“But that’s not the worst part,” she continued, her voice steady despite the tremor I could feel through our bond. “The worst part is what he told me. About why he’s doing this. About the iterations.”
“Iterations?”
“Sixteen of them.” She looked up at me, and her eyes held knowledge that shouldn’t be there—ancient, terrible knowledge. “Sixteen times this story has played out. Sixteen times I’ve come to Wynmire. Sixteen times you’ve tried to save me. Sixteen times we’ve failed, and the cycle resets. Now we are at the end of the seventeenth wondering if we will make the same mistakes again.”
The words hit me like physical blows. “What are you talking about?”
“Auradelle told me.” Her hands fisted in my shirt. “About other timelines. I’ve died sixteen different ways, Kaelren. I saw you become a monster trying to save me, over and over. I saw us fail every single time.”
“That’s not possible—”
“Isn’t it?” She pulled back enough to look at me fully. “Think about it. Think about the things that don’t make sense. The way Eltrien talks aboutpatterns and wheels. The way he always seems to know what’s coming next. The way he mentioned me dying in iteration fifteen before and then tried to cover it.”
My mind was racing, corruption spreading faster as pieces clicked into place with sickening clarity.
“On the way to the monastery,” I said slowly. “I thought he was being cryptic, being Eltrien, but—”
“He knows.” Elle’s voice was certain. “He’s been carrying this knowledge the whole time. Watching us repeat the same mistakes, following the same pattern, failing the same way. And he never told us.”
The garden around us was dying rapidly now, my rage destroying everything my corruption touched. “How long has he known?”
“I don’t know. But Auradelle talked about being able to remember across iterations now that he’s done the research. I wonder if Eltrien is the same. Like he’s been watching this play out over and over, and he’s just been waiting to see if this time would be different.”
“Different how?”
“Me.” She touched my face, forcing me to focus on her instead of the fury building in my chest. “I’m different this time. The pattern is ‘woman arrives, falls for you, has to choose between saving you or saving the realms, chooses wrong, everyone dies, reset.’ But this time, I know about the pattern. I know what Auradelle’s planning. I know there have been sixteen other Elles who stood where I’m standing, and they all failed.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means we can break it.” Her voice held desperate determination. “If we know the pattern, we can change it. We can choose differently. We can—”
“We can’t do anything if you don’t survive the next session,” I interrupted, my hands tightening on her shoulders. “Elle, you’re asking me to leave you in hell for another day while that bastard breaks you down further, and now you’re telling me this has all happened before? That there are sixteen dead versions of you because we keep failing?”
“Yes.” Her voice didn’t waver. “But charging in blind is exactly whatyou’ve done in every other iteration. You storm the Heartspire, corrupted beyond recognition, so focused on saving me that you walk right into his trap. And it never works. It never has.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he told me.” She swallowed hard. “He wanted me to know. Wanted me to understand that resistance is futile, that the pattern always wins, that I’m just another Elle in a long line of Elles. He thought it would break me. Make me accept my role.”
“Did it?”
“No.” Her smile was fierce and defiant. “It pissed me off. Because if there have been sixteen iterations where I failed, that means I get to be the seventeenth one who doesn’t. The one who breaks the fucking wheel instead of being crushed by it.”
I stared at her—this impossible woman who’d crashed into my world and refused to accept any ending that wasn’t her own. Even now, even tortured and trapped and told she was doomed to fail, she was fighting.
“I’ve seen it.”
That halted all my thoughts. “What have you seen, Elle?”
“Other versions of us. When he tortured me and tested me against the Bloom it brought visions of some of the cycles before.”
“Show me,” I said suddenly. “Let me see these other iterations.”
She hesitated, fear spiking through the bond. Not fear of showing me, but fear of reliving it.
“I need to understand,” I said more gently. “If we’re going to break the pattern, I need to know everything.”
She nodded. The garden shifted, reality bending, and suddenly I was experiencing her memory.
