Paragon by Rowan Rook

Author:Rowan Rook [Rook, Rowan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-22T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty: Heroes

Anson—who had walked through the door in his small, square, bloodied lab as Amaranth—pressed on through the dead world. It wasn't that there were wilted flowers or empty buildings or bitter ashes. It was that there was nothing at all. Only the black. Only echoes. Only the tick and the tock of the doomsday clock.

No, he realized. The world wasn't dead. He wasn't too late, not yet. This was only his own exile—he wasn't a part of the Auratessa he was trying to save. He never could be. It would never accept someone like him. He existed only in its shadows.

"I want to make it better," he reminded himself. He'd said the words aloud to savor the familiarity of his own voice, but it came out all wrong. It was strained, sad, scared.

...How could someone like him make anything better?

Anson looked down at himself and gasped. His hands, once so tenderly coiled around books and pencils and projects, were painted red with fresh blood. He'd never be able to get it out from under his nails. He'd never be clean again. Those hands weren't fit for research.

...They weren't fit for anything.

His eyes burned, and for the first time, he looked back.

The door he'd left behind was gone.

"Keep walking forward," said everything and nothing. "You're doing well. You'll make the world better."

The tears finally came. "I want to go home."

"You have no home," said the one who wasn't there.

He had no home.

Anson fought the urge to collapse to his knees and cry.

"Keep walking forward," no one ordered. "You're running out of time."

He had nothing else to lose but time, and so he did as he was told. Each footstep he took was obscured by a rumbling tick or a quivering tock. The clock had come with him. There was barely an hour left before its hands reached the place where he knew they would stop. Where the world would end.

But...

He froze.

Silence.

...Why did it seem as if the clock's hands only moved when he did?

"Keep walking forward," said everything. "Don't look up at the time. You have enough. As long as you keep moving, you'll make it."

He breathed with a sigh that didn't sound like his but was.

"Don't let this all have been for nothing."

Anson kept walking forward. Each footstep came with a tick or a tock. He marched to the beat of the doomsday clock.

Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ

The shudder of snapping walls shook the carriage.

Anson's eyes flew open, his heart leaping out of its steady, sleeping rhythm and into his throat. A gray sky stretched above him. He simply watched it from his place on the seat, his mind still sluggish with strange dreams. Raindrops splashed his face. How odd. Hadn't there been a roof there, before?

Tayla was the first to scream.

Anson and Jeriko spat out startled curses in the same instant.

"Get down!" Aydel was already on the floor.

A gust of wind smashed the carriage seconds later. The horses cried out, the carriage swinging wildly as its wooden bones splintered above its passenger's heads.

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