Solid ground rushed up to meet him, too quick—
Pain lanced through his wrist, then his head, as he collided.
“Baz.BAZ!”
He opened his eyes to a blurry Kai hovering over him. “Thank the fucking Tides.”
Baz blinked. His vision remained blurry. Or maybe that was his glasses, all wet and askew. He lifted his hand to right them and winced. His wrist was leaden with pain, and his head—
“Easy,” Kai said as Baz tried to push himself up. “You landed pretty hard.”
“Where are we?” Baz managed. He was sopping wet and on solid ground, that much he could tell.
“Take a wild guess.”
Baz ventured a look as his vision slowly focused. They were in yetanothercave, this one utterly familiar. “The Belly of the Beast,” he breathed.
Clover and Luce stood at the base of the Hourglass, staring at it with parted lips. Luce seemed to be limping, and Clover’s cheek was scraped, but otherwise, they seemed fine. So did Kai, with only a scratch on his chin, from what Baz could tell.
And the Hourglass stood in the middle of the cave as it always had, pulsing with power.
Before Baz could make sense of how they’d gotten here, the cave shook as chunks of rock fell from above. He glanced up. There on the cave ceiling was a mirage-like reflection of water,as though they were looking up from the bottom of the Treasury’s pool. There was no way to reach it from this distance. No wonder the fall had been so brutal.
It was only then that Baz noticed the cracks that ran like veins along the ceiling, emanating from the magicked pool bottom, and growing rapidly. They spanned all the way to the far end of the cave, where it should have opened onto the rest of Dovermere’s tunnels. There was only a wall of solid rock there, the same wall Baz and Kai had come up against when they’d tried getting back to the door after first arriving in this time.
The fissures in the wallgroaned.
And burst.
The tide rushed in, the cave wall shattering beneath the full, raging force of the Aldersea. Baz flung his magic toward the tide, freezing the waves before they could reach them. But he wasn’t quick enough to stop the growing cracks or the rocks that fell onto the Hourglass.
Baz had an unsettling sense of déjà vu as the Hourglasssplit, the stalactite that formed the upper part of it crumbling at the foot of the dais. The stalagmite still stood, though the spiral etched on its surface was cracked.
The door was broken. Their only way out of here, and it was gone.
Baz grasped at the threads of time around the door, thread by flimsy thread. They were all over the place, scattered and cut to pieces and lying in shambles, as if the door’s brokenness had disrupted the very fabric of time itself. Baz couldn’t fix it—did not know how, not with all his focus and power fighting to hold back the sea. The magic of Dovermere did not speak to him as it once did because it was notthere; it was broken just like the door itself.
“You can do this, Brysden,” Kai said at his side, a tethering presence, steady as he’d always been.
Baz tried to breathe. He forgot how it was supposed to go.
In. Hold. Out.
Like the rhythm of the sea, the slow breathing of the tide. Ebb and flow. A cycle so continuous it could never be broken.
Something sparked in his mind. Grabbing hold of a single thread—the biggest he could find, the one fragment of time and magic that was still somewhat intact—Baz took a deep inhale. As he breathed in, he called the other threads of time toward him. And they answered. When he exhaled, they wove themselves back together.
Again and again he breathed threads in and breathed time out, until he held in his hand the very life force of what used to be or would become again the door, this thing that was made up of time itself. His skin tingled with warmth. Power that felt at once vast and familiar coursed through his veins. He was the Timespinner, and here he was spinning time, unspooling and weaving until he had remade the very fabric of time around him.
Perhaps it would have been a more fitting metaphor to call him the lungs…
The Hourglass righted itself, its scattered pieces mending back together. Baz kept breathing, pushing back on the tide and pulling on time. Push pull. In out. It seemed to be working, but his power was not limitless, despite him being Collapsed. He felt it leaving him in a way that made him certain he was giving up a part of himself he would never see again. The magic left his veins to seep into the stalactite and stalagmite, the veins of power in the rock, the silver in the Hourglass.
This exchange of power only seemed to amplify the pain in his wrist, on his head. He fell to his knees, grinding his teeth against the agony of his body.
He was vaguely aware of Kai’s bracing hand around his elbow, of him calling out his name, of the edge of concern in that midnight voice of his.I’m all right, Baz tried to say, and perhaps hedid say it. But it was a lie he was telling himself, because he knew there was no avoiding this.
With his magic, the Hourglass was reborn. It felt, strangely, like this was what Baz had been destined for.
