For every choice that we make, there is a world where the opposite happened. Those worlds are guarded by an ancient family known as the Rikers. They were chosen to watch over those worlds and keep the balance in time. When an old version of Earth begins to fall into chaos, one brother comes face to face with his own version of chaos. To find an old lover who left him broken and confused is Atticus’ next mission. The order had been given by the other Rikers’ but Atticus was never really close to the Rikers anyway. In the end, Atticus will have to face the Rikers if he wants his freedom and his man.
Insanity is the disease that runs through the veins of the famous Riker family. Well along with a few other things such as craziness, arrogance, stubbornness, and the inability to die no matter what injury is received. Oh the Riker family was famous for their odd and multiple injuries they had acquired. This provided the family with many stories to be told and unfortunately, it also allowed people a great way to be identified. Later, the scar that was on the family’s heart, Mister Callum Riker, but at that moment, it would be used in an argument.
“How dare you use Callum against me,” a man as old as the United States’ itself, with the appearance of a man in his early thirties, snapped at his own daughter. Serena rolled her eyes that were the color of the moon itself.
“How dare you send my brother away without telling me where to,” she hissed at her father. If someone had seen this moment, they would never believe it. Believe a young woman barely at the age of twenty, with hair the color of night and a body that had little curves even in the desired places, was having a yelling battle with a man that had a body women felt weak at the knees when in his presence. No one would believe they were father and daughter since all they have in common was their olive tone skin and the same last name.
Eyes locked in a deep connection. “What makes you think that I would ever send my own son away to god knows where?”
A look that held the power to kill burned into the man. “My brother would not just run off. He lived for the mission, for our family, for you. He went everywhere you sent him to work. He...”
“You don’t know anything about your brother and you clearly don’t know why for the past three years he has never returned home.” Those words cut into Serena like a knife. To hear that one would not know their own twin had been a truly terrible thing to hear. They had grown up together, learned their powers together, and more than once they had worked together taking down a rat demon that wanted to mess with the portal. They had a close relationship, or so she hoped.
“Then tell me.” A hiss that didn’t seem possible to come from a human echoed through the room.
* * * *
As Mr. Christopher Riker walked toward the one room in his home that held a lock, he tried not to remember the moment not long ago when his son stormed down this hall and dove into the portal before his own eyes. Nothing had changed since that moment except the door was not locked tight by a key he always had on him. When the door opened, Christopher felt a sharp pain as he always did inside this room. The walls were covered with a large bookshelf from the floor to the ceiling. In the middle of the room was a large pool of glowing blue water, it was the portal of Riker.
“Every choice we make has an effect on the world. Every single person with every single choice makes a new world, a new life. More worlds then we could even imagine exist. The Riker family was given the honor to live an eternal life protecting the portal, the worlds, and the balance. We have the right to live in any world we choose as its protector from outside threats and to keep people from learning of the other worlds. Your brother was always the calmer one of you two. The task to watch over the other worlds never bothered him. He always was unaffected by it. Once there was a month he didn’t return, so I sent your brother Adam to go get him.” Looking into the blue glow of the portal that he had spent all he had to protect—Christopher traced his finger over the soft water. The eyes of the man had never looked so distant.
“As a Riker, I have lost many friends over my life time even your mother was lost to me. While there was pain and tears shed, nothing can compare to the feeling of losing a child especially when it is your own fault. Callum said he wanted to protect that world that wasn’t an issue with me. I always knew one day each of you would leave to become protectors of a world.”
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