Wish upon the Stars chapter 980

Callie was in a great mood when we finally met up with the others. I was really happy for her too, of course, but also somewhat terrified of where they’d BEEN. “Hey guys,” I greeted my sister, Bethy, and the angels. “Where did you wander off to?”

Bethy beamed. “I was trying to become an angel!” At our confused silence, she put her hands up to clarify. “Oh, not like…forever. But I decided that I could totally do it. I can turn into bats, and bats have wings, and I can turn into mist, which is like smoke, and where there’s smoke there’s fire, and so…” She threw her arms in the air dramatically, and a huge pair of bat wings unfolded from her back. “Ta-da!”

“Do they…do anything?” I asked her slowly. “And did you actually CREATE fire?”

She pouted at me. “Duh, they fly. And yuh-huh. Watch.” She closed her eyes, holding her hands together, and her fingers started to blur. Into mist. Mist which was made of water, as far as I knew. 

“Bethy,  I don’t think-” there was a tiny whoosh, and between her hands a tongue of blood red fire caught and floated inside the mist. “Huh.” I said slowly. “That’s…what even is that? Mist is water, not smoke. And blood is water. And wine is water. Where the hell did you even GET fire powers?”

She just stared at me in pity. “Blood is HOT. Fire comes from heat, everyone knows that.”

“That’s…ok, please put that out, my head is starting to hurt.” She shrugged, then flicked her fingers and the mist dispersed, taking the flame and wings with it. “Oh wow, Callie your hair looks so cool!” she said as she caught sight of my wife for apparently the first time. “And is that a new dress? It looks like the one I gave you but way better.”

Callie grinned at her. “Something like that. I have a new form. Kind of like yours.”

“We could be twins!” she squealed excitedly. “I’ve always wanted a twin! I’ve never even met any.”

Chelsea frowned at her. “Bethy…Shane and I are twins.”

“Nuh-uh,” she vampire responded derisively. “Your hair is black and white. His is yellow. Plus he’s way taller than you, you look nothing alike.”

Weirdly, THAT offended me. “Ok, my hair is BLOND, not yellow. Secondly we are FRATERNAL twins. Which means we were born at the same time to the same parents but we don’t look the same. People aren’t twins just because they look alike.”

“Then how are Calle and I twins?” she asked acidly. She blurred appearing next to my wife, putting on an exaggerated “cool” expression to match my currently nonplussed spouse.

Deciding this fight wasn’t worth my sanity, I turned to the angels. “So, we were here to donate a spark to the brazier, right? Because as much fun as this has been, we’re not too long out from needing to head for my coronation. You two are coming with, right?”

Holly nodded. “Obviously. Your sister is going and we’re trying to bond with her, remember? Plus, having angels at your coronation is super auspicious. You’re lucky to have us around. Everyone is going to be so jealous.” Despite the semi joking tone, I oddly didn’t smell any untruth there. That was interesting to know.

Still, we’d come here to talk to Isaac, so it seemed rude to leave without telling him. Callie obviously thought so too, because she said. “Hey, can you take us to where your tower master is? I wanted to say goodbye before we left.” As she said it, she relaxed her hold on her transformation Skill and slipped back into her normal angelic form.

Bethy gasped. “You have a CLOTHES dyeing Skill? And it works on your hair? That’s even cooler than I thought! Is that what being an angel is about? I need to work on my angel form more, clearly I misunderstood the core essence of angelic power.” She started chewing her lip, lapsing into deep thought about something. I sighed but didn’t bother to comment. Hopefully it would keep her busy until we left.

They led us off in some direction or other, and as we walked, Callie fell back to drop into step with me. “So…I changed my mind,” she said abruptly. At my confused head tilt, she explained. “About the wishes. This new ability is complicated and weird. I already just got a huge bump, and I don’t want to complicate the learning process any further. Plus…I worry. About you and this coronation. I want you to use those scrolls to grow your own stats.”

I frowned. “I guess I get that,” I said slowly. “And we DO have a tower full of potential sources of points here. I imagine plenty of them would love to realign their stats a bit. But are you sure?”

She nodded. “The whole mess before we got here, with my…my dad, and Gossamer and my Chronicle. I did too much at once, and it took me ages to sort everything out. All my training in the sword and in understanding my power, that’s what led me to realize this new path. I built it slowly. I need to focus. Buckle down and learn what this can do. I won’t be accepting any more new stats for a while. Not until I have a better grasp on my Adherent form.”

I sighed. “Alright. It’s your call. I’ll talk to Isaac, I’m sure his people wouldn’t be against using my stockpile. I have over seventeen hundred scrolls lying around, so it’s not like we don’t have enough for everybody.” Six months of stockpiling at nine a day had created quite a nest egg for me to crack into.

When we arrived at the top of the tower (not the VERY top where the brazier was, but Isaac’s office was pretty high up), we were greeted by an enthusiastic Ariel. “There you are,” she scolded her daughters lightly. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” She shot us a warm smile. “Apologies, you four, I needed to speak to my girls before they ran off again without saying anything.”

“We were NOT going to do that,” Holly said bluntly. “Tell her Sera!”

Her sister nodded, her usual somber appearance fully on display. “She is correct, mother. We had no intention of making our absence felt without taking the time to say our farewells.” Her point was underscored by the complete lack of any stupid puns to punctuate her statement, a rarity in regards to the monotone angel comedienne.

“As for you all,” she told me as she snagged their arms to drag them away. “Isaac was looking for you. He had something he wanted to say before you go. He didn’t JUST want you here because of the brazier. But he was hoping to delay his main business until the end of your visit, so you could enjoy yourselves a bit longer.”

I sighed. I had been kind of afraid of that. This whole visit had ostensibly been at Callie’s behest, but it had become clear that while Isaac may not have commanded the twins to invite us directly (or maybe he had, I wasn’t sure), he’d at the very least planted the idea. Looking back I realized he’d ADMITTED this had been his idea when he first met us, and I just hadn’t been paying attention, distracted as I was by the tower.

We thanked her and then headed into the room she’d pointed out, where we found Isaac sitting at a large dark wooden desk, shuffling around papers. When I knocked on the open door, he looked up, his face breaking into a warm smile. “Shane, Calliope, Chelsea, and of course Lady Nightmask, it is an honor.” He gave a dignified half bow to Bethy, who nodded back solemnly, then walked over and plopped down in one of the nearby chairs.

“So…” I said as I took one of the other unoccupied chairs. “You wanted to talk to us about something?”

Isaac frowned, biting his lip and straightening the papers as he seemed to contemplate what to say and how. “This tower was once the item of power of a god.” He began, seemingly deciding to start at the beginning. “A cup, inside which the fires of heaven blazed. To drink from the cup was to sup of the flames of eternity. But eternity is not found in a blazing moment. It is all times, all things, all places. And so, the flames burn not just at one time, but for all of the cup’s existence.”

I grimaced. I understood what he was talking about. I did a lot of stuff with causality and temporal instability, and I’d learned a bit about artifacts that dealt with those kinds of concepts. “Divination,” I said with a sigh. “The flame is always burning, always has been burning, so if you look into it…”

“You see the length of its existence,” he nodded. “The scope and scale of the cup’s truth. This ability is…taxing. As the sole S-ranker of this tower, I am the only one who can use it. The objects of gods are not toys. It takes skill and knowledge to alter a divine instrument to be used by mortal hands.” He shot Callie a weighty look, and she blanched. “But I do sometimes dabble in the flames. I consult the fires of eternity, for myself, and for my allies.” His gaze moved back to me. “Allies such as your grandfather.”

“A prophecy,” I said flatly. “You’re going to give us a prophecy, presumably of something catastrophic.”

He waved me off dismissively. “I am no seer. Such is not my gift. Prophecy is vague, but often complex. I simply see moments, snapshots in time. They are up to my interpretation, and can be changed or avoided. If one is aware of them. I seek not to place a burden upon you, only to forewarn and thereby forearm.”

That got my hackles down a bit. I hadn’t really interacted with prophecy, but I was pretty wary about anything that told me something bad was going to happen. Because they were usually right, and I didn’t need to stress about that shit before AND after.

But this wasn’t that. A warning that could be USED. That could change things. That was something I was willing to hear. Maybe it could help me save someone I cared about.

Seeing me focus on him, he nodded. “Very well. Prepare yourself. This knowledge may very well derail the very tracks of destiny.” I nodded back, waiting, and he closed his eyes. “I saw an image of you. Standing in a large chamber, surrounded by shadowy figures. And you were in danger.”

“I…I’m sorry?” I asked him slowly. “Did you see…where? When? Who the danger might be caused by?”

“Not at all,” he responded earnestly. “You were simply surrounded. There was danger. The people surrounding you might not have been involved. As for timing, I have no idea. The place was also a mystery.” I was about to get up and storm out after telling him off for wasting my time, when he continued. “I did hear a word. Just one. You said it yourself.”

My eyes snapped up to him, pinning him with expectation. That was something I could work with. Was it a name? Some kind of clue?” “What was the word?” I asked him, my tone steely.

He stared at me, eyes lidded and face closed down. He looked menacing and alien, somehow completely other in a way he hadn’t a moment ago. The light seemed to bend around him without actually being bent, like the universe had focused itself on him subconsciously and it hadn’t even noticed itself. “Just one word,” he repeated. “Apostate.”

The word hit me like a closed fist. I felt a shiver run down my spine, carried from somewhere in the future by my fatewalker instincts. A premonition of loss and destruction and the death of all hope. My blood ran cold in my veins in a way I’d never experienced before, and I felt my teeth buzz with the uncontrollable urge to spit that word out into the air myself to cleanse it from my mind. “Ah,” I rasped, my voice shaky. “Well at least it’s nothing ominous.”