Chapter 39 Kaelren
Kaelren
She was gone.
Not dead—I would have felt that through the bond, would have known the moment her heart stopped. No, Elle was something worse than dead. She existed in every heartbeat that ever was—and none I could reach.
I couldn’t fucking reach her.
My hands clawed through empty air where she’d been standing, grasping at nothing.
The bond between us hadn’t broken—that would have been cleaner, kinder.
Instead, it drew taut across impossible distances—across time itself, and the sensation was like having my chest torn open while my heart kept beating.
“Elle!” Her name ripped from my throat, raw and desperate. “ELLE!”
Nothing. Just echoes in a chamber that had finally stopped screaming.
I spun, searching, as if she might be hiding somewhere, might materialize from shadow or light or pure fucking hope.
But there was only aftermath. Bodies sprawled across blood-slicked stone.
The apparatus where Auradelle had become something twisted and wooden, his face frozen in eternal horror, roots growing through what used to be flesh.
Rebels and guards alike, some standing in shock, some collapsed in exhaustion or grief.
And nowhere—no flicker, no breath—was Elle.
“Bring her back,” I snarled at the universe, at the Bloom fragments drifting like dying stars, at reality itself. My corruption flared—frost skittered in jagged patterns across the stone. “brING HER BACK!”
“Kaelren—” Peeble’s voice, small and careful.
“You knew.” I rounded on them, and the beetle flinched back from whatever they saw in my face. “You knew this would happen. You knew what the seed would do.”
“I knew it was the only way to break the pattern—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the pattern!” The words came out as a roar.
My corruption surged, and the nearest pillar began to crack, ice spreading through ancient stone.
My marks may not be as prominent, but that didn’t mute my level of power.
“She’s gone. You said she’d transform, that she’d become something new, not that she’d—I’d—”
I couldn’t finish. The horror didn’t need words.
The chamber exhaled.
That’s the only way to describe it—like the Heartspire itself had been holding its breath and finally released it. The convulsions stopped. Reality settled into something new—not stable, but no longer trying to tear itself apart.
The Bloom—that massive, ancient apparatus that had controlled Wynmire for centuries—shattered into thousands of lights that drifted upward like seeds on an impossible wind.
Each one pulsed with its own rhythm, its own color, its own possibility.
They drifted out like broken constellations, finding soil in settlements and groves and wild places.
I watched them go and felt nothing. Neither victory nor freedom. Everything Elle had sacrificed herself for.
And I’d trade every fragment, every freed bloom, every ‘better future’ to have her back. Solid. Real. Here.
“What the fuck just happened?” Sarnyx demanded, her voice shaking despite her attempt at composure. Blood dripped from a gash on her cheek. “Where’s Elle?”
“She stepped out—out of the loop, out of time itself,” I said, and my voice sounded dead even to my own ears.
“What does that mean?” Mora pushed forward, her face streaked with tears and blood. “Kaelren, what does that mean? Can we get her back?”
I looked down at my hands. The black marks… spreading like rot through my flesh—were fading. Not gone entirely, but receding like a tide going out. What had been solid corruption was now just shadow, manageable darkness instead of killing rot.
She’d taken it with her. Pulled it through our bond when she dispersed, distributed it across every moment she now inhabited. Diffused through time, what would’ve killed me in days thinned to nothing.
Saved me by destroying herself.
“Your corruption,” Bryx said, his compound eyes widening as he noticed. “It’s—”
“She pulled it through the tether and took the worst of it.” The words came out broken, and I hated how weak they sounded. Hated that she’d saved me when I should have been saving her.
The bond between us ached. Not pain, exactly. Something worse. Like a missing limb—only it was half my soul. I could feel her presence, scattered and distant, existing in a thousand moments at once, but none of them now. None of them reachable.
I tried to follow her through the bond. Reached out with everything I had, trying to find her in the spaces between seconds. For a moment, I began to untether—slipping sideways out of linear time—
Strong hands grabbed my shoulders. Thrak, shaking me hard enough to rattle teeth.
“Don’t,” he said firmly. “Whatever you’re trying to do, don’t. You’ll scatter yourself too, and then she’ll have no anchor to find her way home.”
“I need to—”
“You need to stay here. In this moment. In this time.” His scarred face was grim. “She needs you to be her lighthouse, remember? Can’t guide someone home if you’re lost too.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to fight him, to scatter myself across eternity if it meant finding her. But he was right. Some part of me that wasn’t drowning in grief knew he was right.
I stopped reaching, and the loss hit twice as hard.
Something in me cracked—breaking would’ve been cleaner. This was worse. Like a fault line opening in bedrock, like the fundamental structure of who I was was developing fissures I’d never be able to repair.
My knees hit stone. The impact should have hurt, but I felt nothing except the absence of her.
“Kaelren?” Sarnyx’s voice, worried now.
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t do anything except kneel there in the blood and debris and victory we’d paid too much for, feeling Elle scattered across every moment while I remained trapped in just one.
The tether frayed, sang, refused to snap.
Through it, I felt echoes. Fragments. Elle split across seventeen presents at once. Elle learning things that unraveled the mind. Elle fighting to hold onto who she was while becoming something that existed outside definition.
And underneath it all: pain. Hers, mine, ours—impossible to separate anymore.
“She’s not gone,” I said, and didn’t know if I was trying to convince them or myself. “She can’t be gone. The bond—it’s still there. Stretched across time, but there.”
“She’s in temporal flux—everywhere, learning, becoming,” Eltrien said quietly. He looked different—clearer, somehow, like Elle’s dispersal had awakened something he’d been suppressing.
“Can we get her back?” The question tore from me.
“Maybe. Probably.” Eltrien met my eyes, and I saw genuine uncertainty there.
“But not now. Not yet. She needs time—though time doesn’t mean the same thing for her anymore—to navigate what she’s become.
To learn what she needs to learn about the pattern before she can find her way back to a single moment. ”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer made my remaining corruption flare. The floor beneath me frosted over, spreading outward in patterns that looked like reaching fingers, like desperate hands trying to grasp something that wasn’t there.
“Kaelren—” Sarnyx started.
“HOW LONG?” I roared at Eltrien, and ice crept up the nearest wall, crystals forming in violent patterns.
“I don’t know,” he repeated calmly. “Years. Decades. Centuries. Or she might figure it out tomorrow. Time doesn’t work the same for her anymore. She’s experiencing every possible moment simultaneously while trying to navigate back to one specific now.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all I have.” He studied me with something that might have been pity. “But I know this—she’ll need anchors when she’s ready to return. Points of reference in linear time that she can use to navigate home.”
“What kind of anchors?”
“This realm. The people she loved. You.” Eltrien’s voice softened. “Most importantly, you. Your bond is the strongest connection she has to linear time. As long as you stay here, stay present, you’re giving her a path home.”
I stared at him, at the scattered lights of freed blooms, at the chamber that had witnessed Elle’s sacrifice and couldn’t give me a single fucking answer about when I’d see her again.
Hold the line. Be her constant.
I would do that. Forever wasn’t long enough to stop me waiting.
But first, I had to survive the grief.
Around me, the survivors were beginning to move. Checking bodies. Tending wounds. Survival’s machinery clicked into place because that’s what living things do—they survive, even when they don’t want to.
Mora sat against a pillar, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Elle’s friend. One of the first people in this realm to show her kindness. I watched her grief and felt nothing. My own was too large, too consuming to leave room for anyone else’s.
Bryx had gone very still, his antennae drooping. Processing, probably. Trying to understand the scientific impossibility of what Elle had done while simultaneously mourning someone who’d become crew, become family.
Nimor was solid again, more solid than I’d ever seen him, but his face was carved with loss. Vashael stood beside him, one translucent hand on his shoulder, both of them grieving in their own way.
Even Thrak, who’d lost more comrades than he could probably count, looked shaken. He’d believed in Elle. They all had.
She’d left them. Left us. Scattered herself across infinity to break a pattern none of us had asked her to break.
I hated her for it almost as much as I loved her. I didn’t know which feeling was stronger.
“Kaelren.” Sarnyx’s voice again, gentle in a way I’d rarely heard from her. “There’s something you need to see.”
“I don’t—”
“Please.”
Something in her tone made me look up. She was standing near where Elle had been, where the last traces of her presence still shimmered in the air. And at her feet, half-buried in the debris and ash, something caught the light.