The world once more.
I thought it had escaped the coming fire. When Preventer snuffed me, I felt no fear, no panic. Merely regret, an anguished sense of a task left undone.
I hadn’t imagined that I would once again behold it, but I should never have doubted. Nirav is a nothing, a trifle. Merely a song stuck in my head. Any hold that Linker had on ‘him’, was truly on me.
But I have lost time. I can see Nirav’s memories, and I was absent in truth for a month while Indulger screwed around with Her, and then for an entire trip on some absurd boat.
Why was I returned this time, but not in Redo? The only answer that I can give is that ‘I’ died in Redo, starved out by Preventer’s damnable barriers. But ‘Nirav’ was blasted on that boat.
I can think of no reason his gift should work in that manner, but I am not a puling human, who must understand something before he can exploit it. I am the fire unchecked, which will consume all before it.
‘Nirav’, and his infantile friends believe me gone, believe that they have escaped Condemnation. It suits me that they believe so. It will blind them to my movements, as I prepare a a revenge beyond their capacity to imagine.
They will be watching, this time. Dark glasses won’t conceal my influence a second time. I will need to be careful. Haunter has a thousand eyes. Fisher knows her lover’s shadow like no other. And my ultimate foe is invincible.
What of it?
Preventer should savor every breath, but such is not her nature. She is the kind of human who spends her present, each and every second of it, in obsessive contemplation of her future. She squanders each moment, mortgages them for the next.
A foolish bargain. Her future holds only fire eternal.