In return, we ask that you work privately with professors to hone, experiment with, and document your skillset so that we may know more about this mysterious magic and what it might achieve.
We also request that this discovery remain confidential. Recent events have made the Mage Council difficult to trust, and until certain internal mattersare resolved, we would prefer your abilities remain known only to trusted parties.
Sincerely,
Lukas Valencroft
Head Mage at Junira’s College of Advanced Magic
President of The Mage Society
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I was a time mage.
With only a month until my presentation to the Mage Council Conference, I wove through crowded streets on my way home from Master Carter’s tower, dazed. The Capitol was humming with murmurs of royal balls, dresses, and carriages, but I couldn’t have cared less.
My mind wandered over my past and present, over possible futures, of all the timelines set before me and how they’d intertwined to this very moment, this very realization of who I’d been all along.
Had Thomas suspected it, with his odd questions and challenges? Had he come across the concept in his foreign studies?
I rushed down slushy streets, dodging giggling ladies and gentlemen with stern expressions. I threw off my boots at the door, not bothering to greet Mama in the kitchen or Kelara, who sat folding laundry in the living room.
I entered the study, my back against the cool door, my skin tingling and alive. My chest heaved, aching to be free of the shackles of my ribcage.
Papa’s journal caught my eye. I grabbed it, dropping into a chairand flicking through the pages until I found the mended parchment from so long ago.
I set it before me.
I knew I could unmend it just as easily as mend it. Thomas had been restrained in the task himself—hiswhywas to make order from chaos, to figure out how the world worked, to put material back together.
But I’d always been interested in something deeper, more integral to who I was.
The rush of time: how it sped my days of work at the castle, how it slowed at my beloved pond, how it froze at my father’s bedside. How it settled like a blanket over me for so much of my life, slowing my movements, encouraging me to settle for what I already had rather than struggle against it. How mending magic had always come easy through the reversal of time, but crafting from scratch came much harder.
How the premonitions I received weren’t things to change; they were things to come.
I understood that about time—it wasn’t meant to be tricked, or torn, or tampered with. It couldn’t be caged to fit human expectations. It just was.
Just like I was, or at least, was becoming.
My index finger trailed against the parchment, tickling the nerves just beneath my skin. I breathed in deep. Why should I unmake it?
Why would anyone unmake something?
To build it again. To make it better.
Because destruction could be good much of the time, whether that destruction was of materials, expectations, or of time itself.
I thought of Thomas’s shirt ripping, my hands trembling as I reached out to touch his upper arm, a moment that would’ve neverhappened without destruction. Breaking up with David. Admitting my failure to Mama. Quitting the palace.
Leaving Thom.
My heart skipped a beat. He’d left me.
But had that been why? So I could rebuild the pieces he’d left behind, become stronger and better like I’d claimed I wanted?
A clatter from the other room shook me from my thoughts. I startled, my gaze coming back into focus to see the parchment torn in two, directly along the line that Thomas had left behind.
