Chapter 37 Baz
ALONE ON THE PATH BETWEEN godsworld and abyss, Baz went to work analyzing the complex tapestry of threads coming out of the floating hourglass.
He ran delicate fingers through the ethereal, immaterial strands, getting faint impressions of different people through time.
He let instinct guide him until his magic found the threads that connected to Kai and Luce, both of them intertwined.
Baz tugged on these threads with his magic, following the now familiar course they took through time.
The Wychwood they’d gone through with Clover.
The sleepscape swallowing them up. The dark depths of what had to be the abyss.
An obsidian path spiraling up, bringing them ever so closer to where Baz stood…
Those threads cleaved again. Fated oblivion. The end.
But the ritual, rescuing Kai and Luce from the abyss…
wasn’t it all supposed to avoid this fate?
Baz wanted desperately to let go of his magic and go tearing down the path to pull Kai out of hell himself, to see him one last time before oblivion could come.
But those whispers were in his ear again, making him reach out to another thread, one that was connected to Kai and Luce but ran back up the path in the opposite direction—in the godsworld.
Here, it connected to another’s fate. Someone else Baz was familiar with.
Clover.
Their fates were tied. Kai and Luce in the abyss, Clover in the godsworld. A triad of power, connected by threads that Kai himself had noticed when dreaming, this bond they shared that could never quite be explained.
Curiosity had Baz exploring Clover’s thread further. When he’d done so before, in the god’s workshop, Clover’s thread had been too far out of his reach for him to see. But perhaps being at fate’s central core made it easier to follow.
And Baz could see everything in it. Clover’s past—how he’d watched Kai and Luce fall off the bridge of stars between the Wychwood and the Wastes; how he’d journeyed through the other worlds alone, killing the warrior and then the guardian, taking their power, before going after the gods, too.
His present—how he sat in the godsworld, recovering from his last encounter with Emory, raging against his failed attempt to gorge himself on Atheia’s and Sidraeus’s power and make himself into a proper god.
And his future—the threads of Clover’s life fraying into a hundred different possibilities. Baz followed the brightest and thickest one, assuming it was the thread with the likeliest outcome. What he saw made his stomach drop:
Clover, now a god in full, stood triumphant over Emory’s slain body in a world reduced to ash.
Then—nothing. The thread of Clover’s life ended, but not because he was dead.
It was the same way Kai’s and Luce’s threads ended.
But this oblivion wasn’t reserved for a single person.
Everything came to an abrupt end. As if the universe itself ceased to exist, and from the ashes emerged a new one.
As if someone had wiped the board clean and started everything anew.
Heart pounding, Baz backtracked and followed the other fraying threads of Clover’s future. In one possibility, Clover died at the hands of Emory, though it wasn’t the Emory that Baz knew; it was an Emory who had made herself into a dark god like Clover, her power corrupted beyond recognition.
In another, Clover killed Emory, Sidraeus, and Atheia in one fell swoop, spilling their blood into a great fountain, before turning on the boy who’d given Baz the Reaper tree ritual—Equilibris’s old apprentice—whose face shifted between his own and four others who Baz understood to be the gods of the living realms.
In yet another, Clover stood over those same four gods, though they were in their own bodies here, hollowed-out husks that Clover had bled of every morsel of power.
Wiping ichor from his mouth, he smiled tauntingly at Equilibris.
So you’ve come to stop me at last, Clover said, before this thread ended in oblivion, just like everyone else’s.
Every possibility spelled death, and every one of these threads ended the same way: with the worlds resetting, and everyone Baz had ever known ceasing to exist forever.
Baz pulled back from the hourglass. An overpowering dread rose inside him. No matter how he looked at it, the outcome remained the same: obliteration. A complete erasure of life as they knew it.
A sudden gust of wind knocked him back as it rushed past him. Before Baz could make sense of what he was seeing—the ghostly outline of a boy in the midst of a strangely shifting whirl of ethereal power—it slipped through the portal, disappearing beyond.
Baz stood transfixed. It had happened so fast, but the face he’d seen, those rugged features and deep blue eyes that had stared right at him before disappearing through the portal… He knew this boy. It was Equilibris’s old apprentice.
A horrible inkling seized him moments before the screaming began.
It came from far down the path in the direction of the abyss.
Like a howling wind passing through a tunnel.
Cries of agony. A name—Baz’s name—called in a voice that should have been midnight smooth but was sharpened now by desperation.
Baz tore down the path. He didn’t question if this was another hallucination. Nothing else mattered now but reaching Kai, because he knew in his gut that this was him, really him, and something was terribly wrong.
And he was right. He’d made it only a few steps from the hourglass when they came into view: Kai and Luce running toward him, looking exactly as he remembered.
For a second, the breath was knocked right out of Baz at the sight of Kai.
He wore clothes that hailed from a different era, a loose-fitting ecru shirt tucked into dark breeches, the shirt laces at the top undone at his chest so that the tattoos around his collarbone were visible.
Baz imagined closing the distance between them and embracing in some sweeping, romantic reunion.
Imagined stepping out of the portal together and putting this all too real nightmare behind them.
But it was as if hell itself were pulling on Kai and Luce.
Spindly black roots were wrapped around their limbs, making every step an impossible torment.
Panicking, Baz wound the threads of time back on these roots, trying to send them back to where they came from.
Some of them let go for a second before they shot forward again with renewed force, completely out of Baz’s control.
“Brysden.” Kai’s voice was hoarse. The roots were encircling his chest, tendrils of them wrapping around his neck as if to entomb him. “There’s no point. The abyss won’t let us go.”
Those dark, midnight eyes that Baz loved so much, usually so full of starlight, were dull now. Haunted. These were the eyes of someone resigned to the idea that salvation was completely out of reach.
“No.” Baz refused for this to be the end. He closed the distance between them and tried to pull at the roots with his bare hands. “This was my purpose. To bring you out of hell. The god’s apprentice said—”
“Baz.” Kai weakly grabbed his wrist. “The only reason you were sent here was to open a doorway for the gods to escape through. That piece of shit lied to you—to all of us. It’s too late now.”
Baz gazed down at Kai’s fingers around his wrist, realizing why they felt so off. The tip of them was black obsidian. A whimper from Luce had him glancing at her. She wore the same look of defeat on her tearstained face as roots and obsidian slowly overtook her.
Kai and Luce were turning to stone before his eyes, as if becoming part of the very path beneath their feet.
Baz realized then what they had already pieced together: it had all been for nothing.
Opening the Reaper tree portal, setting foot on this path, pulling Kai and Luce from the abyss…
None of it mattered because Kai and Luce couldn’t return to the world of the living.
The abyss had claimed them, and now they belonged to the realm of death.
Baz shouldn’t have been surprised. The god of balance did warn him that there was no changing fate. Pulling at loose threads, trying to create snags in the tapestry, attempting to dupe fate however he could… All pointless, in the end.
And yet…
In his fourth attempt at changing the past, he’d sought to replace Kai with Thames as the one who would follow Clover through the door. A reversal of fates, so to speak, that he never did see the outcome of because he’d been interrupted by the god’s apprentice.
What if it was the answer now?
“Baz.” Kai’s voice was faint. “I know you made me promise not to say anything back until all this was over, but I need you to know before it’s too late. I love you too.”
For a moment, Baz didn’t understand—until he remembered the nightmare they’d shared the last time he’d gone back in time.
Whatever happens, promise me you’ll remember that… that I love you.
His last, desperate attempt to try to change fate. In some small way, it had worked—Kai had actually remembered what Baz had said to him in dreaming.
This couldn’t be the end of their story. Not after everything they’d gone through to get back to each other.
The hourglass called to Baz again. Purpose sang in his veins as in his mind he saw again how Kai’s and Luce’s fates were tied to Clover’s through whatever bond they shared. A triad of power, two points of a triangle condemned to hell, while the other was confined to the godsworld.
Above, below, side to side. A mirror, an hourglass, a scale onto which balance must be kept. A breath in, a breath out. Divine symmetry.
Baz sprang toward the hourglass with sudden clarity. This was the price of taking Kai and Luce out of the abyss: there needed to be someone to take their place, to balance the scales. A Tidecaller in the godsworld in exchange for a Nightmare Weaver and Dreamer in the abyss.
A reversal of fates.
If Clover were the one bound to the abyss, it would rid them of him for good, trapping his corrupt soul where it belonged. Maybe it would prevent the future Baz had seen, the bleak fate that awaited the worlds.
And if Kai and Luce were bound to the godsworld, Baz was willing to bet they could walk right through this portal—that the rules of heaven weren’t as cruel as those of hell, and it would let them return to the realms of the living without resistance.
Even if they couldn’t, they would still be better off ending up in the sea of ash rather than the abyss.
From there, they could make their way through the doors back to their own world—back to Baz and Emory and everyone who wished to see them safely returned.
Baz’s hand touched the hourglass. A sense of rightness spread through him as he held those three fates quite literally in his hands, Kai’s and Luce’s connected to one side of the hourglass, Clover’s to the other.
All the other threads within the crisscrossing pattern disappeared, retracting into the glass bulbs, until there were only these three shimmering lines unspooling from the hourglass.
All Baz had to do was to turn it, and their positions would be reversed.
A turn of the glass, a reversal of fate, until Kai and Luce were above, and Clover deep down below where he had always belonged.
“Brysden,” Kai called out weakly. His legs were entirely turned to stone, and only his face was visible now beneath the roots.
“If this doesn’t work,” Baz breathed, “I’ll find you in godsworld.”
The ground beneath him tilted as he flipped the hourglass over.