Chapter 2 Baz #2
However tempted he was to get a closer look, Baz seized the opportunity to find the answers he was searching for. He approached the loom on quiet feet, and, after making sure the god was still preoccupied, put into practice what he had learned.
There were as many threads spun on the loom as there were living beings in the universe, each one showing how a singular life played into the larger tapestry of fate. Baz found the thread connected to Kai by feel alone, and with his magic followed it all the way to its beginning.
Warmth spread through him as Kai’s life unspooled in his mind’s eye: his birth, his first steps; the taste of his favorite Luaguan dish on his tongue; the ease with which he learned languages; the love he had for his parents, never diminished despite how abandoned he felt whenever they dropped him off at a new school and left him there while they traveled the seas for their trading business; the pride of getting the Luaguan symbols tattooed on his chest, his father explaining what they meant; the taste of nightmares, of Baz’s specifically, how it felt to pull all the darkness away from the printing press scene.
Kai’s first kiss. His first love. His first heartbreak.
Baz, a beacon in the dark.
All the thousand little moments they’d shared together in the Eclipse commons, past and present. And then: Kai going through the Hourglass after Clover and Luce, his hand ripped from Baz’s as Baz was thrown back, barred entry, the door shutting between them with grim finality.
From here the thread of Kai’s fate split into multiple thinner strands, each one harder for Baz to grasp. They unspooled in different directions, weaving through darkness and stars, sentient forests, what looked like the bottom of an ocean, a spiraling path of obsidian—
And then nothing.
All the threads frayed as if they had been cut off. Cleaved. Ripped at the seams.
Baz opened his eyes with a gasp, letting go of his magic as if it had burned him. His head and heart raced wildly, and he had to remember to breathe. In, out, in again.
He couldn’t stop now.
Determinedly, he found the thread of Luce’s fate and discovered it ended the same as Kai’s. And Clover’s… That one, he could not see the end of; it went too far beyond his reach, leaving him gasping for breath until he let go of it.
“There’s a reason I kept this from you.”
Baz whirled around at the god’s voice. The god peered at him with sad, gray eyes, his goggles resting atop his head.
“What does it mean?” Baz didn’t realize he was trembling until he heard the words spill shakily from his mouth.
The god let out a heaving sigh. “Is it not obvious?”
Baz shook his head through tears. “They can’t be dead. I know what death looks like, and that was not it.”
The god had shown him before, what happened to a person’s thread when they died. The bright, glowing thread simply became dark and kept going, unmoored, until it eventually returned to the warping board, shining once more.
“You’re right. Death does not cleave one’s thread,” the god said. “When a life ends, one’s soul is repurposed. Returned to the fabric of the universe. Think of an hourglass being flipped over, sand filling a previously empty bulb. An end becoming a beginning.”
“So then why are Kai’s and Luce’s threads cut off?”
The god shifted uncomfortably. “There are things worse than death. I’m afraid the end of the Dreamer and the Nightmare Weaver is… an unmaking, if you will. Oblivion. That’s all I will say on the matter.”
“But how? That’s not possible, not natural…”
The god looked at him with a quiet sort of pity, as if the answer were clear enough for him to grasp. And it was.
Whatever happened to Kai and Luce could only be one person’s doing: Clover.
Guilt speared through Baz at the realization. Kai and Luce hadn’t known what he now knew of Clover—all the horrible things Clover had done back at Aldryn, the people he had killed. They’d traveled with him to the Wychwood thinking he was a friend and ally, only to meet an abrupt end.
An unmaking. Oblivion.
If Baz gave in to the grief and despair gnawing at his heart, he felt he would suffer such a fate himself from the pain alone.
“There has to be a way to stop it,” he begged. “A way I can change things. What good is my magic if I can’t—if it means Kai—” He bit the inside of his cheek to stop from crying. “Send me back to the past. I can convince Kai not to go through the door. I can fix this.”
“You can’t.”
Baz looked beyond the workshop, remembering all the doors to other worlds he’d passed on his way here. “Then I’ll go after him through the Wychwood door. I’ll help him stop Clover before—”
“This place we are in exists outside of time, boy,” the god snapped.
“You are no longer in the past. If you were to walk through that door, any door, you would find yourself back in your own time, where you belong. Kai is in the past, and there is nothing you can do for him. Fate cannot be changed.”
“But—”
“Clocks,” the god exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Let me show you, if you’re so insistent, what would happen if you were to pick at the threads of the past.”
He rifled through a pile of stray pendulums and gears and abacuses, grumbling to himself before he handed Baz an intricate brass scale.
“This,” the god said, “allows you to explore different possibilities without actually disturbing the tapestry itself. I use it to interpret patterns, see all the different ways a thread might work itself into fate’s design.
See what might happen if someone were to change something here, erase something there. ”
“If the past can’t be changed, then what’s the point?”
“The point,” the god growled, setting the instrument between them with an indignant thud, “is that even gods get curious.”
Baz stared at the scale. “So how does it work?”
“Think of a significant moment from your past. A catalyst that would fundamentally change the course of your life had it not happened.”
“The printing press,” Baz said with confidence. “The day I Collapsed.”
The god nodded and, with an enthusiastic flourish, produced two intricately carved wooden beads from one of his many pockets, one white, one black.
“This is your life as it is,” he said, putting the white stone on one side of the scale, “and this is your life as it might have unfolded if you had not Collapsed.” He set the black stone on the other side of the scale.
“Hold that day in your mind. Now, watch the pendulum here in the middle of the scale… and let it show you what might have been.”
The god gave the pendulum a little nudge, and Baz was hypnotized by the steady rocking motion.
The god disappeared, the workshop, too, and he found himself in the printing press he so vividly remembered, almost as if he were in one of his nightmares.
But Kai wasn’t here, and this wasn’t a nightmare.
The scale was still in front of him, the pendulum swinging rhythmically, but the scene around him played out in rapid motion, a blur of color.
He saw himself as a boy with his father and Jae Ahn in their printing press. He saw Keiran’s parents and Lizaveta and Artem’s father enter. He saw the altercation between them and Jae just as he remembered it. But Baz did not Collapse. Keiran’s parents and the Orlov siblings’ father did not die.
A sliver of hope bloomed in Baz’s chest. If he hadn’t Collapsed, hadn’t killed anyone that day…
then surely Keiran would not have become obsessed with bringing back the Tides, would never have gone after Emory.
Baz’s own father wouldn’t have ended up at the Institute. None of this would have ever happened.
But then the rest of the scene unfolded.
No Collapsing on his part meant there was no stopping Keiran’s parents from going after Jae, who was the reason they’d come to the printing press to begin with.
A fight ensued, and in the chaos, Baz’s father told him to run.
He hid in a shop across the street. And when all was said and done, it was Jae who was brought to the Institute, hands bound in damper cuffs.
Their secret—that they had been Collapsed for years—had come to light, and they would now receive the Unhallowed Seal.
The scale skewed off-balance. Fate thrown off course.
The scene shifted before Baz’s eyes, the years speeding up as he followed the thread of everyone’s life who had been at the printing press that day.
He saw Jae at the Institute, where they became a shade of themself, wholly unrecognizable.
He saw his own father, a free man, but a haunted one; in the wake of Jae’s arrest, Theodore closed up shop, the printing press long forgotten, and lost himself in obscure work trying to understand the Nullifying magic used in damper cuffs and the Unhallowed Seal to find a way to reverse the damage.
His work ruffled some feathers, and he, too, ended up at the Institute for misusing his magic.
Baz followed the other threads, seeing Keiran at his parents’ funeral years later, after another tragedy led to their deaths. Keiran still wound up on his quest to bring back the Tides, still went after Emory, still died in Dovermere.
Baz saw himself Collapsing years later to even more catastrophic results.
It happened in Dovermere, on that fateful day he saw Emory slip through the Hourglass.
Here he called on his time magic to try to stop Keiran from going after her, but since Baz hadn’t Collapsed, since his magic was not yet limitless…
This is where it finally happened. A great blast of silver light flooding the Belly of the Beast, killing everyone who was there as the cave crumbled onto itself—Virgil, Nisha, and the rest of the Selenic Order.
Leaving only Baz and Kai alive, their only way out through the Hourglass—where they were pulled, once more, back in time.
The pendulum suddenly stopped, and Baz found himself in the god’s workshop again, everything around him coming back into sharp, dizzying focus.
“You see?” the god said with a defeated, sad smile.
The scale was completely off-balance, even though all of their fates had remained the same—or worse.
“Changing the past is pointless. You might be able to sway individual threads, make things like death and destruction happen sooner or later than they should, but the larger picture remains an immovable outcome. Fate will always autocorrect, leading you down different paths that will still inevitably get you to the same destination. You can’t unwrite what is already written. ”
There was a wistful note to his voice, as if he’d tried to do just that but could not.
Baz righted his glasses. “I can’t accept that. I have to try.”
The god sighed, muttering something to the darkness above them. He looked at Baz, studying him intently before saying, “If I do send you back to the past. If I give you the chance to try changing history. Will you let this go and return home?”
Baz gulped. “Yes.”
Another sigh. “So be it. I will entertain this naive determination of yours.” He rifled through his pockets.
“If you reach the end of the sequence of events and fail to alter the outcome, you’ll be brought back here, and the timeline will reset to what it originally was.
You can then attempt to go back if you wish, however many times you deem necessary.
But be warned—every time we reset, whatever change you did make may leave ripple effects.
Small snags in the tapestry, not of fate in the larger sense, but in the threads of individuals you interact with.
The more directly you try to change things, the more knotted their threads might become, which could lead to all kinds of, ah, unpleasantries in their future. ”
Baz blanched. “Unpleasantries?”
“Drastic changes in behavior, hallucinations, delusions, loss of touch with reality, distorted memories. That sort of thing.”
The god handed Baz a pocket watch that fit in his palm, and for a moment Baz thought it was like the Veiled Atlas compass watch that Emory’s mother had left her. It was similar, but made of bronze, not silver, its clockface full of symbols and lines and words Baz didn’t recognize.
“You will need this to navigate to the past,” the god explained.
He showed Baz how to manipulate the pocket watch.
At the flick of a finger, a little magnifying glass popped out on the side, which would allow him to view past events, see how threads were connected in time.
There was a dial he could turn to make time speed up, so that he wouldn’t need to relive every second of the past and would be able to jump between key moments and locations as needed.
Another dial made the symbols on the clockface come alive, which would render Baz invisible to unwanted eyes—his former self, especially.
“The repercussions of a past version of yourself coming face-to-face with the current version would be…” The god shuddered. “Just don’t let past Baz see you. And for clocks’ sake, don’t lose the pocket watch. You lose it, you lose yourself.”
“Meaning?”
“Ever seen a ship caught in a storm? That’ll be you, adrift in the currents of time, and good luck finding your way back here then.” The god closed Baz’s fingers over the pocket watch. “Don’t. Lose. It.”
Baz’s hands felt unbearably clammy. “Thank you,” he said, trying to put on a brave face.
“Well.” The god gave him a curious look. “Don’t thank me just yet.”
The god snapped his fingers, and shimmering threads of light pulled Baz back into the past.