.

Brood of a New Age

50.

"And when I get to patrol with Broadway or Lex, we often threaten to eat their brains and laugh our tails off afterwards at how fast the bad guys can run."

"Iggghhhahhahahaha!" Graziella laughed, enthusiastically and at times grunting at his tale. She had seemed very down in the dumps again tonight, probably because of her grandma, Nashville thought, and he had tried hard to make his stories (which were now much more truthful) a little funnier anyway. Looking innocent, he continued.

"I'm surprised it always has such an effect. Especially because most never use their brains. They wouldn't even notice they were missing."

Graziella laughed out loud and her bright laughter made Nashville's ears twitch uncontrollably with joy that he had to put his hands over them in embarrassment.

The laughter immediately broke off and was replaced by a warm hand on his arm.

"Was I too loud?"

He shook his head. Graziella lowered her eyes with a smirk. He noticed her long, dark lashes and thought she was so beautiful even with the, now blue bruise on her temple. He noticed new things about her every time they met, about her looks and her character that charmed him.

"But ... but you do eat normal things?" she asked cautiously, and he hastened to confirm.

"Oh - yes. Absolutely! We can eat anything that humans eat. Our stomachs are very sturdy."

"Now that sounded like humans eat a lot of dirt."

"Don't they?"

She seemed to think about that for a moment.

Then Nash shrugged.

"But we can also eat things that make humans sick. Raw meat or fish or uncooked roots. At least that's what my dad says."

"That's what your dad ate? Was he somewhere on his travels where he had to do something like that." Nash nodded and watched Graziella's mouth tighten in pity. She probably thought of raw meat as a clean cutlet from the fresh meat section. Nash knew his girlfriend was more disgusted by the raw meat and fish-though what he had meant by his comment was that his dad had had to eat raw roots before, but Nash himself had never. Raw meat, however. Every Gargoyle knew what it tasted like. He had caught and eaten a rat just a short time ago. But he couldn't tell her something like that. Not because she was human or because she was a girl. But because she was Graziella, his only friend - and she had to stay his friend. She absolutely had to stay so. He was not a monster. The others were not monsters. But ... sometimes a gargoyle just had to hunt and eat fresh meat. At the thought of the rat's warm blood, his stomach growled loudly and he held his hand to his belly, surprised.

"E-excuse me."

"Are you hungry?"

He nodded hesitantly. He'd been in such a hurry to get away from the table today and do his nightly minimum of schoolwork that he'd eaten less than usual. The rat for dessert wasn't enough either. But he didn't want to leave now either to hunt for something or to go back to the castle to help himself from the refrigerator there.

But Graziella apparently wasn't about to let him go either. She jumped to her feet, pressed her little fists into her hips, and beamed at him.

"I'll get us something!" she said.

"What? What are you getting?"

"There's a Mac Donald's that way! I'll get us something there! I have money."

"Really?"

She fished the thin square wallet out of the neck of her hoodie. "Yeah. It's ... not good money so we'll spend it quick. Now I'm glad I have it and not just the credit card because the wives say in New York you're nothing without money. And if I ever got lost, I could have called a cab to take me home. But I don't get lost. Ever. I have a very good-what do you call it-senso dell'orientamento?"

"S- sense of direction?" asked Nash, and Graziella grinned even wider and snapped her fingers.

"Exactly! Come on."

Nashville was curious what Graziella meant by it not being good money. But the thought of eating some really fresh burgers - straight from a store - was too good so he waited until she had descended the fire escape and then sailed across the rooftops after the small goal-oriented shadow.

.

.

The nights during the week were sometimes soooo boring. That shouldn't happen in New York - but there were hours like that, as if the universe and 7 million people had agreed to take it easy now and then. Her bubble gum bubble popped loudly in the empty fast food restaurant. Lu gawked again like he wished he was the gum bubble himself and she would blow the air into him. She rolled her eyes in annoyance, which she thought looked phenomenal today because of a bunch of mascara and eyeliner. Only unfortunately, there was no one to appreciate it right now. Except this buffoon, who just pretended to clean one of the two grills, which was now already out of service, because during the week shortly before half past eleven it was not to be expected that many orders would be placed at once.

"Come on, Carla. Next Friday. The rave will be so killer," she heard behind her. The same question as twenty minutes ago. The same answer from her.

"No, Lu. Still not up for it. And even if I was, I'd go with Susie."

"Then bring her. Me and you both. Rave and then open end."

"Open End! Phaa. You ... don't get how it works with lesbians, do you?"

"No - I love lesbians. So. I know how it works."

"Just the fact that you keep trying shows me that you DON'T know. Give it up, Lu. I just want to get my night shift over with."

"Do you at least have a non-lesbian friend who would come?"

"That's exactly why the other girls don't want to work the night shift with you."

"The other girls like Concuella, who already has three kids, and Greta, who's about to retire? As if I'd hit on them."

"There! You admitted it."

"What?"

"Hitting on! Stop it. For real. "

"But we could-"

"Lu! Don't overdo it. The basket of fritters in the hot grease is temptingly within my grasp." She raised an index finger with a manicured nail. No one appreciated the effort of maintaining perfect nails when working in such a grease and crumbs joint.

The swinging door was pushed open, forbidding any further discussion from either side.

A small child came in and looked around as if she had never been here before. Which she probably hadn't been. At least not in any of Carla's shifts, because she would have remembered such a beautiful child.

Lu joined Carla behind the counter and looked down at the girl as she did. It was a girl- in the harsh light of the fast food restaurant, you could see her doll-like face and flowing hair that filled the hood of her hoodie with volume. How old might she be? Maybe eight. Or only slightly older. And that at eleven-thirty at night on a Monday. Lu and Carla looked at each other briefly. It wasn't that unusual for young children to come here at night. This was New York. Neglected or simply unsupervised children were not uncommon. Some parents were asocial assholes who didn't give a damn. Others just worked nights and couldn't pay attention. It wasn't until the girl was standing right by them, looking up at them somewhat at a loss, that Carla noticed the painful-looking bruise on her temple. A sight that made her heart tighten.

"What ... can I do for you, honey?"

"I want everything once," the girl said strangely confident and with an audible Italian accent.

Carla and Lu looked at each other.

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"You know we have a dozen dozen different dishes?" pointed out Lu.

The girl's wide eyes briefly skimmed the glowing cards above their heads without actually reading anything. Then she nodded.

"I'll bring everything because I don't know what's okay. I want every burger once and the biggest pack of chicken nuggets and two big bags of fries. No, four bags is better. And a large Coke twice."

"For who?" asked Lu cautiously.

"For... friends," the kid mumbled, glaring at Carla's co-worker as if to stare him down. And really, the wimp took a step back. Carla cleared her throat and showed her babysitter smile. She'd survived the Ramirez twins, who made the twin sisters from The Shining look like little angels - so she'd be fine with this.

"This is all going to be very expensive, though. How much money do you have, sweetie?"

The child narrowed her eyes at the term of endearment and now looked kind of venomous.

Then a strangely smug smirk stole onto her lips and, under Carla's and Lu's eyes, she pulled a bundle of bills out of the wallet hanging around her neck. There were a lot of crumpled small banknotes but also a fifty dollar bill.

"And if that's not enough, we'll use this," the child said generously, producing a plastic card from the wallet, standing on tiptoe and sliding it across the counter.

"There's enough money on there. Everything I said, once."

Lu took the card as if he couldn't already tell from a distance that it was a credit card. Carla didn't know if there would be trouble if they sold the kid what she wanted and then charged it to a credit card the girl had almost certainly stolen from her parents.

Carla was about to say something when she saw Lu's eyes grow as big as saucers. He gasped, grabbed Carla's arm so hard she wanted to smack him, and pulled her into the back of the kitchen. "Excuse us a second," he said to the child with a smile that was completely distraught and tense.

Pulled out of the girl's direct field of vision, Carla broke free of his grip.

"Are you crazy-," she wanted to start ranting but Lu shoved the credit card under her nose.

"Read the name," he whispered.

"What?"

"READ it," he ordered shrilly.

She plucked the card from his fingers and read:

"Graziella Dracon."

Carla raised her eyes, and she knew she had turned at least as pale in a second as he was now facing her.

"What do we do?" she asked quietly.

"We give her what she wants. I don't know if this is supposed to be a test or ... maybe the mobsters sent her to get all this."

"A little girl?"

"Who knows what's going on in their heads. And the bruise on her temple? What if not only us but the girl gets in trouble if she doesn't buy the stuff," Lu argued intelligently, making himself almost lovable to Carla (if she'd been into guys). "Let's not take any risks. Or do you want this place to blow up in our faces?"

"Should we give her the stuff ... for free?"

Lu thought for a moment. Then he shook his head. "The cash will do. Not to be traced."

"What if it's counterfeit money?"

"Do we have to care about that? We work at a fast food giant, they'll be able to handle a hundred dollars in counterfeit money, right?"

They both looked around the corner where the girl was now standing in front of the display case with the plastic Happy Meals figurines.

"These mobsters are disgusting. Little abused girls! Do you think she needs help?" asked Carla. But Lu's empathy didn't seem to win out over his instinct for self-preservation at that point."

"Never mind. Go ahead and get to work. Once each burger, twenty nuggets, four fries I think it was . And every copy of those stupid figurines. Just for good measure."

"Can already see Dracon's men playing with it."

"Let's hope so."

.

.

"Oh that was so good."

"Yes. I'm so stuffed!"

"I've never seen anyone eat SO much," Graziella said almost reverently, gradually shoving the empty burger paper and packets of fries into each other before they could be blown away by the warm sea breeze. She herself had only eaten one burger, one pack of fries, and a couple of chicken nuggets but as small and slender as she was, that was probably just fine for her.

"You don't know Broadway. That wasn't anything yet," Nashville admitted, rubbing his belly, which felt like there was an egg in there. Yet there were still a few burgers left. This was so different from raw pigeon or any other fresh meat. This was more like the opposite. So much industrially processed "food" that Nashville's taste buds were completely confused. It was sweet and very salty at the same time, sometimes had hardly any taste although minced meat or chicken should actually have taste and often only the sauces gave the thing its charm. But it was still delicious and for a change really warm.

The overeaten gargoyle boy stretched out on the cool metal and held his hand in front of his beak as he burped. Only then did he notice, befuddled by salt, sugar and carbohydrates, that yes, there was a girl with him and he looked to her in horror, "Sorry."

She grinned broadly, took her Coke, sucked on the straw until only air-slurping sounds could be heard from the paper cup. Then she slowly lowered the cup, looking like she was about to say something, but instead of sweet words, the Queen Mother of all burps came out of her mouth.

Nashville snapped his beak open and laughed so hard that his full stomach almost made him nauseous. His laughter probably echoed all the way to the Eyrie building.

"Damn! Respect. You're the boss," he declared, extending a ghetto fist toward Graziella like he'd seen human children do to each other.

"That's right. I'm the boss," she said proudly. Such a blissful feeling of happiness overcame him as she returned the gesture with a perky smile that it was absolutely comparable to touching him on the brow bone. But that was perhaps only his personal feeling at that moment. Whenever he thought he couldn't feel more comfortable with Graziella-. Whenever he thought he had said or done something that might cost him her respect or affection- she easily refuted it. How could such a delightful creature be such a buddy type with whom one could feel so content with oneself and the world?

"Was that the first time you ate something from Mac Donald's?"

"Nah. My uncles and I have plundered their garbage cans after closing time from time to time."

When she didn't reply, he turned his head and noticed her brow furrowed in pity. That was the downside of being TOO comfortable with someone. You kept blabbing things that were inappropriate.

He began to justify himself. "It ..., isn't as bad as it sounds. If it's not all sold by the end of the night, they throw away perfectly good burgers - sometimes by the dozen! In their wrappers. They don't even come in contact with the dirt. Really."

"Are you ... so ... are you poor?"

He straightened up again and let his foot claws click on the metal. "Graziella. It's not about money. We're gargoyles. We can't go to a store and buy food."

The girl lowered her head in embarrassment.

"Sorry. I forgot."

Forgot. Nashville grinned. "You forgot I was a gargoyle?"

"No... Just... that you can't show yourselves in front of humans without getting in trouble. I forgot that."

She had forgotten. Certainly not only that he couldn't walk around like her, but also what a different life form he was. He had no idea how that could have slipped her mind for even a second. Forgotten that he was a creature of the night. A creature, not only bound to darkness and shadow, but forced into it by external and internal circumstances. Hunted. Despised. Hated by almost the whole world without that this world knew even the slightest thing about him and his relatives. And she, on the other hand? Tanned skin - a being of light and sun. A child, a girl who was beautiful even to human eyes - next to an ugly thing who would be slain if she stepped even one inch into Times Square.

Nashville actually knew he wasn't ugly by Gargoyle standards. None of them were, and to his own eyes, none of them were. But he had had so much time to think in the last few months. About what he saw in this time and had seen in previous ones. And it was hard not to see the world through the eyes of humans. Not to see Gargoyles and himself through the eyes of the people when the hateful propaganda of the Quarrymen, the insulting insinuations of even ordinary citizens, and the cries of anguish from those they saved rose into the night sky and he sometimes wished he could crawl deep inside the walls that characterized his home and caged his soul. The adults didn't seem to be tormented by such thoughts because they had each other or knew better how to distract themselves and block out human opinions. Or maybe they just didn't show it to protect him as a child.

But he could not suppress the thought of how different Graziella and he were visually and that it was this stark contrast that would cause the most disgust in humans. Because the beautiful and pure could not be tainted by the essence of darkness and its dwellers. Because darkness and ugliness were probably contagious in people's minds. Like Beauty and the Beast, and Nash didn't even have his own castle with an enchanted interior to support it. On the contrary, he had to lie to the residents of his own castle because they wouldn't understand either. That a human child and a gargoyle hatchling wanted, could, had to be together like that at this time, because they somehow needed each other. If the beast in the film had not been enchanted, it would also have been killed by the angry villagers (or its own hunter). Nashville was not enchanted. Nothing would save him from the wrath of the people if push came to shove. That's why he couldn't forget it, no matter how much he wanted to. Not when he saw how people reacted to his family. Not when monster, demon, freak and so many other words that could break hearts and darken minds had been hurled at him. HE couldn't forget that a beak with a hundred fangs, ice-blue skin, horns and wings were considered ugly and freakish by humans - not real push-ups for self-esteem.

And here she sat, comfortable with him, forgetting all this. Graziella - his girlfriend, his secret, his beacon in the darkness. The only thing worth blowing off his skin for in the evening and giving his family a smile that wasn't meant for any of them. He put a hand to his beak in thought. Could he tell her? She already knew so much about him and his family. But there was nothing he longed for more than to tell Graziella about the circumstance that had dominated most of his life and might forever dominate his mind.

He was just going to take the plunge.

"At some point, it's going to change. Someday we'll be able to walk around among the humans without everyone getting scared."

"How do you know?"

"I know ... because I've seen it."

"How?"

"In ... the future."

Graziella blinked at him. "I don't understand."

"I told you about my parents' travels."

"Yes?"

"They were ... not just journeys from one country to another. They were also journeys ... through time. We were time travelers."

"Time travelers. How...?"

"Through magic. My dad had a ... thing that he could time travel with. Now he doesn't have it anymore. It disintegrated. That means it doesn't exist anymore. Hudson says maybe it just reached the end of ... its lifespan. It's hard to explain. But we've been to a lot of different times. And in the future, too."

Graziella looked at him with a strange expression. That's the look of someone who's just come to the conclusion that you're completely deranged and who's going to terminate your friendship, Nashville thought with burgeoning panic. But then the human child brought her knees up to her torso and rested her head on them.

"How was it? The future?" she asked as earnestly as if she were asking about the last trip to the zoo. Nashville had that urgent feeling again to kiss her. To give her a grown-up kiss. But he pulled himself together, twirling one of the cheap plastic figurines that had been in one of the bags between his fingers as he spoke.

"The future. It was ... it's hard to describe. Some things were better. Less pollution. And Gargoyles and humans lived side by side, with each other, in many places. It wasn't always peaceful. But mostly ... it was okay. Better than here currently. But other things were worse. I can't talk about that."

"Why not?"

"Because...it's so hard to explain. Every word I say could change the future. Just me telling you about it could change the future. Or not just because I told you now. That's the funny thing about time travel."

"I don't get it."

"Neither do I. So exactly. Actually, I'm just repeating what the grown-ups keep telling me."

"You're really not lying to me?"

"I would never lie to you, Graziella."

"You swear?"

"I swear on my clan."

Graziella put a hand on his arm and her smile made all the lights of the city fade. His sparrow. His light.

"When that future comes ... we'll go to a real restaurant together. You and me," she whispered before resting her head on his shoulder. "But now ... and here ... it's beautiful here."

"Yes. Beautiful," Nash whispered, not knowing why his heart felt so wide and yet tight.

He didn't know how he came up with it but he had the impression all at once that a somber veil was settling over the human child beside him again. It wasn't like the ... Premonitions he sometimes had in his dreams. It was dim and indeterminate. A skulking little being of unpleasant sensation, not an onrushing monster that sank its long teeth into his mind and made him twitch and spew frothy drool like a seizure.

"Nashville?"

"Yes?"

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure. Of course. Anything Graziella."

"Why are you and your family here?"

He turned his head to look at her the moment she lifted her head as well. She bit down on her lower lip and continued to stare out at the fantastically lit Manhattan. The mingled glow of thousands of lights bringing to her actually tanned face and her flowing curls a honey-colored vivid glow. But her eyes. Her look even from the side so sad.

"Why do you live in New York if you're in constant danger here?" she concretized quietly and anxiously a moment before he could have reacted perturbed and impulsively to her seemingly hostile first words. Now, however, he was able to lower his head again. He also looked again at the adopted home of his clan. He had been able to carry her easily up here to one of the towers of the Wards Island footbridge. Although there were still numerous pedestrians and bicyclists on the route, it didn't bother them up here. The lights of the orange illumination did not reach up here, the middle part was a vertical lift bridge but Nash had never been able to see this function because at night on the Harlem River no such large ships drove. Not here, at least.

"You're worried about us," he noted quietly, and his eyes met his girlfriend's as she turned her head.

"I don't know the others. I'm worried about you."

Nashville covered his joy and embarrassment at her words with a smile. Something that had to look so disgusting but from which Graziella now already didn't flinch.

"You don't have to worry about me. No Quarrymen will catch me."

"Do you know this because of your time travels?" she asked quietly and he nodded hesitantly. No one had ever spoken of HIS time travels with reference to the Timedancer adventures. It was always Brooklyn's time travels. His mom helpful asistance, him just...dead weight. But Graziella was a kid - like him. And his adventures were the ones that interested her. He could tell things from his point of view and there was no one to even suggest that they'd rather talk to an adult after all. That made him feel important. And heard. For the first time. He knew he wasn't allowed to talk to anyone- no one, really- about what had happened. Snippets of the past- maybe a little of that. But never the future.

"You can trust me when I say that no Quarrymen will get me. No human will kill me. I will live for a very long time," he said, not knowing himself if that was true. According to Lexington's theories, there were thousands of future versions from which thousands of versions split off. Multiverse - such a strange word for a concept he couldn't even begin to grasp. Not excluded that he died in some versions. Just because the one he and his parents had visited was the one that was directly "straight ahead" didn't mean it became reality. It just meant ... that this one was a little more likely ... perhaps. As if the child seemed to sense that he would not be able to talk about any specific adventure of time and space jumps tonight, she didn't probe further either. Only one last question did she have.

"What was the best time?"

Nashville chuckled softly and turned off the alarm that had just indicated he had to return to his life without Graziella for another two nights.

"That's easy," he then commented. "This time. Because you're here. I'll even put up with the stupid Quarrymen for that."

She looked at him open-mouthed for a moment. Then she seemed uncharacteristically abashed and turned away while she pulled the hood of her hoodie back over her head and set about taming her flowing hair and pushing it under the fabric. He stood up, stretched, and welcomed the fact that Graziella was pulling herself up by his clothes, so that she really wasn't in danger of being knocked off balance by the wind on the small iron platform of the bridge tower.

Nashville- like most gargoyles could - smelled that rain was in the air. Maybe not tonight but during the day and maybe tomorrow night. A heavy summer thunderstorm that would clear the hot air but would make it muggy. Not that gargoyles sweated excessively.

As she put her arms around his neck and he took her in his arms, he whispered in her little human ear.

"If it rains the day after tomorrow, we won't meet. I don't want you to get sick," he said, feeling like a good protector as Graziella - perhaps still too girlishly bashful about his honest, previous words - only nodded. He would protect her from anything, even if it was just a cold. Gripping the bags of leftover burgers and trash with his tail, he launched himself into the air.

.

.

The homeless man startled out of his half-sleep with a grunt as a bag landed in his lap.

"What the hell," he grumbled, rubbing one eye and looking around. He didn't see the asshole who had thrown the bag at him, but he hadn't thought anyone would bother him in this dark corner of Central Park. He didn't even hear anyone running away, just the rustling of the wind in the trees.

"Damn New Yorkers," he muttered, even though he himself had lived here for fifteen years, albeit without a residence. He realized that there was something in the bag, straightened up so that the glow of the next park light fell on him and tore the bag open in the unlikely but in New York not entirely absurd fear of grasping into a mousetrap, dog shit or anything else when he reached into the bag. But instead of something bad, three wrapped burgers from Mac Donalds rolled into his lap.

Still suspicious, he unwrapped one and looked at it with eyes narrowed in the semi-darkness. Until he came to the conclusion that the burger , though cold, looked absolutely fine and bit into it with relish.

.

.

At dinner around four in the morning- during which he was, of course, absolutely not hungry and mainly poking around in his food- Nashville was deep in thought.

Yes, he had been in a version of the future.

Yet ... Graziella had not appeared in that future. Of course, he hadn't looked for traces of her either, but she probably hadn't played a role in influencing anything in that future in 1997. This could be due to several reasons. Either because Graziella had really been (or would be) only a brief acquaintance - something he didn't want to think about. Or because she had died before she could leave any traces -something he forbade himself to think about even more. It was bad enough that he was constantly afraid for Lex. With Graziella, that diffuse fear would be all the more debilitating to him with each passing day. But most likely was, that Graziella had lived long and uneventfully, and her life had never collided with any future dramas that would go down in the history of the Zulu future he had experienced. That was the most likely cause-one he could live with. One he even welcomed because it allowed him to tell more (even about the future) than he had ever allowed himself before.

But she still seemed unhappy with his assurance that nothing would happen to him- probably because she was just a kid who didn't know how time travel worked. Heck, most adults didn't get it and there were probably rules- physical and logical- that even Brooklyn, Katana and Lexington hadn't figured out yet.

He pondered whether there might be another reason why he hadn't heard of Graziella in the future. For sure it was because she just hadn't been important enough. But what ... if she had been important in some other way? What if she was, what Lexington had called a divergence in a conversation with his dad that he had overheard once? His eighth grade math book (too advanced for him but he had been looking specifically for that word) described a divergence of number lines as a spreading out to infinity. Something of which he had no concept in his head and which left him confused just like the similarly sounding multiverse theory which, however, referred to the splitting off of a new future lying behind a divergence.

The lexicons in Xanatos' library described divergence as a breaking point. Similar words were deviation, dissonance, incongruity. What if Graziella-his little girlfriend in the summer of 1997-was a divergence? A stone that had plopped into the time stream of this time plane, causing ripples and swirls that caused the whole future to change? But in which direction? Better or worse? Was she the flap of a butterfly's wings that could cause a storm? Was that perhaps each of them - with each decision?

But Lexington had talked shop about it. Much too complicated for him as always when his clever uncle lost himself in theories, but he had still tried to listen. Living divergences did not get divergences because their lives had been dull and harmless. They got divergences because they experienced things that were so far-reaching in the world and the respective time stream that they split off a new future. But would these things be good? Or in the worst case dangerous? Didn't Nashville want the future he had seen - with the horrible visions of Hudson's death and Lexington's mangled tinny body and his murderous madness - to change as much as possible? But at what cost? If she was a divergence-would she have to suffer just because she knew him? He wished SO much that at that moment the Phoenix Gate could take him on a trip into the future and tell him what would happen to her. If she was safe. Or if they were still friends. Or more. And if not, how he could turn things around so that everything remained at least as wonderful as it was now. But even if he jumped 50 years into the future with a snap of his fingers, how would he know which future it was and how it had come to be?

Nashville grabbed his aching head with a groan and instantly had all the adults' eyes on him. They anxiously inquired what was wrong with him.

"I'm okay," he lied unhappily. "I'm just thinking. About the past and the future," he said uncertainly, yearning and dreading the coming stone sleep because he had such a strange feeling. He loved Hudson like his grandfather but at that point he longed especially for Aurelio. The ancient, pale yellow gargoyle of the future had always been so good to him, and Nashville had felt like he could never do or say anything wrong with him. And though his voice had always been so creaky and age-worn, his old ballads had more than once lulled him into a peaceful night's sleep, the kind very young gargoyles needed.

A very long chapter with several perspectives and a lot of shop talk about Nashville's own view on himself and on time streams. Not definite and ultimate- but very exhausting for Nashville, me and you readers. Note the talk about divergences and time streams- that will be important in the end and even more so in 25 years on Souls of the Night ^^.

Thanks for reading, Q.T.