Chapter 145 Morbid Feelings
POV: Sibyl Rayne | Her Flat, The Rookeries
The notebook was almost full.
Sibyl sat at the table in her flat with a pen in her hand and blood on her upper lip from the nosebleed that had started an hour ago and hadn't fully stopped, and she was writing as fast as the visions would let her, which was never fast enough and always too fast at the same time.
The visions had been constant for six weeks. Not arriving, exactly. Present. The way a sound becomes constant when you've been hearing it long enough to stop registering it as separate, until it's just the air itself. She moved through her days inside the visions rather than between them, the futures layering over the present until the floor of her flat was also three other floors, also the outside of a building she hadn't seen yet, also the tunnels Callum had found two weeks ago and hadn't told anyone about except Isla.
She knew about the tunnels because she'd seen him finding them six months ago. She hadn't told him because knowing in advance wouldn't have helped him and might have stopped him going, and he needed to go.
That was the thing about visions that nobody who didn't have them understood. Information wasn't neutral. The right information at the right moment changed things. The wrong information, or the right information at the wrong moment, changed them differently. She had learned to hold what she knew very carefully, the way you held something with sharp edges, and to release it only when the releasing would help rather than harm.
She was running out of time to release anything.
The mirror on the wall showed her what she already knew. She had aged three years in six weeks. Not dramatically, not the way Edmund was aging in Arcadia, but consistently, the way candles burned, a slow and measurable diminishment. The visions were drawing on something physical to sustain themselves, taking from her body the energy that running that many futures simultaneously required.
Six months, she had told herself in January. She had been optimistic.
She was writing everything down.
Not all of it could be written, the visions didn't translate cleanly into language and some of what she saw was purely sensory, color and temperature and the specific quality of a moment that had no words. But she wrote what she could, organized by subject rather than timeline because timeline was meaningless when you were seeing events from twenty different futures at once.
She had written forty pages on Callum. His possible futures branched from a central trunk, most of the branches converging on the same three confrontations with Cormac. She had written the prophecy last night and sealed it in an envelope addressed to him, which was sitting on the corner of the table now, waiting.
She had written twenty pages on Isla, whose futures were cleaner than most people's, the branches fewer and the central path more consistent. Isla would survive most of the things coming. That was something.
Valentina's futures were complicated by the conversion in ways that made the branching harder to read. Full vampires carried a different kind of probability than dhampirs. The conversion had shifted her trajectory in ways Sibyl was still mapping.
She had written three pages on the hybrid child, which was all she could manage before the visions became too dense and too painful to sustain. The child's futures were not like anyone else's. They spread in directions that had no prior pattern, futures that didn't look like anything she had seen in thirty years of visions, possibilities that required vocabulary she didn't have.
She stopped writing and pressed the back of her hand against her upper lip.
The nosebleed had stopped. For now.
She picked up the pen again and returned to the final prophecy, the one she had been building toward for two months, the one she had been afraid to complete because completing it made it real in a way that drafting it didn't.
She wrote it plainly because plain was what she had.
The child born of two species will lead a generation.
The brothers will face each other three times: first in hate, second in doubt, third in understanding.
One will die, one will lead, one will be forgotten.
She set the pen down.
She looked at what she had written for a long time. Long enough that the candle beside the notebook burned down a noticeable amount. Long enough that the flat went from night-dark to the specific grey that came before London dawn.
She sealed the prophecy in a second envelope, separate from the forty pages on Callum's futures, and wrote his name on the front in letters large enough to read easily.
She set it beside the first envelope.
Then she picked up the pen again, opened a fresh page at the back of the notebook, and began writing the things she hadn't written yet. The things she had been holding back. The sharp-edged information, the details that required the exact right moment to be useful.
She wrote until the dawn light came through the window properly.
She wrote until her hand stopped shaking enough to form letters.
She wrote until the pen ran out of ink, and then she found another one, and kept going.