Heather split's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Heather pulled off the road two miles from Bella's house and parked under a wide oak. The board on the passenger seat had gone warm. The marker climbed out of her pocket on its own, uncapped, and started writing across a fresh row of squares. She held the wheel and read as the ink dried. There will be a new, maybe two, but three will earn the throne. The power of the mare. Two will have time in their hands. One will rule the realms. But who is the two and the one, or else there will be none. The marker capped itself and dropped. The tin voice under the cap went quiet. Heather read it twice. Three. Two with time. One with the realms. She waited for the shard-feeling that used to come with her visions, the flash of a face or a hand. It came slower this time, like a photograph developing on the seat beside her. She saw a stone circle. Two young women stood inside it. One had yellow sparkly hair pulled back for work. The other wore a green hood and stood close, watching her sister's hands. Goldie counted under her breath, and a leaf hung in the air for five beats before it fell. Sierra caught it and held it still herself for one more. Bella stood outside the ring with her arms folded, not helping, only watching. Then the picture shifted. A tall young woman with white sparkly hair stood on a stone floor, giving an order Heather could not hear, and people moved to obey. Silver. The realms. The one. Heather sat back. Her children were not in the car. They had not been in the car for years. She remembered that now the way you remember a room you left on purpose. Her three were grown, in their twenties, scattered across towns of their own. The bag of baby blue blankets in her memory belonged to a morning that had already passed. The prophecy was not about her children. It had never been about her children. She picked up her phone. It was not Tuesday and it was not Thursday. She called Bella anyway. Bella answered on the second ring. Heather told her what the board said, word for word, and what she had seen at the stone circle, and the young woman on the stone floor. Bella was quiet a moment. Then Bella said, plainly, that the training had already started, and that Heather should keep driving. Heather asked if Bella had known. Bella said she had guessed. She said the role picks its own. She said Heather's part was not to protect them from it now, but to name it correctly. Heather rolled the board up and set it on the back seat, out of sight. She started the car. The prophecy was written. The three were chosen. Her job had changed from hiding her children to reading the right ones, and she had, and she could keep driving.