A Gift from the Goddess novel Chapter 158

“Seven times?!” I gasped. “H-how…? How is this possible? And why can’t I….”

I could see the faintest traces of memories, but they were all nonsensical, just painful flashes of random images rather than providing any sort of insight. Yet the more I tried to dive deeper to look, the more it pushed back at me.

“Come on, Rheyna! Look!” Clarissa demanded, pointing at my marks. “Doesn’t this look familiar? Don’t you remember?!”

“I-I… I don’t know… I don’t think so. I just….”

“GODDAMMIT!” she yelled, a fury in her eyes that made me flinch. Though it only flashed for merely a second. Just a second before her gaze then slowly fell to the floor, a look of defeat washing over her. “…God-fucking-dammit. Why now?”

It was the first time I’d seen her look so upset. Not angry anymore, just… sadness. An emptiness as she accepted that I wasn’t able to tell her what she needed to hear. A change from her normal bratty attitude.

“Clarissa… There’s no point in wasting time if this really is all true,” I said awkwardly, doing a bad job of trying to navigate her mood. “You’ll just… need to explain to me what’s happened. Does this mark thing have something to do with why you’re sick?”

Her little body sighed and was quiet for a moment, assumedly trying to pull herself together. The news of my amnesia had hit her incredibly hard.

“…I’m not sick, per se,” she started after a minute had passed. “Sick implies you can get better. The truth is that I’m just… slowly dying. Again. The first time being when I was just a small child with my parents. The war was soon ending and we were ambushed. There was nowhere we could go, nowhere we could hide. I remember being scared… and then there were enemy wolves surrounding us. But we’d drunk that spiked suppressor water. Everyone had for months. And inevitably we were all cut down.”

“But if you were brought back, doesn’t that also make you a Saintess then?” I asked.

“Well… not quite,” she said. “No, I’m… I’m a bit different.”

I went to ask what she meant but, before I could, she pulled aside the top of her pyjama shirt so I could see her skin better. And though the small campfire light wasn’t great, I could still make out what I needed to. I could still see her inflamed red skin, her veins spreading in an incredibly painful-looking manner.

“Clarissa…,” I whispered, having too many questions.

“I contain the immense power of a God, yet it’s trapped within the frail body of a mortal. Not just a tiny piece to help revive such as you, but enough so that it burns away at me from the inside.”

“But… why?”

“Selene,” she answered as if it should have been obvious.

“The… Moon Goddess? The one that apparently created werewolves?”

“The one who broke her natural laws to create us, yes,” she corrected. “My great-great grandmother, Aria, had been the one to originally discover her dirty laundry. Turns out that making a sub-species of humans breaks whatever contract she had with the new Gods for neutrality. It’s how Aria bargained for Myra to be brought back to life. Blackmail, if you can believe it.”

“This is a lot…,” I said, struggling to follow.

“Look, long story short, Selene needed a way to hide. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the Gods were on her back and wanted to start digging into what she’s been up to. And she knew what they would find. So when the war inevitably killed off the ranked Silver Mist members capable of being a vessel, she chose me of all people to be the guinea pig. Shoved a large portion of her power into me so she could pass herself as a mortal to hide. Got the idea from what she did to her dead mummy-dearest, Thea.”

“So… you’re a Goddess now?” I asked.

“No. As I said, I’m a mortal. I don’t have any omnipotent higher understanding and the things that I do know, I only know because we’ve both been figuring the puzzle out slowly with every timeline. But I did pick up her ability for rebirth, assumedly since foresight at its core foundation is just a type of time manipulation. Though it’s not as strong as Selene’s, of course. Not to mention that every time I use it, I burn up my insides more and more. Which is why we can’t fail this time, Rheyna. I-I can’t… I can’t do this again. One way or another, this is my final battle.”

“So then how does it end? What do we need to do?”

And her expression slowly became dark, a cloud of hatred forming around her. A seriousness to her that took me off guard.

“More than anything… at whatever cost… we need to stop Allison.”

If I’d been surprised by her quick change in manner before, I was far more surprised by this revelation now. To think the young girl could do anything that warranted this kind of reaction was hard to comprehend.

"...Allison… Lycroft?" I asked confused. "Kieran's sister? What? How is she involved in all of this?”

“Because no matter what we do, no matter how many wars we win, something always happens… and the little psycho brings forth doomsday.”

…It must have been the reason why I’d hated her from the beginning, an explanation for why I’d always had the urge to rip her to shreds. I must have retained some sort of recollection. Deep down, I must have known that I needed to stop her. But in my ignorance and forgotten memories, I hadn’t gone through with it.

I’d played nice with her for Kieran’s sake.

…But something still seemed strange.

“How could she even manage to start doomsday, anyway?” I asked slowly. “From what I can tell, she’s just a kid… a bit religious crazy, sure, but that’s not entirely her fault, I guess. I don’t see how she could be some diabolical mastermind, thwarting our plans in all the past timelines.”

Clarissa scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m certain that ‘kid’ is the key to stopping all of this.”