It happened too fast for her to make sense of, even as time seemed frozen. Clover wrested the ghosts to him. They were like stardust seeping into him. His eyes glowed with otherworldly power. And this was what these souls had become: a power source all their own, something dark and angry and chaotic ready to be harnessed. Something powerful enough to turn someone into a god.
As Clover looked at Emory from the middle of a silken hurricane of souls that swirled around his limbs, she knew that was what he had become.
A god with the power to put an end to her and everyone here—and all the worlds if that’s what he wanted.
39BAZ
VEINS RAN BLACK ALONG CLOVER’Sskin, a ghostly sheen lighting his eyes, his hair flowing around him as if on some invisible breeze. The threads that had bound him to Kai and Luce turned black, dissolving entirely before Baz’s eyes.
Baz understood then that turning the hourglass—switching fates—had solved nothing. Because Clover was no longer a Tidecaller, nor even a man.
He had risen as a god, and now he would destroy them all, just like Baz had seen in all his futures.
Fate running its course. Inevitable, no matter how hard they tried to change it, no matter how many snags they created in the tapestry.
A broken teacup flashed in Baz’s mind, and as his eyes fell on the hourglass, he was suddenly reminded of Emory’s dreams. How the glass would shatter and something or someone would always come spilling out of it.
What if it wasn’t about releasing anything trapped inside the hourglass—but breaking fate entirely?
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Clover advancing toward Emory and Sidraeus, power singing at his fingertips. Saw Luce hurling herself in front of her daughter, yelling at Clover through angry tears that he’d become the very thing they’d set out to stop. Felt Kai hovering at his own shoulder, as if ready to pull Baz away from danger at any second.
Power shot out of Clover, leaving Baz no time to think, to study the problem that lay before him with a cool, level head.
He smashed the hourglass against its altar.
Pain in his hands, shards of glass embedded in his skin—and all hell broke loose. Threads snapped, unraveling in the dark. Glass exploded and turned into dust that swept up and down the path, swirling into great gusts. The path itself trembled beneath their feet, starting to crumble at the edges, obsidian disintegrating and fading into the darkness around them, suspended between the unmoored threads of fate.
The air was thick with potential. As if, now that fate was broken, anything was possible.
Clover must have sensed it too. He paused his attack, turning to Baz, to the shattered hourglass. The frenzy of souls around him became agitated, ravenous with the same hunger reflected in his eyes. Before anyone could react, he disappeared within a maelstrom of power that rushed past them all, shooting toward the godsworld.
“You foolish boy.”
Baz spun around. Equilibris stood on the other side of the altar, staring wide-eyed at the broken hourglass, then at the snapped threads, the crumbling path. His voice was calm, but there was a tremor of something beneath it that betrayed the god’s emotional state. “I told you not to mess with fate, and you go ahead andbreakit?”
“I did what I had to,” Baz gritted out. “I saw the outcome—whatfate had in store for all of us. It didn’t matter what anyone did. It would always have ended up with the worlds being reset. Withyouwiping us all from the board and starting anew.”
Something flashed in the god’s eyes, before a snarl had his attention snapping to Sidraeus. The Shadow was hurling himself at the god, his face etched in fury, a thirst for revenge. The god held his hand out and Sidraeus froze, held in place by whatever power the god wielded.
“You bastard,” Sidraeus growled. “I let you sacrifice all my Tidecallers back then so you wouldn’t need to reset the worlds. And you were going to do it anyway?”
The god shrugged. “So I lied. I couldn’t do what I was meant to while your creations lived.”
“Then why didn’t you go through with it?”
The god narrowed his eyes at him, before shifting to Emory. “Not all Tidecallers were sacrificed, were they?”
Bleak understanding shot through Baz. In all the visions where he’d seen the worlds come to an end, Emory and Clover always died or became twisted versions of themselves, no longer Tidecallers but something beyond that.
The worlds couldn’t be reset so long as a Tidecaller existed. Someone to embody the delicate balance between life and death, creation and destruction. A power the gods had never intended to exist.
It was why Equilibris hadn’t been able to reset the worlds back then. Because a single Tidecaller had survived, and since then, there had been more of them over time. Perhaps there had always been one, a last failsafe against utter obliteration.
Now Clover was a god, no longer a Tidecaller. But Emory still was. She was all that stood between Equilibris and that bleak fate.
But I broke that fate,Baz thought.It no longer has to end that way.
Equilibris looked at him as if he’d heard the thoughts in his mind. “You’ve doomed us all.”
