Epilogue
I have met him seventeen times.
He never remembers first, not the first look or the first ache. Sometimes he kills me before he knows why he can’t. Sometimes I die loving him anyway. Once—just once—we lived long enough to grow old, and the world died instead, resetting while we held each other in the ashes.
But this time—this time I think I might get it right.
I exist now in the spaces between moments, diffused across every second we should have had.
I can see them all—every iteration, every failure, every version of myself standing where I once stood.
I watch them fall through lightning and land in moss.
I watch them meet his eyes for the first time and pretend they don’t feel recognition.
I watch them love him, lose him, choose wrong, die wrong, break the world trying to save it.
Sixteen times I have failed. Sixteen times the wheel has turned, grinding us both to dust and beginning again.
But I am speaking now into the seed of a moment—before the thunder that isn’t thunder, before he looks up and sees me properly for the first time in this iteration. Before everything changes and nothing does.
She’s there—the version of me who still believes in beginnings.
Who thinks endings can be escaped if you just try hard enough, love fiercely enough, sacrifice beautifully enough.
She doesn’t know yet that she’s been here before in seventeen different ways, wearing different faces, making seventeen different mistakes that all lead to the same devastation.
She has my grandmother’s stubborn chin. My mother’s earth-green eyes. And somewhere beneath her skin, marks that haven’t bloomed yet—golden vines that will spread like prophecy and doom combined. She’s about to meet him. The man who is both salvation and ending.
The one who will carve himself open trying to reach me, who will become death incarnate because the alternative is watching me disappear. Again.
Kaelren doesn’t remember the other iterations. Not consciously. But his body knows. His corruption knows. Every time he looks at this new Elle, some part of him will recognize her the way you recognize dreams you can’t quite recall—familiar and devastating and just out of reach.
He will fight what we are. He always does. He’ll push her away with cruel words and colder eyes, all while his marks reach for hers like plants toward sunlight. He’ll tell himself it’s duty, debt, necessity—anything but the truth that echoes across seventeen lifetimes.
We were always going to love each other. We were always going to destroy each other trying.
Maybe if I whisper softly enough through time’s cracks, she’ll hear me—this seventeenth Elle who’s about to crash through lightning into a realm that’s been waiting for her since before she was born.
Maybe she’ll feel it when she first sees him: not love at first sight, but recognition at first sight.
The way you know a story you’ve already lived.
Maybe this time, that will be enough.
The thunder begins. Not real thunder—never real thunder. It’s the sound of reality tearing, of the wheel beginning its turn once more, of my grandmother’s last desperate attempt to change the pattern finally, finally bearing fruit.
Lightning splits the sky of two worlds.
And she falls.
I am here, scattered across every moment she will live and die. I am the whisper in her instincts, the certainty in her bones, the reason she’ll refuse every ending except the one she chooses.
This time, she knows about the pattern. That’s never happened before.
This time, she’ll disperse herself across time trying to break it. That’s never been tried before.
This time—
This time has to be different.
Because I can’t bear to watch him scream my name in seventeen different timelines. Can’t watch her make the same mistakes I made, choose the same impossible choices, fail in the same beautiful, terrible ways.
So I wait here between seconds, neither alive nor dead nor anything the wheel knows how to categorize. I wait and I watch and I pray to forces older than the mistake that started this:
Let this one stick.
Let her be stubborn enough.
Let him love her fiercely enough.
Let seventeen be the number that breaks instead of bends.
The lightning strikes. She gasps awake in a realm that knows her blood. And somewhere in the Wynmire, a man who has met her seventeen times without knowing feels recognition pierce him like a blade.
It begins again.
Please, gods and roots and ancient blooming things—
Let it also end.