Sunlight is rarely allowed to enter this room. Within this company, the why of this is understood: were the shades drawn to admit any view of the outside world, the occupants of this place would find it even more difficult to pay heed to whatever person droned on in a monotonous voice with a repetitive message.

Still, I often find that I look beyond the drawn shades when I am attending a staff meeting in this room. Rarely is my mind engaged in whatever is being said. I gain about all I really need to know by glancing at the agenda that is always given to us when we enter the room. Therefore, a part of my mind pays heed to the spoken words being uttered in the room even while so much of me is looking beyond the shades and into the sunlight of the world beyond.

It is the quarterly sales meeting. It is the time to be harangued for those of us who fail to meet our sales quotas. It is the time for preening by those rare souls who meet their quota. I have never once met a sales quota. I have never been in danger of being fired, however, because the sales quotas are not really the priority. They are artificial barriers designed to keep us fervent but they become rods to beat us down the longer we stay with this company. It is why few sales associates ever last longer than two years.

I have worked here for five years. I did not come here for any reason than to be anonymous and unseen. I have never been bothered by the artificial limits set by the red-faced management each quarter as this company doesn't matter any more than as the place that no one would think to look for me.

"Be free, Kallista, but keep me in your heart as you will stay in mine. And when the time is right for us, I beg that you will join me again and we will find that place where nothing stands between us but the wild power of our nature and the open sea of possibility."

I shift in my seat and look at my hands as they knot the fabric of my dress that covers my sex from public view. On either side of me, my co-workers do not notice. They are lost within their own daydreams.

Max. How the name fires me.

My time with him has been present in all my dreams since I have returned from the pilgrimage to Finis Terrae -- whether they occur at night or in the day, as this one is.

I had been irritated when he called me Kallista. I had told him my real name. Yet he had called me Kallista, an abomination of a name that would have been claimed by only a vain, empty woman. It was the taunt that the goddess Eris inscribed on the golden apple that she tossed amidst the gods gathered at a celebration to which she had been excluded. It meant "fairest of the fair" and it had not only caused three beautiful goddesses to battle for the title but it did serve as the inauspicious seed of the Trojan War. Such is the legacy of the Goddess of Discord, Eris.

In his mind, Max surely believed Kallista to be linked so inexorably to the goddess Eris that I would take it as an endearment and proof that he appreciated the origin of the name my mother gave me. Yet, I had not called him on this for he was romantic man enough to want to pay me a compliment; to whisper one word to say he found me beautiful above all other women in his life. I would need to tell him that the name held sorry connotations for me. He would rip his tongue out before calling me this name again once he learned its impact on me. Why had I not told him then? Because we had been saying goodbye.

And also, because ... I have lied to him about my name.

No, not lied. I am holding the full truth in abeyance from him. It is not a lie if I intend to tell him the truth one day, is it? There will be a day when I tell him the truth about why my mother named me Eris. There will be a day when I tell him the truth that if he ever came looking for me by the name Eris Turan, he would not have found me. I did tell him the larger truth. Eris is still my name. It is just not what I am called. Some day, the man will earn the right to know the fuller truths I must withhold until the truth will be useful and meaningful to him. Some day, he will know why my first and last names matter in the way they are juxtaposed.

My hands smooth my dress. I look at the wrinkles that will not fade from the linen. I see beyond the wrinkles in the fabric. I see through to the wet folds of my very sex.

It was the morning after Maximus and I had completed the pilgrimage to Finis Terrae. I lay in the bed we'd shared the night before and was alone when I woke. I saw him walking back toward the bed. Many things went through my mind. I wonder if he knew?

The first thing was the notice of my body's condition -- sore in that way a woman most treasures because it is the finest testimony to a man's touch of her body and her own reaction to what he gave her. And as I shifted to my back and felt that ache between my legs and watched as he approached, I felt awkward.

Why was that? I think it was because it is always awkward after a night that you fear may be a one-night stand but hope will be more. And you're in that curious position of not knowing if the intimacies of the night before linger with your partner or whether you should pretend to be callous enough that the night meant a speck of what it did to you. Do you admit tender feelings? Do you feign a brazen heart?

I am sure it was this sense of awkwardness that caused me to cling to the white sheet over me and draw it tight under my chin, my arms crossed over my breasts. I do know I worked instantly to have some protective smile on my face, just in case he was getting dressed to leave me.

But he never seemed awkward to me. Certainly not in how he boldly approached the bed and slowly so slowly tugged that sheet out of my grip and then drew it down still further until he revealed the length of my nudity to his eyes.

Did I thank him for that? That gesture meant so much.

My supervisor's name is Andrew Wyathe. He is a young man, younger than me. He has sandy gold hair and a harried personality. I know he has two young children and a wife who is equally harried. I see her sometimes when she comes to pick him up after work. I can tell when she's coming to get him because he begins looking out his office window in anticipation. But when he sees her car in the lot, he sighs. I think it's because sometimes, he likes to dream that he is more carefree than he is and when he sees the two children in the back seat and his tired wife walking around to the passenger seat in anticipation of his arrival at the car, he realizes he is trapped in a life he never saw coming.

He also feels hopelessly trapped in his job. He doesn't belong here. I always want to tell him that, but I never do. I know that he will stay longer than he should. I know it will be the death of his marriage. I know he will regret that for the rest of his short life.

"But you've just returned from vacation," he is saying to me. He has a nasal tone to his voice and I know he is trying to adopt his stern manager voice. He feels awkward with me because he knows I never buy into the pressure his bosses make him put on those of us who work for him. He also feels awkward because I am a few years older and because he sometimes wonders about me in a sexual way. He daydreams about several of us there. He imagines we know things that he doesn't. He pretends sometimes that we teach him exotic sexual maneuvers.

"Yes, I know that but this really can't be avoided," I tell him calmly.

I have just given him my two-week notice that I am quitting this company. This is his reaction ... to somehow link it to my vacation. It is linked to it, but he doesn't know the vacation was really the moment I knew a new life was beginning for me. I knew even then that I was not staying with this company when I returned from that pilgrimage. But for good reason, I still held out some hope that it would not come to pass. It has and so I have already set this in motion. I waited until the staff meeting was over to come into Andrew's office and tell him I am quitting. He's not torn up because I am his best worker because I am certainly not, even though I am easy-going and do produce at a steady, foreseeable pace.

He is really only upset because while I was gone, his unit fell even further behind its sales quota because he was short-handed. I'm quitting now and he won't be able to replace me quickly. That means, this next quarter will look very bad for him and his unit.

"But why? Is it more money? Is someone offering you more? Perhaps I can talk to Bob and get you another few dollars an hour or perhaps a higher bonus after meeting your sales quota," he says. Bob is his boss; everyone else has to call him Mr. Sullivan. Andrew calls him Bob so I will know they are on such friendly terms that he could really get me more money if that's what it would take to keep me there. I would be surprised if Mr. Sullivan even knew Andrew's face much less his name.

"It's not the money. And I'm not leaving for another job."

"Then why? I don't understand. You need money, you need a job."

He's seen my old car; he knows I live in a not-so-nice area of the city. He knows a few other things about me, like that I am adopted. He has met my adoptive parents at one or two family picnics the company has given to boost morale and make us better selling machines. He's not failed to notice the clothes they wore, the car they drove and the great unease of the lower middle class that hangs on that couple like a disease when they are in unfamiliar social settings with people they think might be from a higher class. He knows I work because I need the money like every other grown child of lower middle class parents who never were able to do much with their college education. He knows I can't just quit if I don't have another job lined up; people like me don't do that if we want to continue to have food on our table and a roof over our head.

"I don't really need a job anymore."

"Why not? What will you do for money?"

"I have money now."

"How? Did you rob a bank on your vacation?" He laughs at his own joke but his eyes are tight and I know he's already thinking of the want ads he'll place to find my replacement.

"No. My mother died," I tell him. "She left me some money and some property. I don't need a job anymore."

"Your mother?" He is now very attentive. This raises his curiosity. Whether it's the mention of my mother or the fact I am so calm about her death, I don't know. "You were adopted, right? And she died? But I thought they ... I mean, I've met them, right? Is your father still alive? Surely they could not have left you much."

He's right. If it were my adoptive parents, there would likely be more debt than inheritance. They were sweet people to me. However, their gifts to me were never monetary. Until this very moment, I had been forced to live a life that someone raised only by these two sweet, but essentially clueless people would have led. It's why I'm in this dead end job. It's why I've always kept to myself and people think it's because I am meek. No one but me knows that the person I was meant to be is the woman my mother raised even though I have not lived with her nor been in any physical contact with her since she left me at a cloistered abbey in Colorado when I was three years old.

Since that time, I have not seen my birth mother. She has not written me. I have never sent her a card or any other mail. There have been no phone calls. Yet, she has been with me and has raised me as only she could have. Still, it was not enough. It was not as it should have been if I'd spent all those years in physical proximity to her so that she could have taught me all I needed to know. I am not totally prepared for what my life will be like after her death even though she told me it was coming. She would have prepared me long ago except she had to abandon me at the abbey to assure that I would live to see this day.

She told me a month earlier to get ready. Then she sent me to Finis Terrae with no real notice other than a vision that told me to go on that pilgrimage. I hadn't realized that she had sent me there to meet Max. The night I met him, she sent me another vision to be sure I understood that I would learn something from him that would help me face my future. The night she died was the first night I spent in his arms.

"I am actually leaving town tomorrow. I need to see to my mother's final wishes," I tell Andrew. So much for two weeks' notice.

The sheet was cool cotton. A shaft of light slanted in with golden highlights into the room. I will always remember the sun of this morning, I thought. Just as I will always remember the way he touched me our first time together the night before. I had learned in that first time that he was a man who would stand fast with me.

As he slowly tugged the sheet from my hands and down my body that morning after, I remember looking away from him and into the sun. I remember thinking that this shaft of sun that fell across my body was illuminating a pilgrim who had found the purpose for her journey. I understood that my mother had meant for me to meet him because he would help me face future difficulties. I simply did not know what they were then.

I looked at him as he regarded my body. His hand held the sheet, twisted in his grip. His other hand hovered over me, as if he were reading my aura, as he slowly sunk down to sit next to me upon the bed's edge.

His form was god-like in its appeal to me. I have seen the gods and there are many who would be jealous of him. As for me, I took note of the attributes that showed me the man inside: the steady, clear gaze of the sea in his eyes; the rugged male beauty that demonstrated a life lived head-on; the expanse of shoulder and chest that barely held the power of his heart within; the arms formed by heavy, useful muscles that could at once wield a mighty sword with abandon and still cradle a woman with exquisite care; the brawny legs that carried him in regal bearing and... it must be said without prurience... the manhood that validated the virility that seemed to leak from every nuance of his movement and action. His grace was shown in every small gesture that demonstrated he had learned as an adult male to wield the strength of his body with reverence for what damage he could do with the skills he had obtained in years of training to be a warrior. That he had long been a warrior was obvious, from his bearing to his scarred skin to his always-alert eyes to the wariness of his carriage.

His fingers of the hovering hand finally found a place to light upon my body. They teased and tangled in the hair above my sex.

His manhood responded to his intention to take my body in the sunlit morning. These gestures of his ...the way he treated me with such dignity and such desire ...I knew this was not a one-night stand to him.

My own fingers played within his pubic hair. He shifted on the bed, easy in conveying to me that he wanted my hand there. I fingered a wrinkly sac; I stroked behind it and he moaned deep in his chest. His eyes were on my sex and he seemed languid in his visual examination. I held his firming penis in one hand and began slowly pumping him. He stretched to lean over my torso and gave my sex a tiny kiss.

His manhood expanded and darkened as I tended to it.

"Let me," I whispered to him and never waited for a response.

Inside my apartment that night, I finish packing the few boxes of mementos I will take with me in the morning. Every unexplained noise in the night jars me. I am so much more aware of who I am. But I am also nervous for the first time in my life.

My mother is dead.

She has left me to carry on our line. She has left me instructions but I have to figure them out in order to follow them. The next part of my journey begins when I travel to her estate tucked among stands of mangroves and pine trees on the island of Captiva off the west coast of Florida a few hours south of Tampa Bay. I will leave this tiny cracker box of an apartment and then I will head for Captiva in the morning. It will take me two days to get from the choking intensity of Atlanta to the serene salt-spray cleanliness of Captiva. I could make it in one day, but I want to arrive with enough reserves of energy because I will need them when I enter her inner sanctum.

I know I should rest before this next part of the journey. But instead I lie in my bed and masturbate because all day long, I have needed the physical release of what dreaming about my time with Max does to me. It never leaves me alone. It makes me itch. It makes me crave. It makes me desire. It fascinates me for how it makes me need him. I can't see him yet. I have one more series of tasks to do before it will be time to see him again. If these visions of him do not let me rest, I don't know how I'll survive until then.

I bent at the waist so that I could remain laying on the bed and only have to shift my body a bit to enable my head to go where I wanted it to. My mouth neared his groin and he leaned back on his elbows to give me unfettered access to him.

His scent assailed my senses. The scent of this man.

The skin covering his shaft felt like raw silk. Like it had texture and could seduce you without you even realizing how very much you enjoyed stroking its sensuous covering. It tasted of the remnants of the love he'd made with me the night before. He'd taken me then so gently. I'd told him that it had been a long time without a man for me. He'd said only this: "I will make you forget."

I did not know if he meant that he would make my body forget its long dormant state or if he meant he'd make my body forget any other man who'd ever touched it.

He had done both.

But holding his penis in this morning and my face buried close to its root ... I wanted to simply enmesh myself within this intimacy between man and woman. It made the taste of me mingled in with the left over and brand new tastes of him an intoxicating blend.

He let me explore and he simply leaned back on his elbows and left me to it. He dropped his head back and gave this low, long, guttural sigh when I took him deep inside my mouth after giving a slow, suckling kiss of the gleaming tip.

How that fired me. To hear him enjoying this. When his hips began a slow, subtle pumping motion into my mouth, I looked up at him. His head was hanging to the side, his ear to his shoulder, so he could watch me. He smiled, dark and mesmerizing, to see me gaze over at him. His tongue licked his lips.

I moaned and closed my eyes to concentrate. His eyes distracted me and I wanted this experience to be full. Somewhere deep inside me, I loosened and gave up another bit of me to him. I stretched out across the bed and turned toward him so I could take him in deeper.

My movement was basic, primal. The movement of a woman engaged in this sexual congress with a large man of good sexual appreciation.

Perhaps I could have gone on forever. It seemed he was content to let me for a while. But then I felt his fingers upon my sex and I realized he had curiosities about my body as I had about his. I parted my legs at his urging and let him stroke my folds. I felt a finger go inside me. My eyes fluttered at the exquisite sensation of his gentle touch where I was so sensitized from the night before. I became aware of the ache down there again. A part of me knew that I would welcome him to come inside me there again, even then, even sore. Another part of me wondered how he'd learned to touch a woman with such sure finesse that it didn't hurt. He has big fingers; chubby fingers for the way they taper and the way they are shaped with blunt beauty of man. His big hands seem designed more to grip a heavy sword than to explore a woman's most tender parts.

He pulled his finger out; I squirmed ever so slightly at the feeling of abandonment. I sucked on him and hummed a light song. He pumped in a bit stronger in response and I felt light-hearted.

His thumb entered my slickness. It was just thick enough that I knew it had to be his thumb. I felt his other hand pull my legs further apart as he twisted his torso just a bit to gain the angle he wished for his hand. His thumb left me to be replaced by the finger. I had little time to think about why he switched digits.

An instant later, I felt his slickened thumb circling purposely around the ring of muscles protecting my anus. I gasped around his thick shaft in my mouth and I tensed with the rest of my body. He continued; his massaging grew deeper. I looked down at where he was the moment I felt his other hand spread my cheeks. Our eyes met. They locked. He watched me, his face serious yet relaxed. I sighed with new ease when he stopped with his thumb but then I startled when he put his thumb in my vagina again. I frowned. He just watched me, never seeming rushed.

I felt him spread me wider below. I was sucking on him. He was pumping into my mouth a bit more. Not wild yet; just more primitively. I got used to it. My eyes flickered shut.

They flashed open the instant I felt his thumb prod into the very tip of entrance of my anus. I gave this heavy grunt and tried to roll away. But his hand on my hip, his finger up my one hole, his thumb up my other, his cock in my mouth ... I was locked to him and he was in total control of me.

My eyes were probably huge as I searched his eyes for understanding. I struggled. He pumped into my mouth harder. His eyes were narrowed and watching me intently, gauging my ability to go with him in this. His thumb was gentle as it moved deeper. His finger was nearly stationary. And then another finger glanced across my clit and he saw the flare of reaction that generated deep inside me. It was the first time I saw him smile during this time.

I felt like all I could do was hang on to his cock and suck it down. I felt like I had to keep my eyes open and locked to his. I felt like I'd never felt in my life ... filled completely and by one man. When he spoke to me ... these harsh, throaty words ordering me to release myself to him ... truly, he'd filled up two more holes in my body with his sex. His sex words in my ears. His sex organ in my mouth. His fingers probing me.

Fly, he said. Fly here for me.

He pumped in. I sucked. I bucked in waves of increasing pleasure as he thrust finger and thumb in alternating moves. I came blazing and churning. I gurgled deep in my throat as I came and came. I sucked harder and he came with this last thrust of groin in my face and his entire body seemed to be collapsing and charging at mine.

In the aftermath, there was a sudden vacuum in the room. No noise except our mutual whimpers but that seemed far away. I pulled his spent cock from my mouth and laid my head upon his thigh, feeling the sweat of my neck slick over his skin as I nestled in and felt drunk in the excess of his scent.

I looked down at him as he lay there on his back, one arm flung above his head and the other hand still buried in my groin. It amused me to be falling back into that after sex slumber with his finger and thumb still inside me. I wrapped an arm around the girth of his thigh and snuggled in.

When he shifted, the bed dipped and my body rolled toward him. I sighed and told him I was too spent to even crawl up in his arms so he could hold me.

He never answered.

I nearly choked at the next sensation.

He shoved me onto my back and his mouth devoured my sex even while his finger and thumb moved hard within me. It went from park to Mach 1 in nothing. One moment I was almost asleep, the next I was reeling from what he had made my body do. Everything down there was sensitized ... from the sex the night before to what he'd wrung out of me just minutes before. But this time, his mouth was sucking, nipping, licking ... and his finger was seesawing with his thumb ... one would go deep in one hole while the other waited for it to retreat before going deep in the other hole.

And all the while he was sucking.

Suckling.

Gnawing.

Licking.

Timed to the pulses of my body's impending explosion.

I clung to his thigh and my entire body shook and shook. I cried to him to release me and he sucked harder. I batted at his hand that held my legs apart but he just gripped me in tighter to him.

And all the while he pumped in and out.

Relentless.

Hungry.

Curious.

Determined to find the rhythm that would bring me to a coming that yanked an incautious scream from me.

I sobbed before I screamed. I sobbed after I screamed. I babbled his name and my pleas did no good until they stopped. He would not relent until I unable to respond further except to release everything within me to the sense of coming undone in his hands.

No man had ever taken me there.

I wished one had.

But I knew only this one ever would.

My mother had lived on Captiva for almost twenty years. I never knew that until just before she died. I have never been there. She only moved there after she had been driven from her first sacred place. Captiva had proven an auspicious move for her. She had found peace and protection there. I will come to learn everything about this only later, after I explore her inner sanctum. It is an ancient place and its reputation among the sacred places had been lost within the mists of time. This was why she chose Captiva. It protected her secrets. They surely had searched for her in her time there, but for some reason, they had left her alone while she was there. Maybe it's safer there for a while for me. But it won't be for long because I must keep my anonymity for as long as I can. This much I know already. There is so much more I have to learn.

I think they were waiting on her to die. They knew they could not track me until it was my time to take her place. I do not know how much time I have, but I do know that I need to enter her inner sanctum in the house on Captiva. I am not yet sure why. I trust it will become apparent to me there.

Hours later, I was still boneless. We lay together in the bath of the hotel room and talked of many things.

I even told him of what I had first thought upon waking that morning. That I had thought he was leaving me. That I thought I had only been a one-night stand.

He had been so amused when I told him.

"How different are the reasonings of men and women!" he had said as he kissed my neck and wrapped his arms around me. I relaxed back against his chest and felt the water lap around us. A moment later, his mouth was at my ear, and his deep voice said, "If I had known your thoughts this morning as you lay there soft with sleep and loose with my love! I was dwelling on the wonder of a woman naked by my side and what a gift you had granted me of yourself. To think you feared that the light of day would reveal that I was not as constant as my behavior might have suggested. All you needed to do was look into my eyes. I am not that kind of man. You are not that kind of woman."

I turned my head toward him and gave him a kiss. My hand trailed down his cheek. "I have no experience with your kind of man, Max. I wasn't sure how you saw me. But I should have known, shouldn't I, because I did look into your eyes."

"I saw you lying there, golden skin against white cotton, hair a cloud against the pillow and the shaft of sunlight dancing on the scene. It occurred to me how life is simply life, whatever age or place you find yourself. This is the essence of what we are, laid bare and open before another soul. Do you know how much I needed you last night? Or how much more I needed confirmation in the illuminating light of day that in you I had found someone who would not desert me or abandon me again to loneliness?"

Turning in his arms, I took his face in my hands and leaned in instantly for a deep, loving kiss. I whispered his name over and over as I kissed his cheeks, eyes, brows, forehead, jaw ... I wrapped my arms around his neck and murmured to him of how deeply his words touched me. My mother's death was strong with me and her spirit lingered there ... and I knew in that one moment that he had proven himself to be the man I would need in the coming time.

It seemed to give him the will to be so open and so romantic with me. There has never been anything more devastatingly beautiful to me in my life that the reality of this strong, virile man showing me a deeply vulnerable side to him. His hand stroked down my back as he said softly, "I slipped the sheet from you to reveal again the person that you are with no professional smile or armor to protect you from a cruel world. And naked as I was, I joined you and we loved beneath the sun's eye. There was no hiding then in shadows and pretence."

Shadows. Pretence.

My mother left me then.

She left me with this prophecy: hide out of the shadows; give joy to those who bring it to your life; be vigilant for the time when strength and might of hand are a gift.

The long bridge to Sanibel is ablaze in midmorning sun. All around, people enjoy the mix of warm ocean and soft sand. I drive the length of the island in perhaps twenty minutes before crossing the narrow, short bridge that crosses the swift, thin strand of water that separates the two islands. And then I am on Captiva. I follow the road as it curves to trace the far west coastline. More than halfway, I am mesmerized by the feeling of home. Trees form a happy canopy over the road. To the left, the ocean hits relentlessly at the bright beach of the public side of the island. Wooden fences along the right side of the road hide house after private house from the casual drivers upon this road. These houses are old and have lived-in elegance. Their property lines stretch across the width of the island and give out onto the gulf side where the more sheltered beaches are. There is more varied life in the gentler tides and the thick mangrove stands on this side of the island -- fishes, mollusks, otters, birds, porpoises.

I need no sign to tell me when I am at my mother's place. I need only my own intuition. I drive past her home until I find a small shopping area where I can find groceries for the few days I will be there.

My nerves have never settled since the last day I was in Atlanta. It's because I'm feeling what my mother's visions to me predicted. I am beginning another pilgrimage.

I call Max that night after I've strolled down the beach from my mother's property down to the bridge and back. I have found a huge purple scallop shell in and amongst the many other shells washed up on that beach. This one is in perfect shape, save one minor nick along its edge. It reminds me of the scallop shells the pilgrims on the road to Finis Terrae wore per custom. When I return to my mother's house, I dig through my suitcase and find the shell I'd brought back with me from that pilgrimage. It makes me smile. Max and I had exchanged shells, as if we knew this one symbolic gesture would mean something someday. The one he'd worn on his pilgrimage is in my hand. It is nearly identical to the one I've picked up on Captiva's beach.

He sounds warm and welcoming when he hears my voice. It is the first time in days when I am not nervous and waiting for danger to make itself evident. "I have thought of little save you since our time together," I tell him. "I seem to spend so many hours remembering your beautiful body and your spectacular heart. I so long to be near you."

"Your words are more than kind. That such a creature as yourself could find in this rough and war-weary man something of beauty is difficult for me to understand. I am scarred and weathered, hardened and worn. How to compare that with the luminescence of a beautiful woman, all soft and pure and unsullied?" he whispers to me. I smile at the words, not only because of the sentiment, but because the way he phrases them fall off his cultured, English tones in a way that seems out of time, out of place.

"There is something I need to tell you, Max," I say. He gives me time to say this at my own pace. "There is a journey I need to make and I need someone on whom I can depend to accompany me. Someone who is both strong and trustworthy. I would wish it to be you, but you must hear what it entails before you say yes or no. Max, can I come to you in London and talk this over with you?"

 He never hesitates in his response. His voice is firm. "If my strength and my heart can be put to your service, then you know that I will never falter. I will be as a faithful hound to watch you when you sleep and shadow your steps when danger lurks unseen."

"Oh, Max," I whisper back, suddenly so overwhelmed that the one person in the entire world who could serve as my protector has captured my heart already. "I will be in London in three days. If you say yes to what I will ask of you, we will embark together on a journey. I will ask much of you for we would need to go much further than when I met you in Finis Terrae."

"Command me and I shall be your loyal servant. Adventures beckon and my restless spirit yearns. Can you feel the rhythm of destiny like a pulse in your blood?"

Destiny pulses like blood.

When I hang up from Max, I enter my mother's inner sanctum. Our destinies are entwined, as soon our blood will be. It is my first real prophecy.