Zeitgeist Shadows

Caine begs forgiveness; and kneels at last.

A thousand miles away, a woman dressed in the battered armour of a saint hears his prayer. She hears it in her blood, hears it in the soft uplifting rush of her spirit, hears it in the final silence of her Beast.

For the first time in over a century, Firinne Devon sees the possibility of her own redemption. She sees a peace that she has not known since her Sire took her amidst the Dublin ruins.

To her left, a man clad in battered combats looks at her with clear blue eyes.

“Don’t back out on me now,” he says, with the kind of tone which indicates that he isn’t really asking, and Firinne has a sneaking suspicion that the choice she is actually making now is ‘live forever as the last survivor of the line of Villon’ or ‘live forever as the first of the line of Pints’.

Firinne grins.

She has too much work to do to just lie down and die now anyway.

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A thousand miles from there, Tegan O’Riordan is past caring. She has already made her choice, made her sacrifice. Even Caspian’s final act, removing London from time, doesn’t affect her. Rather, the little island in the Thames just shifts a little. It needs to be accessible. It needs to be there for everyone.

In the months since the Final Battle, more people have come, trickling in. Crops have been planted, and the people who live there have lit the fires that will get them through the winter. The air is sweet and clean, and there’s a small pond where the children have been skating, skidding gloriously and free on the snow touched ice.

There’s a young woman there with violet eyes, who watches over all this with satisfaction from beneath a great spreading tree. She lays a palm flat against the trunk and smiles softly.

“Thank you, mother” she says.

It is no woman, but a tawny coloured cat which pads quietly away.

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No one knows what has happened to Carla Obertus, or ‘Rissa the Corax, or any of a dozen other small and slightly peculiar women who were seldom (but sometimes) in the same place at the same time.

The SFS arrive at the strange underground city that Firinne and Kieran made for them to discover that their personal possessions have been nearly unpacked in their new quarters. The entire city has been warded, using magics from another, long forgotten age. The wards, a carefully typed note (with a small dent in one corner from the tweezers which were used to handle it), should last for a thousand years.

The woman who performed the rituals has gone.

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The Thousand Years of Darkness are beginning. In the future, men will tell tales of the great heroes.

One day, stories will be told of the Memory Keepers, who bore witness for the dead, and never feared the dark. The Ashen King, who stood at their head, will be half-legend, half-god, and warriors will brand the mark of the Ashen King's Valkyrie consort into their arms for good luck before battle.

One day, a sword will found, in the roots of a dead and twisted tree. In the hand of the pure and perfect warrior, the sword will begin to glow with a silver light.

One day, a monster will die at the end of that sword, as the sun rises, bright and glorious over the horizon.

One day...