Chapter 040 The Loop
I don't exist in a place you could find on a map. I'm in the static between radio stations, the breathless second after a car crash but before the glass hits the pavement.
I am not just Aria anymore. I am all of them.
I have met him seventeen times.
Sixteen of those meetings ended in blood. Sometimes mine, soaking into the roots of the Fenwood while he screamed a name he didn't remember learning. Sometimes his, with my knife in his chest because I thought I was saving the world.
He never remembers the first look. He never remembers the first ache. But his body does.
I watch him now, down there in the mud and the mess of the physical world. He's looking up at the sky. He thinks it's a storm. He thinks the noise tearing the clouds apart is thunder.
It isn't thunder. It's the sound of reality ripping open to let me through again.
He flinches. His hand goes to the scar on his shoulder-the corruption he calls a curse. It burns when I get close. It knows me even if he doesn't. He'll push her away when she lands. He'll use cruel words and colder eyes, trying to drive her out of the hollow, all while the marks under his skin reach for hers like plants dragging themselves toward sunlight.
He tries so hard to be a monster so he doesn't have to be a victim. I want to tell him it won't work. I want to tell him that he's already mourning me, and I haven't even hit the ground yet.
Down in the gray, the Honda Civic is just a crushed metal shape. The Dr Pepper is spilling onto the asphalt, sticky and sweet and entirely out of place.
And there she is.
"She" looks so small from here. Just a girl in a hoodie who thinks her biggest problem is a dead grandmother and a weird inheritance. She's terrified. She's scraping her knees on the reality of a world that wants to eat her alive.
But this time is different.
In the other sixteen timelines, she fell blindly. She stumbled into the magic like a drunk walking into traffic. She learned too late, or not at all.
This time, she knows about the pattern. That's never happened before.
It's buried deep, maybe. Hidden under the panic and the adrenaline. But it's there. A seed of forbidden knowledge sewn into the lining of her instincts. She knows the Bloom isn't just plants. She knows the Crown isn't just a king. She knows the rules of the game before the dice have even stopped rolling.
Maybe if I whisper softly enough through the cracks in the time stream, she'll hear me.
*Don't run,* I tell her. *He's going to try to scare you. Let him. He's just afraid you'll die again.*
The lightning strikes-a jagged, purple tear that smells like ozone and ancient dust.
She falls.
I close eyes I don't technically have and offer a prayer to whatever gods are listening, to the roots and the rot and the things that grow in the dark.
Let seventeen be the number that breaks instead of bends.
Let the circle snap.
Please. Let it end.