Baz, a beacon in the dark.
All the thousand little moments they’d shared together in the Eclipse commons, past and present. And then: Kai going through the Hourglass after Clover and Luce, his hand ripped from Baz’s as Baz was thrown back, barred entry, the door shutting between them with grim finality.
From here the thread of Kai’s fate split into multiple thinner strands, each one harder for Baz to grasp. They unspooled in different directions, weaving through darkness and stars, sentient forests, what looked like the bottom of an ocean, a spiraling path of obsidian—
And then nothing.
All the threads frayed as if they had been cut off. Cleaved. Ripped at the seams.
Baz opened his eyes with a gasp, letting go of his magic as if it had burned him. His head and heart raced wildly, and he had to remember to breathe. In, out, in again.
He couldn’t stop now.
Determinedly, he found the thread of Luce’s fate and discovered it ended the same as Kai’s. And Clover’s… That one, he could not see the end of; it went too far beyond his reach, leaving him gasping for breath until he let go of it.
“There’s a reason I kept this from you.”
Baz whirled around at the god’s voice. The god peered at him with sad, gray eyes, his goggles resting atop his head.
“What does it mean?” Baz didn’t realize he was tremblinguntil he heard the words spill shakily from his mouth.
The god let out a heaving sigh. “Is it not obvious?”
Baz shook his head through tears. “They can’t be dead. I know what death looks like, and that was not it.”
The god had shown him before, what happened to a person’s thread when they died. The bright, glowing thread simply became dark and kept going, unmoored, until it eventually returned to the warping board, shining once more.
“You’re right. Death does not cleave one’s thread,” the god said. “When a life ends, one’s soul is repurposed. Returned to the fabric of the universe. Think of an hourglass being flipped over, sand filling a previously empty bulb. An end becoming a beginning.”
“So then why are Kai’s and Luce’s threads cut off?”
The god shifted uncomfortably. “There are things worse than death. I’m afraid the end of the Dreamer and the Nightmare Weaver is… an unmaking, if you will. Oblivion. That’s all I will say on the matter.”
“But how? That’s not possible, notnatural…”
The god looked at him with a quiet sort of pity, as if the answer were clear enough for him to grasp. And it was.
Whatever happened to Kai and Luce could only be one person’s doing: Clover.
Guilt speared through Baz at the realization. Kai and Luce hadn’t known what he now knew of Clover—all the horrible things Clover had done back at Aldryn, the people he had killed. They’d traveled with him to the Wychwood thinking he was a friend and ally, only to meet an abrupt end.
An unmaking. Oblivion.
If Baz gave in to the grief and despair gnawing at his heart, he felt he would suffer such a fate himself from the pain alone.
“There has to be a way to stop it,” he begged. “A way I can change things. What good is my magic if I can’t—if it means Kai—” He bitthe inside of his cheek to stop from crying. “Send me back to the past. I can convince Kai not to go through the door. I can fix this.”
“You can’t.”
Baz looked beyond the workshop, remembering all the doors to other worlds he’d passed on his way here. “Then I’ll go after him through the Wychwood door. I’ll help him stop Clover before—”
“This place we are in exists outside of time, boy,” the god snapped. “You are no longer in the past. If you were to walk through that door,anydoor, you would find yourself back in your own time, where you belong. Kai is in the past, and there is nothing you can do for him. Fate cannot be changed.”
“But—”
“Clocks,” the god exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Let me show you, if you’re so insistent, what would happen if you were to pick at the threads of the past.”
He rifled through a pile of stray pendulums and gears and abacuses, grumbling to himself before he handed Baz an intricate brass scale.
