The End by Justin Chiang Read Free Book Online Page B

something specific.  Something she remembers from her childhood.  According to the lessons taught by her own Mother, these etchings were left by an ancient line of their family as a warning of things to come—but unlike other findings throughout the late 20th century, these prophecies were not in some obscure dead language.  There was no Sanskrit or hieroglyphs.  No cave drawing or the ancient puzzles of the Missouri Indians.  No these messages carbon dated thousands of years before any of that and yet as impossible as it all seems, they were written in 20th century English.
    Some of t he etchings were written as a timeline of events.  They predicted great discoveries, the fall of empires, world wars, even the moon landing all with precise month and year dates.  But this strange fact is not what concerns Tessa at the time.  She's looking for a specific event that ends the timeline and begins a channel of text that unfortunately has faded with time and is no longer legible.  As her eyes find the exact spot she reads aloud, "the extinction of the human race at the hands of dark angels  - October 1999."
    Her family eventually gave up on the ancient etchings.  1999 came and went uneventfully and the timeline did not include any event that followed.  Evan and his mother even tually went as far as to leave Abbey Downs permanently after Evan's father died.  He was trying to preserve the records of his research on what ultimately ended up being a false prophecy of the end of the world.  Distance and time eventually faded all that Evan had learned about their destiny into a childhood memory that may or may not have happened.
    It's not that they didn't believe everything else that they learned and taught each generation.  There was no question that there was magic and that they weren't quite human themselves (although the bloodline was very thin anymore).  Nobody questioned the existence of magical creatures that only their kind could see and hear.  Nobody denied the control their kind had over the natural and unnatural forces of the world around them.  It was just the prophecy.  Evan's father even theorized that the events foretold in the etchings wouldn't come to pass in 1999 because they were foretold and now Tessa is beginning to think he was right.  According to Samael, the reason the etchings were so accurate spoke more about who was writing them, than about the events themselves.  He believed that the timeline, while a warning of the end, was also like a validation.  If the United States of America landed a space ship on the moon in July of 1969 than this added credence to the end date.
    The fact that they were also written in 20th century English was the next obvious indicator.  Some theorized that the etchings weren't in any particular language but rather written in magic that would adhere to whatever culture ultimately existed when 1999 came around.  Samael didn't believe this either, he thought it was written in 20th century English because those that wrote it were originally from the 20th century. 
    He spent hours in the caverns uncovering different etchings, even some in the great pit, and documenting them all, piecing them together as best he could.  Trying to make sense of them.  Everything wasn't as cohesive as he thought it ought to be.  There were texts about a great war that came in the early 21st century following the end of the timeline but it was disparate at best and didn't seem to be written by the main scripter. 
    He went on to say that whoever wrote the texts must have changed the timeline simply by inserting themselves into it in the past but before he could finish this line of thought a fire broke out at the library where his research was stored and he died trying to save it.
     
    Tessa turned around as the shadows on the cavern walls around her began to contort into a vaguely humanoid shape.  A man approached her and they embraced.  His unnaturally large eyes were the color of