Prologue
Evelynne Grace Farrow, the Vampire Queen and New York Times bestselling author, looked down at her new leather-bound journal and slowly opened it to the first page. She inhaled the scent of leather and unmarked pages, ran her hand over the empty lines, and marveled at the landscape of possibilities. Then she turned that page too.
She never wrote anything on the first page of a journal. She didn’t even know why she’d never done this. She just never had.
When the second page lay bare before her, Evie picked up her coveted Montegrappa pen, blood red and shimmering, and placed it to the paper. Then she wrote. She wrote in a voice that echoed through the chambers of her mind as a new player settled down by the fire of her imagination and told her a story …
Once upon a time, there was a man with all the power in the world. With no more than a thought, he could create and un-create. The slightest manipulation, and something that was supposed to happen wouldn’t happen, or something that shouldn’t have happened, would.
He rarely used this power. For the same man with all the magic was the only one who knew how foolish it was to utilize it. And… he liked the world. It was fallible. It was often stupid. It mired itself in politics and religion, in murder and excuses and torture and more excuses. But it also cherished childhood. And it grew gardens. And it was filled with puppies with head tilts and kittens with purrs and baby elephants and giant trees.
But most of all, the world was part of the multiverse, and the multiverse had an order to it. That order was Time.
Time flowed through all things. It moved them forward, from yesterday into today, and today into tomorrow. Without Time, there was nothing. That was the true absence of everything, not darkness, but a lack of Time. Before the world, there was stillness. A frozen miasma of impossibilities.
And then the first second ticked, and the cosmos was born.
And so was Cronos.
For innumerable eons, Cronos acted as the companion to Time, the son, the daughter, the child, the apprentice, and finally the master. For untold forevers beyond that, he kept a now weary Time moving, working, and in order. But to everything, there is a beginning and an end. Especially to Time. And eventually – one time-turned day – Cronos grew bored.
There are approximately one-hundred-thousand-million stars in each galaxy. There are roughly one hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. And there is an infinity of universes within the multiverse. It was Fate, perhaps a force more powerful even than Time, that lead Cronos to one tiny blue planet circling one mediocre star in one fairly attractive spiral galaxy in one of countless of choices of universes, and there on that itty-bitty planet, he took on physical form.
It took years to create a body strong enough to contain Cronos’s power. But what were years to a being composed of time? They were nothing. They were not eons, after all. So Cronos took his new body and became a man.
One would assume assimilation into human culture would be difficult for a being who had never before stepped foot on solid ground, much less worn clothing or even spoken words, eaten food, or tasted wine. But Cronos was the master of Time, and as such, he knew all that had ever occurred – and all that ever would. Passing creations of mortality such as language and cuisine were grains of sand on an endless shore, and they wrapped themselves around him and filled him up with no effort at all.
In record time – for humans – Cronos became William Balthazar Solan. And William became the master of other things: Money. Sex. Power.
From the shadows, he pulled the puppet strings of human workings, building a secret empire of wealth and taste that would rival that of any mortal’s. But it was huge and it was empty. It echoed as only a vast barrenness possibly could. And yet another time-turned day, William Solan realized he was lonely. Painfully so.
And then Fate once more made itself known to him, and one autumn day in a land called Greece, Solan set his clockwork eyes upon another mortal. A woman.
Time stopped.
He felt it hold its breath. He felt it cease to move. It was painful beyond reason. And it was wonderful beyond words. For in that single lack-of-a-moment, she smiled at him, and William Solan felt alive for the first time since his creation. Not simply in existence, not simply being. But well and truly alive.
When Time remembered to breathe and all returned to motion, William was already changed. He’d already been tied and bound, weakened beyond previous measure, and he was already lost.
Everything was different now.
He unwittingly surrendered himself in exchange for the gift Fate offered. It was a choice he made without thought, without will, for it was his spirit’s decision, and the last of his transformation into a creature of this world. He was diminished, lessened from the bonfire of invulnerability Time had made him to a candle’s flame of immortality, eternally burning, but a mere light in the darkness compared to what he once was.
In the brief measure it had taken him to behold the woman Fate placed in his path, he was rendered by and large powerless. For she was all he had never known he wanted. She was everything he had never known he dreamed of. And that was enough for him.
They knew love. He and she. It was a great, unbreakable love like no other. Beyond wars and battles, in secrets and in shadows, that love grew to fill the empty spaces within Time, and its beautiful but lonesome master.
Until a great wrong was born into his world, and the Fate of the woman was shattered in two. Two possibilities. So very different, they were the essence of opposite.
The wrong pursued her, as desperate as existence can become. That wrong threatened all that was right and good, so she defied the wrong, and in return, it caused pain. It caused loss. It maimed, and it murdered.
The Master of Time secreted the woman away, sheltered her, protected her, but it was never enough. The wrong was relentless. And it was the one force in the cosmos as powerful as William. It was the one thing William could not defeat.
In a desperation just as strong, and an utter agony even stronger, Time’s master made a choice, coming to the worst of decisions in the dead of one horrible, culminating night. For the woman could not escape the wrong that followed her.
And William… could not allow her to join it.
A merciful potion brought about her end, painless and swift. She died in her sleep, and the candle flame that was Time flickered in an expanding and broken hearted darkness.
But the thing about Fate is that it can’t be quieted. It cannot be denied. It is the end-all, and it is what will be.
So the woman one day returned, and the wrong once more pursued her, and hence the cruelest of games was played between the three throughout the centuries.
Again and again, she was taken from him. Over and over, it was he who ended her. It was a testament to the strength of Cronos that he did not go mad. But perhaps he in fact did, in the end. For one night, when his hands were bathed in the blood of the one he loved, he called out to Time, demanding a deal.
Once and for all, Time would take what remained of his power, and with it hold the woman’s soul hostage, keeping it in the veil of nonexistence so that William would never again be forced to destroy the only thing in the multiverse he had ever cared for.
The deal was struck, and the deed was done.
William Balthazar Solan moved alone from that moment on, through the decades, through the centuries, alone and enigmatic, a powerful mystery of a man cloaked in darkness and emerald eyes, a hint of the cosmos he’d once commanded, tall and regal, rich beyond measure, with the face of a fallen angel… and a smile just a touch cruel.
Eventually he took a place amongst the renowned of the realms at the Table of the Thirteen, and assumed the sovereignty of the Time King.
However.
This story teller has said it before, and she will say it again now. The thing about Fate is that it can neither be quieted nor denied.
And now, a door is being unlocked, and a path is being once more revealed to the candle flame that was once the bonfire of the Time King. It is a door that leads to trouble, and it is a path filled with obstacles. It is a way, most assuredly, ripe with pain.
But just as Fate cannot be denied, the thing about a candle flame is that it can spread. Fire can always grow. All that is needed for the conflagration to expand to the boundaries of the horizon and consume everything in its path… is a good, stiff wind of change.
Evie lifted her pen and stared down at her words. As often was the case after writing in such a manner, it felt like a tale told through her, as if she were a vessel for the scribed story of another. However, this time, she found her brow furrowing.
Something was not quite right.
She glared at the pages. Something here in the sentences she’d scribbled was blatantly incorrect. It was a lie. It was an untruth told to her by her muse, and that had never happened before.
Baffled, she wondered just where the lie was.
And she wondered that for a long time before she took a deep breath, recapped the pen, and sat back in her chair. “Huh,” she said.
Then she was surrounded by a nimbus of green light, and vanished altogether.
On the desk in front of the now empty chair, the journal’s written pages flipped in a magical breeze. When the breeze settled and the stirring pages slowed, the journal at last came to rest on its first, empty page.
And the room was silent.