Evelyn Earth Part 55 "THE FINAL CHAPTER"

“Evs?” he sighed.

                “Yes, yes it’s me, are you alright? Are you in pain?” I said too quickly, my tongue stumbling over the words as they spilled out of my mouth.

                “I…I can’t see. It’s so...bright.”

                “It’s me, I’m sorry I don’t know what it is” I looked down at myself, at my hands that were gripping onto him so hard that my fingers ached. Reluctantly I disentangled my fingers from his ripped shirt and awkwardly tipped backwards so that the blinding light wasn’t covering him.

                “Evs, I think I met the Mother. She was…fat.”

                “Yes” I laughed as tears streamed down my cheeks, “she’s not what you expected huh.” I wiped the droplets from my face with a harsh swipe of my glowing hand. As if in unison Bas raised his own hand and rubbed at his pallid face. He turned his head to face me and narrowed his eyes before covering them.

                “You’re shining” he said, “what the fuck happened, why are you shining?”

                “I connected with the Mother and she made me ...she made me into the same substance as her heart.”

                “Like a diamond? I don’t get it” he coughed. It started off as a few haggard breathes and then escalated to a coughing fit that made him seize up into a foetal position. Small droplets of blood studded the ground around him.

              

Evelyn Earth Part 54

 My first instinct was to fling up a wall of darkness between them, but as I summoned up the last dregs of my energy I realised that it wasn’t enough. The force-field had taken every last drop of power that I had. I cried out as she collided with Sebastian. I expected a surging blindness, a bright flash of light or something supernatural, but nothing happened.

The next few moments flew past so quickly that I barely registered them. My body was on autopilot. My eyes saw that Bas had grabbed Ariel by the throat and transferred some of his miasma into her. Her face intertwined with dark slithers of power stood motionless against a background of chaos. Grigori howled and launched himself at the pair. I intercepted him midway swinging my arm across his face as hard as I could. His tiny frame went flying off to one side leaving me to face a furious Zadkiel. He was no longer the image of Zen and tranquillity, no golden showers rained from his fingertips; instead he clasped what looked like a blade made of sunlight.

Evelyn Earth Part 53

“I’ve never seen something like that before” Grigori said. He spun around on his heel and pierced me with his deep brown eyes, “how did you do that?”

I looked from him to Ariel to Zadkiel and waited for one of them to make a move, but all three stood their ground. Ariel looked more frantic than before. Her hair had puffed up around her head, slipping out of the braid and resembling a frayed mop rather than a rope, which gave her an altogether mad scientist appearance.

“I asked you how you did that demon” Grigori growled at me.

“I did it because I could. There’s a lot more that I can do that I bet you’ve never seen before” I replied, my voice cold as ice. I was still holding onto the mass of darkness around Izzy and Travis and it was taking its toll. Anything I said from now on would have to be a perfect bluff because that force field was draining the last remains of my power.

“You said you wanted to talk” Sebastian interrupted mine and Grigori’s standoff, “so talk.” His clipped tone had finally seeped through and I could tell that losing all three of his friends in the space of one minute had really pissed him off and ground him down. We both knew that we could die, but if I knew Bas well enough, he’d rather die angry and fighting than desperate and fighting.

“What are you doing?” Ariel asked after a long stretch of silence that involved all five of us exchanging mixed glances.

“Yes, what is it that you are doing exactly?” Zadkiel chimed in. He had continued to smile despite the fact that the situation had escalated to preposterously tense proportions. Maybe that was his way of easing his stress? Or maybe he was just manic.

Evelyn Earth Part 52

I crawled laboriously over to the edge of the pillar and stuck my head over the edge. I felt Bas’s hands on my shoulders making sure that I wouldn’t tip forward. Below us Sloan was standing with his feet apart talking loudly to three people that were shimmering with unearthly light.

One of them was a woman, I could tell from this height because her hair was braided into a thick rope that rested over her shoulder. The person next to her was too small to be anything other than a child or a dwarf. I remembered what Audrey had said about some of the Sun Soldiers being children and I gasped. I hadn’t believed her at the time, but there was proof standing right below me that the Sun picked its army because of their simplicity of mind.

The third person was a man, but that was all I could tell from this point of view. Sloan raised his voice another octave and was waving his hands around as if describing something to the trio. I slid backwards and rested my head on the surface of the pillar.

“I can’t believe it, but I don’t think he’s told them that we’re up here” I breathed out.

“He’s covering for us” Bas said.

“Why?”

“There’s one thing about Sloan that you don’t know and that’s despite his vileness he’s as loyal as a dog. I’ve saved his life numerous times, and I have no doubt that he hates me for it, but he has never forgotten it.”

“I never knew that” I frowned, “I thought you said he had resented you from the moment the darkness entered you and not him.”

“He did, but he still wanted power even if it was association with it and not possession. I think if the chance presented itself and he could take the darkness from me he would, all loyalty forgotten.”

“But he wouldn’t give you up to the Sun Soldiers?”

Evelyn Earth Part 51

“This revolution will be the first of its kind. We can only learn so much from history, before we hit a road block of difference” I muttered to myself. Everything that I had read about ancient civilisations and their downfalls was whirling around in my head. In almost every case that I had studied humanity had exhausted the natural resources around them, which lead to their inability to continue living in the way that they were accustomed.

Slowly, step by step though civilisations re-built themselves and made the same mistakes as their predecessors—in our case on a global scale. There had never been a check and balance system that had extended to every living person on the planet. What if we, as Earth Warriors could create such a system?

“Everything depends on the actions of others” Bas said, “the actions of others with power to be more specific. If there are more Earth and Sun soldiers like Audrey then to put it lightly, we’re all fucked.”

“So we do what we can” I shrugged.

“We do what we can” Bas echoed softly. His fingers squeezed mine tightly and I felt the build-up of power coursing through him.

Evelyn Earth Part 50

It was not lost on me that I sounded like an extremist, someone who believed in an ideology to the extent that they wanted everyone else to believe it too. Not only believe it, but live it. Be trapped within it. I groaned inwardly.

                How did political leaders make these sorts of decisions? I had read about militant tyrants and fervent religious masses doing things that were at complete odds with each other, but were thought to be utterly correct.

                I couldn’t stop thinking about what the world would turn into if what we did turned out to be wrong. People were suffering all over the globe and they had been suffering for as long as anyone could remember. A select few nations had overcome obstacles as simple as clean drinking water, medical aid and education, which led to a new and improved way of life. And here I was saying that I was going to take us back to the pre-historic age where hunters and gatherers foraged for berries and chiselled arrow heads out of flint.

                 A new Earth meant no hospitals, no agriculture, no infrastructure and nothing of anything really. Was that something that sounded right? It sure as hell didn’t sound logical.

Evelyn Earth Part 49

I wanted the feeling of contentment that I received from that moment to live on inside me forever. I wanted it to be something that I held close to my heart until the day that it stopped pulsing with blood.

                I woke up in the middle of the night and gently got out of bed. Bas, I had started calling him that incessantly as a substitute for ‘baby’ which irritated me to no end, was sprawled across the sheets and breathing softly. He never snored, nor did he like to grab me and press his hot body against mine while we slept. It was so comforting knowing that I could move around and do what I wanted in bed, without the constraints of cuddling. Most of the time I slipped off to sleep easily, but tonight something had kept in a state of barely awake consciousness.

                As I lay in bed I could hear the sound of insects and the sway of trees. It was a chorus of things that didn’t allow me to move onto the next stage of deeper sleep. I padded my way over to the window and swung it open. They were old style French glass windows with six panes on each side and two ornate handles.

               

Evelyn Earth Part 48

Inadvertently we had faced the enemy and won, but now I wasn’t so sure about who was the enemy and who was simply other. For the past few months my life had taken a trip down the strangest road. Things had been revealed to me that I never thought existed, things that I had wondered about, dreamed about, but never dared imagine to be tangible.

                I was given a purpose by a divine entity. I had been chosen just like all the books I had read about heroines being selected for adventures filled with vampires or werewolves.

How stupid.

                This was the real world. It wasn’t filled with fantastical creatures that fought for good or evil, it was filled with humanity who was all of these things wrapped up into one tight bag made of flesh and bone. Humanity was disgusting and beautiful all at the same time.

               

Evelyn Earth Part 47

It coursed through us like electricity. Every capillary, every tendon absorbed the darkness. I shook my head back and looked upwards towards the blue sky. The power was overwhelming me the same way it had after I took in the vengeance from the railway line. The greed that was within me then still lurked inside my body, it didn’t want to stop the connection and spill a drop of darkness.

                I needed it all.

                I screamed up into the sky and shook my head harder. My mind had to be stronger than this. I was my own person. If I let us self-destruct now we would have accomplished only one part of our destinies. I wanted to live to see the new world. I wanted to be part of its reconstruction. Who would be there to stop people like Audrey? Who would be there to monitor mankind’s intentions?

                I felt Sebastian’s vice grip tighten. He had less power within him so logically he should be able to hold more. I forced my head to the side and looked at his profile. His jawline was clenching periodically, I could see the muscles spasm under his layer of ebony skin. He wasn’t doing any better than I was.

Evelyn Earth Part 46

I was torn between scenarios. If I made myself known and confronted Audrey then we would most likely end up in a stand-off. I couldn’t guarantee that I would prevail in a one on one fight with her so that was out of the question. I couldn’t risk my life for someone that was already dying especially when I had an important job to do.

I could simply turn around and walk away, pretend like I hadn’t even come up here to look for them, but I had already gotten rid of the front door—a dead giveaway that someone had been in the house.  

The only thing I could really do that would cause the least disturbance to our plans was to combine the two scenarios. I slowly made my way back down the stairs and stood in empty doorway.

“HELLO!” I shouted, “time to get up lovers, everyone is waiting for you back at the well!” I placed my hands on my hips and assumed an annoyed expression, which fluctuated between nervous anticipation and worry. Audrey’s flame red hair flounced down the stairs followed by a flowing summer dress and ending in the slap of bare feet.