Chaos erupts.

  A flash of blue light blazes across Titus's forehead as his Codicil ignites. His voice slices through the air, tearing reality apart. A massive portal rips open above our heads, its twin materializing behind the Vritraha's hull.

  The war fortress's energy beam lances down, straight through the portal. Metal screams. The redirected blast punches through the Vritraha's own armor, splitting the fortress in half.

  Burning debris rains from the sky. The platform beneath my feet bucks and tilts. Feminine shrieks pierce the air as people scramble for stable ground. I grab the nearest railing. Cyra stumbles into me, her fingers digging into my arm.

  The broken Vritraha plummets, its massive bulk blocking out the sun. Wind from its descent whips my hair across my face. The platform groans, listing further. More screams echo across New Larin as the fortress crashes toward the ground below.

  Twenty feet away, Castor Urisius stands frozen, his eyes lock on the falling fortress. Penelope stands beside him, her hand reaches for his arm.

  Panic hits him.

  The world fractures.

  I grip the railing, but suddenly I am ten steps to the left. Then diving forward. Then backward. My body multiplies across space. Each version lives out a different choice. I watch myself sprint across the platform, roll under falling metal, shield others with my body. My skull caves in beneath a twisted beam. My spine snaps. I survive. I die.

  Warmth floods across my upper lip, more than before, hot and thick.

  The visions stack and blur, reality bleeds between what is and what might be. My head pounds. Every possibility vivid and real and happening all at once.

  Castor's shadow twists.

  It moves wrong, against the light. His silhouette on the frost-covered platform darkens. Deepens. Becomes something more than absence of light. The edges blur and writhe.

  He stumbles backward, his mouth opens. Shock or terror, I cannot tell. The shadow swallows him.

  One moment he stands beside his sister. The next, only Penelope remains. Her hand grasps empty air where her twin brother should be.

  She turns, searches. "Castor?"

  The falling debris does not wait for answers.

  Then I see her.

  Penelope lies broken beneath burning metal, her platinum hair spreads like frost. Her eyes empty, fixed, staring.

  The image repeats across every timeline. Every possibility.

  She dies. Always she dies.

  Pain spikes behind my eyes. The blood comes faster now. Streams down my chin. My vision wavers between red-tinged present and the ghostly futures overlapping it.

  Rage ignites in my chest, pure. Primal.

  Fury that demands action.

  My head pounds harder. Each heartbeat sends fresh blood dripping onto the frost-covered platform. The taste of iron fills my mouth. I spit red onto white ground.

  Why? We are strangers. She gave me a sad smile once. I owe her nothing.

  The rage does not ask, does not wait. It simply is.

  And I let it be.

  No.

  The timelines snap together like a fist closing. The endless possibilities collapse into a single moment of crystalline clarity. Everything else falls away. The screaming crowd. The burning fortress. My own scattered fears.

  Only now. Only this.

  I plant my feet against the tilting platform. "Move." I shove Cyra hard. She stumbles backward. Catches herself against a support beam. Safely clear of the falling debris. One thread secured.

  Penelope stands motionless twenty feet away, her face upturned to the rain of twisted metal. Time stretches thin. I see the jagged pieces falling. Calculate their trajectories.

  My body moves before thought catches up.

  I sprint across the lurching platform. Blood spatters with each footfall. My vision tunnels. The nosebleed will not stop now, will not stop until I release my grip on the timelines.

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  But I hold them. All of them. Every possibility locked in my awareness until I know which path saves her.

  The world narrows to the space between us. To the closing gap I must cross. A burning shard of hull plummets past my shoulder, close enough to sear the air.

  Penelope's eyes meet mine, wide and afraid.

  The platform moans beneath my feet as my muscles burn, the distance evaporating with each stride.

  Stupid. Reckless.

  I do not care. The fury carries me forward.

  My fingers stretch toward her arm. The metal storm descends.

  I slam into Penelope. We hit the frost-covered earth hard. The impact knocks the wind from my chest. A section of hull crashes down where we stood. Twenty feet of twisted alloy. Heat and sparks wash over my back. Shrapnel peppers my exposed skin.

  Ringing in my ears. Metal against metal.

  Pounding in my breast. Organ against flesh.

  Penelope stares up at me. Her platinum hair spreads across the frost in a platinum corona, each strand precisely where I saw it fall in the vision that was not vision but certainty. The same pose. The same frost beneath her. The same angle of winter light catching the small scar above her left eyebrow.

  But her eyes are alive.

  Not empty glass reflecting nothing. Not fixed on some distant point beyond this world. Alive. The difference hits like a physical blow. In every timeline I saw, those eyes were empty glass. Now they are wide with confusion and something else I cannot name.

  The scar I saw in the vision. Real now. Close enough to touch.

  I flop onto my back. The chill of the earth seeps through my clothes.

  My face is slick with blood, it pools in the hollow of my throat, soaks into my collar. The frost beneath my head stains crimson.

  The broken Vritraha fills the sky above me; its massive bulk turns day to night. The air smells of burning metal and ozone.

  A dark shape launches from the falling fortress. Trails smoke. The figure twists impossibly through the air, movements too fluid to be natural. Even at this distance, I see the telltale shimmer of double pupils catching the light.

  Eidolon.

  Black shapes materialize from the crowd below. Six Void Sentinels rising as one. Gold torqs gleam against void-black fabric. Their voidweave uniforms make them look like tears in reality itself as they streak across the sky.

  The fortress plummets like a dying star.

  The impact hits.

  The world becomes sound. Metal tearing. Earth buckling beneath impossible weight. The shock wave rolls across New Larin like the breath of some dying god, carrying heat and ash and the screams of a thousand onlookers who cannot look away. It catches me as I try to sit up, slams my skull against frozen earth that has forgotten how to be solid. Something cracks—my head, the ground, the distinction between the two.

  Pain erupts white and sharp.

  I catalog it automatically: likely concussion, lacerations across my back from shrapnel, bruised ribs on the left side, severe epistaxis from temporal perception overuse.

  The last one I cannot simply lock away. The damage is done.

  My limbs feel like lead; each breath scrapes raw against my throat. I turn my head, force my eyes to focus on the sky.

  The Void Sentinels and the enemy Eidolon dance above New Larin in patterns that predate thought. Too fast for mortal eyes to follow, too precise to be anything but killing art. Their movements blur together: streaks of black against winter white, negative space given form and fury. Six Sentinels moving as one. One enemy refusing to die.

  Fire blooms between them, not natural flame. These blossoms unfurl in colors that should not exist. Petals of green-hearted crimson. Black fire edged in violet. Each flower opens and dies in the space between heartbeats. The heat does not radiate. It hungers. I feel it reaching down even from this distance, tasting the air for living flesh.

  Crystalline barriers erupt in geometric perfection. The angles hurt to look at. My eyes slide away from the shapes, unable to hold their configuration. The barriers pulse like breathing things. Beautiful in a way that makes my stomach turn.

  The enemy Eidolon trails smoke that moves against the wind, spirals upward when it should fall. The Sentinels weave between impossible spaces. Their coordination is perfect, beyond perfect, six minds moving as one.

  Reality wounds itself where their powers clash. The air shimmers. Tears. I see afterimages bleeding at the edges. Ghostly flames frozen mid-bloom. Barriers that exist and do not exist. The sky above the platform is scarred.

  Ash falls upward. Gray flakes drift toward the heavens before dissolving into nothing.

  My skin crawls. Something in my body knows this is wrong, knows these colors and shapes should not be. The spectral residue washes over the platform in waves. Each one makes my teeth ache.

  Suddenly, words spill from an unseen maw. Ancient syllables that scrape against reality itself.

  Even from here, they make my teeth ache. My bones hum.

  Titus's voice cuts through the chaos, not shouted, spoken, but I hear it as if he stands beside me. The words are incomprehensible. Sounds that predate language. That command the very fabric of existence.

  The attacker stops. Mid-flight. Mid-weave. Simply... stops.

  Then falls.

  The Void Sentinels converge. Catch the body before it hits the ground. Their movements are gentle now. Controlled. They bear the unconscious eidolon toward the platform like pallbearers carrying sacred cargo.

  The roar of flames becomes white noise. Snow swirls. Ash drifts.

  I lie in the frost, blood pooling beneath my head, staring at the wounded sky.

  Even the powers of the Hells are nothing before the Codicil.

  The thought settles heavy in my chest. The enemy Eidolon commanded fire and wind, bent reality to his will through his connection to Gorath Maw.

  Yet Uncle merely spoke, and the enemy Eidolon's torq obeyed.

  No weaving or crystalline barriers or impossible flames. Just words that predate civilization, that carry the weight of Malkiel itself.

  The difference between an Eidolon and a Polemarch is not one of degree. It is a chasm.

  What did I just do?

  The question surfaces through the fog. I saved Penelope Urisius, threw myself into falling debris for a girl who barely knows I exist, used my time-sight in front of hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  How many noticed? How many saw me sprint toward danger that had not yet fallen?

  Grandmother will hear of this. Oshen will add it to his collection of suspicions. Uncle Titus will calculate how to use it.

  I should care. Should be afraid.

  But the rage still burns beneath my ribs, satisfied now, primitive and absolute.

  It does not care about consequences.

  Neither do I. Not yet, not right now.

  A shadow peels away from the underside of the tilted platform. Castor stumbles out of it. Lands hard on hands and knees. His platinum hair hangs in his face. His whole body shakes.

  He looks up at Penelope. At me lying beside her. Blood-soaked and broken. His expression cycles through confusion. Horror. Shame.

  "I..." His voice breaks. "I could not... it just..."

  He vanishes again, this time deliberately, fleeing into shadow rather than face what his fear just cost.

  I close my eyes. The darkness takes me.

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