"Comforting," I say.
We find Eltrien on level eight, exactly where the desk attendant said he'd be. He's seated on the floor amid open texts, the mycelial marks along his skin pulsing in quick, uneven patterns. His silver eyes move across the pages at an unnatural pace. He doesn't look up when we enter, which tells me he already knows we're here.
"Let me guess. You're here about the chasms," he says.
"You know about them."
"I know what's causing them." He still doesn't look up. "I've been trying to find a way to stop it, and the answer isn't in any of these texts because it's not something any of us can stop."
I crouch in front of him, forcing myself into his line of sight. "Eltrien. Talk to me."
He finally meets my eyes, and what I see there puts a knot in my gut. Resignation. The look of someone who's run through every option and come up empty.
"When Elle dispersed herself across time, she stabilized the convergence. Stopped the cycle. Saved both realms." He speaks carefully, measuring each word. "But she also removed herself from the present. And without her—"
"Kaelren went after her," I say. "He's using the locket and the Elm Gate to pull her back."
Eltrien goes still. His marks stop pulsing. For a few seconds, he doesn't move at all, and that scares me more than anything else I've seen today.
"He opened the gate," he says. Not a question.
"Yes. Before I left. He was preparing to channel the bond through the locket, to reach her."
Eltrien closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the resignation has deepened into something worse.
"Then he's gone too."
The words hit hard enough to hollow out my chest.
"What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean, the gate should have worked the way he intended. But clearly, it didn’t. Something interfered with the transfer of power." He presses his palms against the floor, and his marks flare. "It didn't pull her to him. It pulled him toward her. Into the iterations. He'd have been drawn in and deposited somewhere in the timeline, but not necessarily where she is."
Vashael's hand goes to her mouth. Nimor has gone very still beside me.
"You're telling me," I say, keeping my voice level because one of us has to, "that Kaelren is lost in the iterations. Without a way back. And Elle is still scattered across time."
"I'm telling you they're both in the iterations, most likely in different ones, and neither of them has a clear path home." He pulls his hands back and folds them in his lap. "The bond between them still exists. If they can find each other across the timelines, if Kaelren can locate enough of Elle's consciousnessto anchor her back to a single moment, they might be able to return. But that's a lot of ifs."
"Can we reopen the gate from this side? Pull them through?"
"Not without the locket. Kaelren must have it with him." He shakes his head. "We can't reach them. We can't help them."
I let that settle. It's not the information that gets easier the longer you hold it.
"The chasms," I say, steering us back to what we can actually affect. "Tell me what's happening to Wynmire."
He places both palms flat on the floor again, and his marks flare. Light threads outward from his hands, spreading across the stone. "The realms are held together by the bond between the two anchors. Root and Bloom, fae and human, Kaelren and Elle. Without both anchors present and bonded in the current timeline, the connection degrades. The boundary between worlds thins."
The floor trembles. Just enough to rattle the jars on the shelves and send fine dust drifting through the air.
"The chasm east of the river colony," Nimor says.
"That's the beginning. More will form. From the weakest points outward, the ground will open, the boundaries will dissolve, and Wynmire will fold in on itself." His marks pulse faster. "I've seen it happen in three other iterations. The ones that collapsed before Elle could visit them. The ones where the anchors failed."
"How long do we have?"
"I don't know. Weeks, maybe. Months, if we're lucky. It depends on how fast the degradation accelerates." He looks at each of us. "Kaelren is stubborn, and he loves her beyond reason. If anyone can find her, it's him. But we need to keep this realm standing until he does, because if Wynmire falls apart while they're still in the iterations, there's nothing for them to come back to."
