this is why I find myself awake

I couldn't sleep. I was rolling through my memories. Once they were smooth and sequential. Now they were as jumbled as a collapsed house of cards. I slipped out of my cot and adjusted my nightgown. I was still sore on point of pride for being stripped and hosed down behind the Consulate. I could still catch the faintest whiff of kerosene in my squeaky-clean hair.

I adjusted the oil lamp in the Reading Room and squinted at the spines of leatherbound volumes of The Bloodwing Foundation Chronicles, their ziggurat symbols emblazoned on the front covers made it easy to to pick them out from the overwhelming collection of the Heterodyne novels.

I found the tome that compiled the stories from the Autumn of last year. I jotted down my own recollections on a blank sheet of paper, then wrote lines of the revised history beneath them.

1.Darien became infected by the Hydra possessing Jeremiah, and used the parasite to pull the remaining snake from Jeremiah, killing him.

Jeremiah's snakes kill Darien.

2. Bloodwing uses Qlippothic's Galvanic Tesseractor to catapult Darien into the past Jeremiah into Otherspace, where the physics of the Tesseractor age him to dust. Bloodwing assumes Jeremiah's clone machine activates once the active Jeremiah is no longer detected in this world.

3. Qlippothic reanimates the body of Jeremiah, incurring Bloodwing's wrath, but Bloodwing discovers Qlippothic's suspicion was true: that Jeremiah was truly Darien in disguise. Darien. Qlippothic rages against Bloodwing, saying "it was not supposed to be this way!"

Interesting, I thought. The time traveller senses that History was being changed around her. She had secretly conspired with timelost Darien in the bowels of the Mason Plantation before. She had never disclosed what was said for obvious reasons, but she and Koen must have coordinated their escape with him. I'll have to ask Koen what he remebered versus what the chronicles now tell.