So maybe she did have power over him after all.
Sidraeus met Emory’s gaze as she twisted the dagger deeper into her gut. It hurt like hell, and she wanted so desperately to stop, to wrench the blade out and heal the pain away. But she held his gaze with a stony face, hoping he understood what this meant: that she wasn’t above hurting herself if it meant keeping him from killing her best friend.
That he was at her mercy.
“Emory,” he gritted out. “What she means to do is inconceivable.”
“I don’t care,” she said with difficulty, shooting his own words back at him. Speaking brought tears to her eyes, made her breath shallow, the pain in her middle unbearable. Her fingers trembled around the blade, but she didn’t falter. “If there’s a chance Romie’s still in there, I can’t let you hurt her.”
“Listen to your pet, Sidraeus,” Atheia crooned. “I’ll even play nice and letyoulive, for now, if only for the satisfaction of knowing you’ll see me purge what you’ve created out of this world.” She brought Romie’s hand up to her face and contemplated the Waning Moon tattoo on the back of it, tracing it lovingly. “I think I’ll start where it all began,” she added as if speaking to herself.
It was at this very moment that Vivyan and Ivayne landed on the plateau the fountain was built on, their draconic wings unfurled and beating wildly. They were carrying Virgil, Nisha, and Vera—having picked them up, Emory supposed, to avoid the avalanche of ash—and set the three of them down now on shaky legs.
“Romie!” A thousand different emotions danced on Nisha’s face. The lines of her body went slack in relief as she lurched toward Romie.
“Don’t!” Emory wheezed in warning.
But Nisha had already stopped short, the smile slipping from her face the second those kaleidoscope eyes met hers, and she realized this wasn’t Romie at all.
With that unnerving smile, Atheia vanished—dissolving into a great swirl of shimmering air that gusted out of the sea of ash quicker than Emory could make sense of. Sidraeus raged, moving as if to follow her, but stopped as Emory gave another twist of the dagger.
Only when Atheia had fully disappeared and Sidraeus was on his knees looking defeated did Emory pull the dagger out of her stomach. She fell to her own knees, blood spilling in the ash. Dizziness threatened to pull her under, but she stayed lucid enough to call on her healing magic, tending to her wound until the pain subsided to a faint numbness.
Distantly she was aware of Virgil and Vera fussing over her, asking if she was all right. Of Vivyan and Ivayne holding their swords a breath from Sidraeus’s neck. Of Nisha staring, aghast, at the spot Romie had vanished. But Emory tuned them all out, her eyes glued to the three bodies lying in the fountain bed, almost entirely buried beneath the ash.
Aspen and Tol and Orfeyi, the three keys whose lives had ended for Atheia to live. Emory hadn’t wanted to look at them before, but she forced herself to do so now. She sent a wave of healing toward them, desperate to find a trace of life, something to fix.
But they were dead.
And as what little could be seen of their faces disappeared beneath the ash, Emory wept.
13BAZ
IT ALWAYS STARTED OUT THEsame way: Baz standing on Dovermere Cove, watching his past self heading to Cadence with Kai, before making his way up to the Eclipse commons.
It always ended the same, too: Kai going through the door, and Baz ending up in the god’s workshop, having failed once more.
The timeline always reset to the original one, and so each time, Baz tried a different method of stopping the outcome. His first attempt had been fueled by desperation. His second, he left all subtlety behind and confronted Kai from the start, hoping that honesty would wield the best results and that together they could come up with a plan. If anything, it felt good not to be alone in this as Kai vowed to do everything in his power to stop Clover.
The chaos that ensued in this timeline still haunted Baz so much that by the third attempt, all he did was observe from the shadows as a ghost—he’d always been good at that—unwilling to change anything at all until the very last second.
In this fourth attempt, Baz strove for balance. He wouldn’toutright show himself to Kai, but couldn’t remain entirely a ghost, either. So he left clues. Wrote Kai letters that he slipped in his room.Don’t trust Clover. Don’t go through the door. Don’t, don’t, don’t.He left some for his past self, too, hoping to sow seeds of doubt in both their minds, enough to make them ask the right questions, enough to change the outcome.
But it was as if they never even saw any of his messages. As if someone were destroying them before they could.
Baz thought it might be Clover himself, given how he’d been onto him in the first and second timelines. So he watched Clover closely. Watched Thames, too, since they were both joined at the hip, and Thames, being Eclipse-born, could have easily found the clues Baz left around Obscura Hall. But neither Clover nor Thames seemed to be meddling in Baz’s scheming.
The longer he observed them, the more it pained Baz to see how much of Thames was wrapped up in Clover. Their love was obsessive, unhealthy. And more one-sided than Thames believed, because surely Clover did not love him if he was so willing to let him go in the end, watching him Collapse to his untimely death.
Suddenly the answer smacked Baz in the face.
This all started with Clover—and Thames, who did his bidding.
It starts at the root, not the leaf,Baz remembered telling Emory once, when they were in Romie’s greenhouse practicing Emory’s Sower magic. The root of the problem here had always been Clover. Clover manipulating Thames to Collapse; Clover making Thames take all the blame; Clover replacing Thames with Kai as his Fear Eater slash Nightmare Weaver.
Perhaps this was how Baz could dupe fate. Not by trying to rewrite history entirely, but by replacing one with the other. Not by chipping away wildly at the cup until it might fracture, but by taking out the fragment he was so desperate to erase from thepattern and patching it up with something else to keep the cup intact.
If someone with nightmare magic was needed to go through the door with Clover and Luce, it would not be Kai. This time, it would be Thames.
