Chapter 42 Baz
BAZ WAS SUDDENLY SPRAWLED AT the foot of a familiar tree, his limbs tangled with Kai’s.
Their hands were still clasped tightly, a testament to how scared they’d both been to lose the other.
Despite the horrors they’d just escaped, Baz wanted to stay here in this desperate embrace and forget the world around them existed.
Kai seemed to share the sentiment. His eyes dropped to Baz’s mouth. Heat rose up Baz’s neck.
Now wasn’t the time for a proper reunion.
But oh, how he’d missed this—the way his heart galloped at a single look from Kai, how the two of them seemed to melt into each other like hot metal poured into a mold.
They were a perfect fit as Kai’s face nestled in the crook of Baz’s neck and Baz pulled him in closer, arms winding tightly around him.
They held each other in the quiet, not needing words or anything but this closeness, this brief moment of stillness in the chaos.
Noises sounded from afar. Reality crashing in. Too brusque an end to too tender a moment.
Neither of them let the other go even as they got to their feet, as if their interwoven fingers were the last shred of strength they were both holding on to.
Kai’s gaze sharpened as he took in the Reaper room they were in. “What is this place? Where did that bastard send us?”
“Back to Aldryn,” Baz answered. The room was in shambles—the tree half uprooted, the ceiling shattered—and it was empty, quiet. “The others should be here…”
Unless, he thought, they hadn’t gotten out of the portal.
Baz reached for the familiar pocket watch he’d snatched from the god’s workshop—the device that had helped him navigate time travel.
He didn’t know what compelled him to pick it up when he saw it there amid the rubble of the destroyed workshop, but it could come in handy now, to flick open the little magnifying glass that would allow him to view past events.
Before he could do so, noises echoed outside the room again—only this time, there was no denying they were screams.
Wordlessly, Baz and Kai hurried out the door toward the screaming, still holding hands.
Down the corridor, students had amassed outside Decrescens library, their faces pressed against a large diamond-paned window.
They all looked aghast at what they saw outside, hands covering their mouths, tears in their eyes, the air ripe with their fear.
Baz and Kai shoved their way through to see what they all stared at.
The Aldersea wasn’t entirely visible from here, as Decrescens Hall was set farther back from the edge of the cliff, behind Pleniluna Hall.
But Baz could see enough of it to know something had changed.
He couldn’t make sense of it, only grew more and more confused the longer he stared at it.
Students around them were shouting, some of them racing through the corridors toward Pleniluna Hall to get a better view. Baz and Kai ran after them, and finally, on the very top floor of the Pleniluna library, they got a full view of the coast.
In the distance, a storm raged over Cadence, veins of lightning turning the dark skies a deep indigo.
Only it wasn’t Cadence anymore. Not really.
Where the village had once been now stood twin peaks that were as different from each other as night and day: one, a snow-capped mountain of moss-clad rock; the other, a desolate, jagged black volcano.
They seemed fused together in an impossible way, as if the peaks had merged to create one, but fell short of such a vision.
The quaint cottages of Cadence were still there, Baz realized as he swept a gaze down the length of the peaks, but instead of being neatly organized along cobblestone streets gently sloping toward the sea, they now clung to the side of the mountains.
As if a giant had plucked them from their places and scattered them along the mountainside.
And the Aldersea that had hugged the Cadence coast was no longer a sea at all but a sprawling forest of ancient-looking trees, their branches twisting up toward stormy skies.
As Baz stared and stared, trying to make sense of what his eyes were seeing, a loud roar rent the night. The source: something large flying above the twin peaks.
Something that looked, impossibly, like a dragon.
Understanding hit Baz all at once. Clover hadn’t blown up all the doors between worlds.
He’d gone one step further and combined all worlds, fusing them together.
Whatever he did had created this great cosmic shift that saw the four worlds overlapping in strange, chaotic ways.
Forests growing out of the sea. Snowy peaks sprouting in the space between islands.
Beaches becoming deserts with rivers of lava running through.
Different shores colliding to make something new.
All the worlds’ peoples and beasts and magics clashing in this one great space, so that Clover could easily rule over this new domain of his.
A world without borders. Without limits.
One endless shore, rife with infinite possibilities.