daughter. I wonder why you always answer my questions briefly and then seem disinterested in my company," Lívia sighed. "I miss you. I don't want us to drift apart even further."

  Aisling hadn't even realized how much she had been avoiding and neglecting her family recently.

  "My research makes me avoid and neglect everyone, but everything will return to normal afterward," she promised, guilt-stricken, to her mother. Quietly, she resolved to pay more attention to her family and friends.

  Eventually.