I save him by becoming something that can’t be saved.
“Kaelren,” I whisper, his name carrying through every thread of time. “The bond won’t break. It never could.”
He reaches for me, his hands passing through my fading shape. I see the moment his heart shatters—the way his face folds under the weight of it, the way our bond screams with the sound of his refusal, the way he keeps reaching anyway.
“I love you,” I tell him, the words vibrating through all seventeen versions of us. “Find me in the spaces between seconds. I’ll be there—in every life we never got to live.”
And then I let go.
39
Kaelren
She was gone.
Not dead—I would have felt that through the bond, would have known the moment her heart stopped. No, Elle was something worse than dead. She existed in every heartbeat that ever was—and none I could reach.
I couldn’t fuckingreachher.
My hands clawed through empty air where she’d been standing, grasping at nothing. The bond between us hadn’t broken—that would have been cleaner, kinder. Instead, it drew taut across impossible distances—acrosstime itself, and the sensation was like having my chest torn open while my heart kept beating.
“Elle!” Her name ripped from my throat, raw and desperate. “ELLE!”
Nothing. Just echoes in a chamber that had finally stopped screaming.
I spun, searching, as if she might be hiding somewhere, might materialize from shadow or light or pure fucking hope. But there was only aftermath. Bodies sprawled across blood-slicked stone. The apparatus where Auradelle had become something twisted and wooden, his face frozen in eternal horror, roots growing through what used to be flesh. Rebels and guards alike, some standing in shock, some collapsed in exhaustion or grief.
And nowhere—no flicker, no breath—was Elle.
“Bring her back,” I snarled at the universe, at the Bloom fragments drifting like dying stars, at reality itself. My corruption flared—frostskittered in jagged patterns across the stone. “BRING HER BACK!”
“Kaelren—” Peeble’s voice, small and careful.
“Youknew.” I rounded on them, and the beetle flinched back from whatever they saw in my face. “You knew this would happen. You knew what the seed would do.”
“I knew it was the only way to break the pattern—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the pattern!” The words came out as a roar. My corruption surged, and the nearest pillar began to crack, ice spreading through ancient stone. My marks may not be as prominent, but that didn’t mute my level of power. “She’sgone. You said she’d transform, that she’d become something new, not that she’d—I’d—”
I couldn’t finish. The horror didn’t need words.
The chamber exhaled.
That’s the only way to describe it—like the Heartspire itself had been holding its breath and finally released it. The convulsions stopped. Reality settled into something new—not stable, but no longer trying to tear itself apart.
The Bloom—that massive, ancient apparatus that had controlled Wynmire for centuries—shattered into thousands of lights that drifted upward like seeds on an impossible wind. Each one pulsed with its own rhythm, its own color, its own possibility. They drifted out like broken constellations, finding soil in settlements and groves and wild places.
I watched them go and felt nothing. Neither victory nor freedom. Everything Elle had sacrificed herself for.
And I’d trade every fragment, every freed bloom, every ‘better future’ to have her back. Solid. Real.Here.
“What the fuck just happened?” Sarnyx demanded, her voice shaking despite her attempt at composure. Blood dripped from a gash on her cheek. “Where’s Elle?”
“She stepped out—out of the loop, out of time itself,” I said, and my voice sounded dead even to my own ears.
“What does thatmean?” Mora pushed forward, her face streaked with tears and blood. “Kaelren, what does that mean? Can we get her back?”
I looked down at my hands. The black marks… spreading like rot through my flesh—were fading. Not gone entirely, but receding like a tide going out. What had been solid corruption was now just shadow, manageable darkness instead of killing rot.
