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Slowly, she turned back toward me. “Excuse me?”

“You’re Fate,” I said again, my heart buckling under the weight of this moment—how it balanced on the edge of a future rife with either redemption or ruin. “You write the endings of every story. You can’t mean to tell me you’re confined to this temple made by the faeries whose lives you etch?”

Fate’s lips clinked together in indignation, but something about what I’d said seemed to make her reconsider. To crack her resolve.

She took a step toward me.

“Do you know what you are asking, General Steeler?” The words came out in terrified whispers, as if something lurking within the bowels of this temple might overhear and come charging at both of us. Something that made my grip tighten on my sword. “It’s hard enough for a couple to fight her off together. No one has ever defeated her from separate ends of this world.”

“Defeated?” My eyebrows furrowed. “Defeated who?”

Of all the times I’d heard stories about the temple and those who visited Fate, nobody seemed to be able to describe what happened once they stepped inside. Even Nara and Barberro had fallen silent whenever I’d asked them as a child, claiming it was something you had to experience for yourself. I’d always assumed, after that, that Fate must just take an excruciatingly long time to give an answer.

Instead, she lifted a trembling finger to point at Free Will.

Who snapped around so fast that I stumbled backward.

The song pouring from her mouth ended like the crack of a whip. Her lips peeled apart in a feral snarl.

And right before my eyes, the colors from her windows—all the way down the hallway for as far as I could see—began to ooze from the glass, forming shapes like a sea of wavering soldiers pointed toward me. Poised to attack at her command.

“Last chance to turn around,” Fate said.

I didn’t even glance back at the exit so far behind me.

“What happens if I don’t?”

Fate bowed her head, clinking back to give me a clear path. “Then I won’t step between you and your love any longer. If you want her, all that remains to defeat is Free Will. On both your end and hers.”

For the first time since I’d last held Rayna in the ship, a spark of hope lit up beneath my ribcage. Understanding flared there too, churning with the adrenaline that had risen to the surface of my skin. If I could choose Rayna again and again for the rest of my life, I would in a heartbeat. But my own choices—her choices—weren’t quite enough to braid our futures together when the rest of the world could snap our bond at any twist or turn.

This was the rest of the world, spread out in a shimmering army of colors before me. The will of millions of others, including Mydusia’s and Dyonisia’s, fusing together to keep us apart.

No longer. By the moonbeam and the mist, I would get to the love of my life, my little hurricane, my via, even if it was the last thing I did.

Eyes narrowing, I raised my sword.

CHAPTER

54

RAYNA

The magic washed over me, burying me in wave after wave after wave.

It was all I could do to retreat to my subconscious again. I huddled up against her throne, wrapped my arms around my knees, and rocked.

“Is this it?” I whispered. “My breaking point?”

For the first time, my subconscious didn’t have an answer. And a vicious CRACK lashed through the sky of my mind anyway, splitting the crescent moon from the tumbling crest of the sunset-infused clouds on the other side.

This was it. The moment Dyonisia got her wish and turned me into a monster. The moment I lost myself to excess power. Already, I could feel something in that crack sucking in a deep breath as if to pull me in.

To pull me away.

I didn’t want to go, though. Didn’t want to lose the part of me that loved those who made every bit of this pain-riddled life worth hanging onto:

Jagaros, who hadn’t abandoned me like he’d claimed, but who’d saved me in the best way he knew how.