Prologue

"The love that lasts a life time is the love you would kill yourself to keep."

I stared out at the Dal blindly, my mind clouded with thoughts of the upcoming war. It was senseless, as all war was. I couldn't see any reason to fight when the real enemy was the Guruda. The old one coming to kill us all, enslave us. It was going to take those who survived this war and do things to them I couldn't even fathom. Things that I didn't want to fathom. I grasped my beer and took a swig before setting it back down, the light of the setting sun illuminating the amber coloured bottle. I stared at it, glancing up only when Bo walked in.

It shocked me just how damaged Bo had become in the Fade. Just how much one of the Old had taken from her, taken from Lauren. And now that the Doctor was missing, there wasn't a lot I could do to try and help either of them. She did it to protect us, like she'd done the first time. Taking off to protect us from something she couldn't control, knowing she wouldn't be able to live with herself if she'd done something to hurt one of us again.

It wasn't until Bo turned her eyes on me that the vision hit me like a tsunami. Suddenly I was suffocating, drowning as my soul was pulled from my body and thrown off somewhere into the future.

I didn't see anything for a long time. It was just darkness upon darkness upon darkness. But what I heard was more than I could handle. I heard the roar of fire, the whistling of projectiles and the cries of battle. The sounds that were so familiar to me and yet always seemed to terrify me.

I'd been in more wars than I could count, taken more lives than I'd like to remember. Shellshock was common for people in my position, often experiencing bouts of uncontrollable shaking, emotional trauma, spontaneous fear at the mere sight of a uniform. And I had that for a while. On occasion, my hands would tremble violently for several minutes at a time, I would wake in the dead of night and scramble under the bed, convinced it wasn't safe to sleep next to my own husband. But slowly, after a century or two, the psychological affects diminished. I gained back control of my body and went on to fight in the wars to come. I learned to understand the ways to turn the war into something that was a part of me.

But as I stood there in complete darkness, it felt as though I'd never been in a war in my life. In the darkness of nowhere, I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I just looked around, desperate for light, for grounding.

And suddenly, my eyes opened.

The grass was cold and wet beneath my body as I lay face down in the battle field. It was silent now, all partakers in the war now on the ground as I was, some lifeless, others slowly creeping towards death. I felt the blood trickle out of my mouth as my throat filled with it. I coughed and sputtered, my fingers clenching the blades of deep green tightly. As I moved, I felt the painful grind of impalements in my torso, three rods pinning me to the ground, my hands and back drenched in crimson goo. But the pain seemed far away, like the aching of a healed fracture.

I raised my head and saw two figures standing in the clearing of bodies. They were too far to tell who they were, what they were. All I could see was that one had the other by the throat, hoisted high in the air. The victim grasped the hand holding them up tightly, while reaching behind their back with the other.

They said something then, but it was as if I was underwater. I couldn't make out the sentence, the noises were too distorted, too warped for me to understand, just like the reply. Then suddenly, the glint of a dagger flashed before my eyes just before it was plunged into the first figure's chest. I held my breath for an agonizing moment, as if I'd been waiting for that to happen. Expecting it, but dreading it. They stared at each other for a long time before the second person was dropped to the ground. All they could do was watch as the dying individual stumbled back, staring down at their chest.

Then, with a flash of light, they threw their head back, an unearthly scream exploded from their throat. The sound was so ear piercing, so powerful, that my vision exploded into colour before fading away again into nothing.

"Amelia!" Trick's hands were on either side of my face, forcing me to look at him. I blinked a few times at him.

"Trick?"

"Amelia, what did you see?" I looked at him, then at the table in front of me. There, scribbled in black pen on the hardwood surface, was the battled field I'd seen in my mind. So dark and so destroyed, rough faces frozen in looks of complete agony. Of death.

And the figure in the centre of the field, head pointed to the sky, arms spread out, dagger jutting from its chest, standing in the beam of light. I ran my finger over the silhouette slowly.

"The end of everything."

Ya-ho! I couldn't muster the ability to contribute to anything else I've written on FF; I got Doccubus on the brain especially after that 2x21 youtube thing I saw. Ker-squeal. There was so much fangirling that I may have peed a little. Anyway, this will (hopefully) be the final part of this story and I hope I can do it justice. I'm kind of nervous about the season finally tonight... oh well.

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