She’d taken it with her. Pulled it through our bond when she dispersed, distributed it across every moment she now inhabited. Diffused through time, what would’ve killed me in days thinned to nothing.
Saved me by destroying herself.
“Your corruption,” Bryx said, his compound eyes widening as he noticed. “It’s—”
“She pulled it through the tether and took the worst of it.” The words came out broken, and I hated how weak they sounded. Hated that she’d saved me when I should have been saving her.
The bond between usached. Not pain, exactly. Something worse. Like a missing limb—only it was half my soul. I could feel her presence, scattered and distant, existing in a thousand moments at once, but none of themnow. None of them reachable.
I tried to follow her through the bond. Reached out with everything I had, trying to find her in the spaces between seconds. For a moment, I began to untether—slipping sideways out of linear time—
Strong hands grabbed my shoulders. Thrak, shaking me hard enough to rattle teeth.
“Don’t,” he said firmly. “Whatever you’re trying to do,don’t. You’ll scatter yourself too, and then she’ll have no anchor to find her way home.”
“I need to—”
“You need to stay here. In this moment. In this time.” His scarred face was grim. “She needs you to be her lighthouse, remember? Can’t guide someone home if you’re lost too.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to fight him, to scatter myself across eternity if it meant finding her. But he was right. Some part of me that wasn’t drowning in grief knew he was right.
I stopped reaching, and the loss hit twice as hard.
Something in me cracked—breaking would’ve been cleaner. This wasworse. Like a fault line opening in bedrock, like the fundamental structure of who I was was developing fissures I’d never be able to repair.
My knees hit stone. The impact should have hurt, but I felt nothing except the absence of her.
“Kaelren?” Sarnyx’s voice, worried now.
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t do anything except kneel there in the blood and debris and victory we’d paid too much for, feeling Elle scattered across every moment while I remained trapped in just one.
The tether frayed, sang, refused to snap.
Through it, I felt echoes. Fragments. Elle split across seventeen presents at once. Elle learning things that unraveled the mind. Elle fighting to hold onto who she was while becoming something that existed outside definition.
And underneath it all: pain. Hers, mine, ours—impossible to separate anymore.
“She’s not gone,” I said, and didn’t know if I was trying to convince them or myself. “She can’t be gone. The bond—it’s still there. Stretched across time, butthere.”
“She’s in temporal flux—everywhere, learning, becoming,” Eltrien said quietly. He looked different—clearer, somehow, like Elle’s dispersal had awakened something he’d been suppressing.
“Can we get her back?” The question tore from me.
“Maybe. Probably.” Eltrien met my eyes, and I saw genuine uncertainty there. “But not now. Not yet. She needs time—though time doesn’t mean the same thing for her anymore—to navigate what she’s become. To learn what she needs to learn about the pattern before she can find her way back to a single moment.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer made my remaining corruption flare. The floor beneath me frosted over, spreading outward in patterns that looked like reaching fingers, like desperate hands trying to grasp something that wasn’t there.
“Kaelren—” Sarnyx started.
“HOW LONG?” I roared at Eltrien, and ice crept up the nearest wall,crystals forming in violent patterns.
“I don’t know,” he repeated calmly. “Years. Decades. Centuries. Or she might figure it out tomorrow. Time doesn’t work the same for her anymore. She’s experiencing every possible moment simultaneously while trying to navigate back to one specificnow.”
“That’s not an answer.”
