“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Kai sighed. “It was a long time ago.”
Luce hummed in thought. “And yet you’re still glaring.”
Kai gaveherhis most menacing glare. She held up her hands in a show of innocence, dropping the subject. Kai brooded on the matter. He didn’t care about Farran or what happened back then. He was more so interested in figuring out why the hell he washere—and how.
When Farran finally came back to sit with them, Kai crossed his arms and said, “Talk.”
“Where should I start?”
“Oh, I don’t know, what about explaining how it is that my backstabbing asshole of an ex managed to escape death, meet a god, travel back in time, and suddenly decide to give a shit enough about me to save me from plummeting into the unknown.”
Farran gave him a dimpled smile. “Funny, I don’t remember you being so cynical.”
“That tracks. You’re the reason for it.”
The smile slipped at that. Farran cleared his throat. “I owe you an apology for that. Both of you.”
“Me?” Luce exclaimed with surprise.
“It’s not just Kai I have a history with. Except you would have known a different version of me.”
“I don’t understand…”
“The thing about being apprentice to a god who rules over time and fate is that I know things about my past that no mortal ever should. And bypast, I mean, well, pastlife.”
Kai huffed a laugh. This all had to be some great cosmic joke.
Farran ignored him as he went on: “My first death was… unnatural. Through some kind of loophole, the god of balancetook notice and called my soul back from the afterlife. He shaped me into someone he could eventually use at his side, molding me to fit the pattern of fate in a certain way. And then he sent my soul back to the realms of the living through means of reincarnation. Thus Farran Caine was born. I had no knowledge then of past lives or gods or what my soul was created to do. Everything I did, I believed was by choice, but turns out it was always fate’s design. Every decision I made was predetermined by the god’s tinkering of my soul, his way of ensuring everything played into fate’s design. Because certain things needed to happen in a specific way.”
“Whatthings?”
“Sowing the seed in the minds of Keiran, Lizaveta, and Artem about waking the Tides. My death in Dovermere to spur them on.”
“And me?”
Farran couldn’t look Kai in the eye. “Yes, you. Dating you fueled the others’ disdain of Eclipse-born and their desire to wake the Tides. Breaking your heart sent you toward another.”
Old anger and hurt surfaced in Kai until he wanted to smash something. “So it was never real between us.”
At this, Farran’s head jerked up. “It was. If nothing else, you have to believe that. I didn’t know at the time that my actions were predetermined to serve the god. It’s only when I died and ended up back at the god’s side that I remembered what purpose he’d driven into my soul. It was only then that I remembered who I’d been before, in my previous life.”
“Who were you?” Luce asked, frowning at him as if to see who else might be hiding beneath his features.
“You knew me as Thames.”
Luce’s hand shot to her mouth, covering a bewildered gasp. Kai was too numb to react—didn’t know how many more absurd revelations he could take.
“Something about Thames’s death caught the attention of thegod,” Farran continued. “The way Thames injected himself with a Tidecaller synth to make himself limitless, only for it to corrupt him from the inside and ultimately kill him… I guess this left a mark on his soul—onmysoul—and the god thought to use that to his advantage, a loophole he could explore. He thought I’d be an ally because I’d want to get justice after what Cornelius did to me. And I was, for a time. Before I found out what fate has in store for us—what the god has been working toward.”
“Which is what?”
“To wipe clean the slate and start the worlds anew. I saw it myself in the tapestry of fate. What Cornelius is going to do is meant to be so disastrous that the god thinks the only way to prevent it is to throw away the fabric of our universe and start a new tapestry from scratch. Everything we’ve been, everything we are, everything we could still become… just wiped completely forever. No reincarnation in sight. Not even an afterlife. Every soul, every particle dead and alive that makes up our universe, gone and forgotten for something new to take shape.”
Kai fisted his hands at his sides, feeling angry at the world, at this god who thought he could treat them like chess pieces on a board. What was the point of going forward if that was the fate that awaited them?
“But why does the god want that?” Luce asked, her voice pitched high with mounting frenzy.
