The Forbidden Domain - Part 7

What should I know that I don’t know? What sort of cryptic advice was that. I wondered if this had been sent my Master. He said he wouldn’t be able to contact me again but maybe he managed to do one last thing. What don’t I know that I should know, I tried to think about it for a bit but I couldn’t think of anything.

I would have to keep it in mind. I finished getting ready and eat breakfast and then headed out for town main street. I got into the right position and got ready. Then those words came once more.

“Could you help me? I seemed to have become lost.”

“Lost? How could you possibly become lost?”

The conversation continued just like it always had. He would explain to me everything like I didn’t have any idea who he was and then Valarie would show up and interrupt us because she was his guide. I had done this many times before. It was our first meeting, that was repeated again and again.

We had spent so much time together that it was hard to think of this as a first meeting anymore. More like old friends reunited.

Me, Valarie, and Him. Despite our conflicts the three of us had spend a lot of time together during the past resets, although he didn’t remember it. Me, Valarie, and Him…. Me, Valarie, and Him… I paused for a moment while I was conversing with him. That was very strange…. Very strange.

I was about to say something different, to mess up everything when Valarie interrupted. My mind was trying to walk through everything in my mind, trying to bring the rail of my though to a conclusion but things were happening around me and I needed to speak, to continue saying the things that I always said.

The meeting finished and Valarie took him away and as they rounded the corner I sunk to my knees no longer able to support myself. I ran through the conversation again and again in my mind. It wasn’t there…. The thing that should be more important then anything else.

I tried remembering, thinking back to previous times. Had it been said then. I remembered may of those conversations, those where what I used to say my line again and again but it was missing.

It was a horrible gut wrenching feeling, something that I though I had concealing. Something dark and sinister was pulling itself loose my my subconscious like a giant snake that had been waiting there for me to make this realization.

‘What should I know that I don’t know.’ Those words rang in my head again and again. Why had I not been able to see it until now.

I did not know his name.

During the first conversion that we just had he never introduced himself. He did not tell me his name. In all the times he had spoken to me I never remembered him telling me his name.

People have names, my enemy had a name, she was Valarie Bordelon. I had a name, it was Yiskah. I even had a last name, although because I was an orphan I never thought of it as my real last name. It was Page. Yiskah Page. And although I always called him Master even he had a name, it was Arron Kruse. It was normal for people to have names but I had always thought of him as just Him.

How had that not seemed strange until now? Then there was this darn nagging serpent that was coiling itself around my thoughts. Before now I had never questioned him, never thought his activities too strange but now that I was trying to put the pieces together things were starting to make a kind of disturbing sense.

It has always been me, Valarie, and Him. At then end when things were reset it was just the three of us. If it wasn’t me that reset things and it wasn’t Valarie then that left only one other option. When I had looked at him I had never gotten the sense that he remembered anything, his eyes and face showed no recollection of the past time however…. I shivered and that dark serpent loomed.

His actions were always different. More than me and more than Valarie, His actions were different every reset. Previously I had simply discounted that as his response to my slightly different actions but it couldn’t just be that. There could be only one conclusion from this. That He actually did remember and that it was Him and was the one resetting time.

It was hard to believe, painful to believe, but that all my thoughts were coalescing into that one realization. I didn’t want to believe it… If that was true then… he deliberately…. The pain was too much for me to handle.

It couldn’t be true, He couldn’t be the cause. I needed to prove that this was just my imagination. Maybe I was dreaming and I would wake up and remember his name. I somehow managed to pull myself to my feet and staggered through the streets of the town. He moved to town recently, I knew where he house was. I staggered through the streets until I stood outside it.

The front door was locked but that would not stop me so I walked around to the back door. I felt a bit guilty for what I was about to do. Master, had given me weapons to use to fight Valarie. Tools designed to stand up to the strength of the Maiden of Destruction. They were not intended for breaking and entering but they served the purpose fine.

The Dimension Seal was intended to protect me but it could be used to open holes in things. The seal appeared for a moment on the back of my hand when I placed it on the door. A black circle appeared on the door and I passed my hand through it. I fiddled on the other side and unlocked the door. I pulled my hand back and the black circle disappeared and I pushed the door open.

I walked in shutting the door behind me. I felt back about breaking in but I needed to know. I walked through the hallways. There here boxes around that were filled with his stuff. I moved up the stairs. From previous experience I knew that his room was up at the top floor.

The room was basically empty. There were boxes but nothing had been unpacked. Not surprising considering he moved in about a day ago. I opened one of the boxes, clothing. I closed it and checked some more. The next couple contained books.

After rummaging through the boxes I eventually found one full of more personal belongings. Inside it was a photo frame which I pulled out. There was a man in it. I remembered seeing it before. I had been to his house a few times before… in the future, past, whatever. He had said is was a picture of his father. Now that I looked at it again it felt like an odd picture. He had said that he father had died recently which is why he moved to this town to find a quiet place to live.

That part wasn’t really strange, however him and the man in the picture didn’t really share any family resemblance. Still that only wasn’t enough. I put the picture back in the box and shut it, there should be another clue somewhere.

A few boxes later I found exactly what I was looked for. I had remembered seeing them in his house but I hadn’t had the opportunity to look at them there. He had a set of family picture albums. I opened the oldest one first. There was a little relief when I saw pictures of a smiling kid with his father looking back at him. The father was the same person I had seen in the framed picture.

I flipped through the album beginning to be relieved. Maybe it had just been the strange resets that were befuddling my memory. He definitely did have a name, I just needed to ask him to properly introduce himself next time. Maybe I had done that previously and just forgot. Human memory is very fickle.

I looked at the last picture satisfied and was about to close the album when that dark serpent in my thoughts reared its ugly head again. His eye color, the kid in the picture had a different eye color then he did. Frantically I pulled out the most recent album and paged through it. It contained pictures of him in collage. At least it should have but the man in the picture was definitely not him. The hair color was almost the same but the features and eye color was different.

Only a blind person would confuse the person in the photo with the person I had met earlier today. All the hope drained from me as looked at the picture. Who was he? Stuff the albums again and ran from the house, barely remembering to hide the traces of my presence there. Why was he doing this to me?

My own voice responded in my head, ‘Because he does not care about you.’

‘But everything we went through?’

‘It was just part of the plan to him.’

‘He told me that he loved me.’

‘He lied, to both you and Valarie.’

This pain in my heart was worse then any I had felt before. Must worse then the feeling I had after the first reset or just before the second reset when Valarie took him away from me. I could not imagine being in more pain.

Soon I found myself back at my apartment building however instead to my room I went to the roof. It was still early in the day for the place was empty. I walked over to the bars that lined the edge and looked over them. There was a desperate part of me that yelled ‘Leap, it will be less painful’, and I almost gave in to that voice, to abandon this pain and forget… but I had died before that that had not been a solution.

I huddled down near the bars looking down at the ground below. If I could just end it all that would be better than this but even that was not possible. I wouldn’t even care that I was leaving Valarie behind to destroy the world…. I paused. So intense was my pain that for the first time I truly considered letting Valarie destroy the world. This world which had abandoned me. Would it be better that way?

The dark thoughts rose in my mind, revenge. He manipulated me, made me love him, and then through me away only to repeat the process. If he thought he could get away with that then he was wrong. There would be only one way to get true revenge. He had been reset time to get something he wanted. I needed to make sure that he never not that. Even if that would cause the rest of the world to burn.

                                                                                                    

Lyle Clarke felt that everything was going well in his pursuit for Valarie’s true ending. He had found the route that he was looking for and everything seemed to be falling into place. Despite the fact that this was Valarie’s ending the path for Yiskah was the difficult part. He had stumble across her portion of the route almost on accident and once he had triggered it then the route almost become too predictable.

The ending was almost upon him. According to the website that he frequented he would be the first person in the world to find this ending. He was excited to see it and then share his findings with the internet. In the story he had just reached the eclipse, the point in the story where the ending finally revealed itself.