Vi sighed and closed her eyes, thinking back to her interaction with the goddess. She remembered pain, then life, then Queen Lumeria—who hadn’t actually been Queen Lumeria, but Yargen masquerading as the sovereign.
“She told me… That she was restarting the world,” Vi paraphrased. “Returning me to a time before her power had been turned against itself, and destroyed.”
“Exactly. You know what time you’re in, yes?”
“Norin fell in three hundred twenty-two.” Vi raised a hand to her forehead and shook her head. “Just saying that aloud is madness.”
“Yet you know it to be true. You can feel it in your marrow, just as you can feel Yargen’s power. This will all be easier if you don’t try to fight the truths before you.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t feel,” Vi snapped. She was a rope fraying at all sides. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be curt,” Vi said hastily. “It’s a lot to process is all. I was just thrown back in time and now I’m talking with someone akin to a ghost. Not to say I’m not happy to see you, but…” She trailed off in the wake of Taavin’s tired smile.
“I understand. You’re not alone in feeling jarred by all this. From my perspective, I just died for the ninety-third time and it gets no easier.”
“Ninety… third?” Vi repeated. He seemed determined to look anywhere but at her.
“This point in time is the furthest at which Yargen can remake the world with the limited power she had,” he continued, determined to ignore her probing stare. “So it is where our work must begin. Your job is twofold. Foremost, your goal is to ensure the birth of a new Champion and another attempt, should you fail. While doing so, you must collect the crystal weapons in order to consolidate Yargen’s power once more and prevent Raspian from ever being set free.”
“So I am to change the past?”
“There is no past—not the past you knew, at least,” he said gravely. “The only time that exists is the one in which Yargen exists. The world you and I knew, the world we were born into, is no more. She lives in this world now, in you.”
“But this world exists along the same lines of fate… so it appears identical,” Vi said, remembering more of what the goddess had told her. She sank heavily onto the bed behind her. “My mother, father, brother?”
“They do not exist, yet.” He was silent for a long moment, then added softly and apologetically, “And the Aldrik, Vhalla, and Romulin who will exist, will not be the ones you knew.”
She looked down at her hands. They were trembling again. Her whole body shook. Vi felt painfully cold, like no matter what she did, she’d never be able to warm up again. “I wanted to save them.”
“Preventing the Crystal Caverns from being tampered with is how you will save them.”
“No, the family I loved is gone—you just said so.” Vi tilted her head up to the man as if pleading with him could change the terrible fate she found herself in. “The world was in danger, so I did everything I was told; I did everything to stop it from ending. I did it all to save my family.”
“And this is how we will stop it so your family is never in danger again.”
“The world—my family—merely ended at the hands of a different tyrant!” Vi was on her feet again, pacing. Her magic crackled, stronger than ever before, ready to collect in her palms and burn the whole broken world and all its pieces. “Raspian didn’t end the world, so Yargen did? So we could try to fix a new version of it? How does that make any sense?”
“The timeline we were on was a failed future. It made sense to abandon it.”
“The timeline.” Her hands shook harder. “Don’t call it a ‘timeline’ as though it’s just dates and facts in a book. There werepeople, Taavin. Hundreds of thousands of people. A whole world of them. My family was in that world… and they’re all gone now.” Vi didn’t remember approaching him, but her fists knotted in the simple tunic he wore—the same garment he’d had on when she’d found him in his room that fateful night. A night that might as well have been a thousand years ago. “Yargen killed them all.”
“Yargen is life. Vi, don’t think of it as them dying.” His hands wrapped around hers again. His tone was soothing. “As it stands now, they never existed in the first place. But fate can see them born again in this world—a world you will save. You saw it yourself, the end of the world.”
For a brief second, her eyes were as haunted as his, as visions of her falling before a dark god flashed across her mind.
“If we had remained in that world, Vi,” he continued, “the cycle of light and dark would’ve ended. Raspian and Yargen would’ve battled again. But since she was weak and didn’t have all her power, he would’ve killed her for good. There would’ve been no eventual return of the goddess, no great war, no subsequent age of light. Darkness and death would’ve ruled forever. It was the end.”
“You’re saying no matter what… the life of everyone in that world was forfeit? Every beautiful, hidden corner, every person, all would’ve been destroyed?” Her voice quivered alongside her hands. She had been born into a dying world and she was the only person to survive it.
Vi felt profoundly unworthy of each breath she took.
“Yes.”
“I thought, as Champion, I could save it. Save… them.”
“You were chosen for this world, where you stand now. It was the last Vi’s failure that doomed the world you knew.” A ghost drifted around his words, one that seemed to cloud his vision whenever his eyes settled on her.
Ninety-three times. His earlier words stuck in her mind.
“How many times have we had this conversation?” Vi whispered.
