Raw power detonated.
Fear and grief and horror andlove.
So, so much love.
The sharpest, wickedest power in existence.
With a screech, I flung myself wide open.
Take me instead!
Give him back and you can do whatever you want with me!
The storm paused.
The world glittered in its web of frost.
And...the ice replied.
With a howl, it reversed direction and barrelled through me.
It accepted my bargain androared.
Pain I’d never felt before tore me wide open. Every droplet of crystallised blood. Every frigid vein.Everythingruptured. I shattered into shimmering pieces as winter wove with love and time wrenched to a halt.
Fate bent.
Destiny rewrote itself as I pulled power from all those who’d perished before and defied death itself.
Murderous cold fogged with catastrophic waves. The sky rained silver. Lightning bolts cracked through suffocating snow.
And I didn’t care.
“Come back.” Tears fractured down my cheeks, half ice, half salt. “You have to come back.”
The cold deepened, feeding off my emotions, growing stronger and stronger.
The mountains cracked as ice ploughed through stone. Trees broke in half as arctic wind scythed through them. The river froze solid as the entire valley descended into a tomb of eternal winter.
And in the midst of calamity, I sank into time itself.
I felt every string holding existence together. Ancient history and extinct civilisations. Future advancements and upcoming tragedies. I held every moment that ever was or ever would be, and all it took was a simple choice tocut.
To cut the strings of time and cease life itself.
The knowledge I could tamper with the very existence of this world overwhelmed me.
I choked as my body began to break.
My skin iced over. My hair bled white.
But I couldn’t stop myself.
I called upon every forgotten, dead creature within these mountains to hunt Lucien’s soul and bring him back. Snow hung suspended like glittering stars as I closed my fist around reality and refused to let it keep ticking without him.
There was only this. This space between moments. A rewriteof everything that ever was.
I tried to reverse time the same way I’d somehow stepped through it when racing to find Lucien earlier in the night. I pictured a different reality where we’d gone to the mountain together. Where he’d never triggered this unsurvivable ascension. Where all those prisoners stayed alive and Whisper never ran off—
