Chapter 154 The Death Bed
POV: Sibyl Rayne | Her Flat, The Rookeries
Callum sat in the chair beside her bed and she could see him clearly, which was more than she could say for most things at this point. The visions ran constant and thick now, the present and the possible layered so densely over each other that navigating her own flat required following the sound of his breathing rather than trusting what her eyes gave her.
She had been like this for three days. She knew that from counting his visits, not from any internal sense of time passing, which had stopped being reliable around the same time the seizures had become hourly rather than daily.
"Rest," he said. He said it the way he said things he knew wouldn't work but needed to say anyway. "Stop looking."
"Can't stop." Her voice came out rough, which was new. Everything was new at this stage, her body finding new ways to demonstrate how much the visions were taking from it. "Need to see. Need to warn you."
He leaned forward in the chair and she saw his face above the layered futures and it was the same face it had always been, scarred and tired and still fighting, the face she had seen in her first vision of him years before she had ever met him in person.
She held onto that face as an anchor and let the visions she had been holding back start coming through.
"Lily lives." She said it first because it was the one he needed most. She felt him go still at it. "You'll find her. But you'll find others too. Twelve others. Children like her."
She let that one settle and reached for the next.
"Valentina's child lives. In glass and magic." She watched his face process that, the confusion and something else underneath it, something he didn't have a word for yet. "You'll understand when you find her. Don't be afraid of it."
The next one was harder to hold clearly, the probability branches tangling around it, the futures where it went wrong braided through the futures where it didn't. She sorted through them as carefully as she could with a mind that was running at less than half its normal capacity.
"Cormac will choose," she said. "There will be a moment. One moment, and he'll have to decide who he is. The choice defines everything that comes after for your family." She paused. "Don't write him off before that moment comes."
She felt his resistance to that one. She didn't argue with it.
"Isla will lead when you fall." She said it plainly because plain was what she had the strength for. "Not if. When. It won't be permanent but it will matter. Let her."
She could feel the edges of herself starting to go soft, the way candles went soft before they went out, the substance of her becoming less solid than it had been an hour ago. She was running low on whatever the visions had been drawing from.
One more.
"The masquerade repeats," she said. "History circles. You've been living in a circle since before you were born. The community in the tunnels in 1666, and now you, and the children after you. Each time the circle is a little wider." She found his hand beside her on the blanket and put her fingers over it. "That's not tragedy. That's how things change. Slowly. In circles that expand."
She let herself go quiet for a moment. Outside, London was doing what it always did, which was existing loudly in two layers simultaneously, and she could hear both of them with the particular clarity of someone whose filters were giving out.
The last vision came without her reaching for it, which was how the important ones always arrived.
She saw Parliament. Not as it was now but as it would be, the chamber changed in ways she couldn't fully resolve, new faces in old seats, the portraits on the walls the same but the people beneath them different. And in the chamber, standing rather than seated, not as subjects or prisoners or problems to be managed but as members, as voices with standing, were children she recognized. Hybrid faces. Ash's face, older. Lily's face, much older.
Parliament falls, she understood. Not destroyed. Changed. Opened. Made wider by the people it had tried to erase.
Not now. Not soon.
But it falls.
She smiled, which surprised her. She hadn't expected to smile at the end of something.
"The children," she said, very quietly. "The children bring it down."
She closed her eyes.
She did not open them again.