Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
The winter field shudders at the edges, Astrid’s shape flickering briefly, her face younger, before the madness had carved lines into it, before her eyes had started holding that vacancy I’d spent months telling myself I wasn’t seeing.
What if I’d loved her enough to look sooner?
The loop resets.
She is twenty feet away.
What if you’d been stronger?
The field is already white with frost when I hit it at speed, the ground cracking under my boots as I force through it, every step biting and unstable beneath me. The light is too pale, too flat, the kind that burns everything clean of shadow, and she’s in the middle of it.
Still moving.
Still tearing through anything that gets close enough to matter.
She’s rabid, completely out of control.
Astrid turns through another strike, her movements sharp and violent, power snapping through her limbs in uneven bursts that don’t quite hold together, like something inside her is pushing harder than her body can sustain.
I see the fracture points in it, the places where control slips for half a second before snapping back into place, and I know exactly what’s coming.
I push harder, forcing more speed out of a body that already knows the limit, closing distance that never seems to close fast enough.
The frost splits under me in jagged lines, the ground resisting every step like it’s trying to hold me back, as if it knows where this ends and is making sure I don’t get there in time to change it.
“Astrid!”
She doesn’t hear me.
Or she does, and it doesn’t reach the part of her that would know what to do with it.
She turns again, too fast, too sharp, her focus snapping to a new target that isn’t there, reacting to something only she can see. Mordain’s poison is still deep in her system, still driving her, still tearing through whatever is left of her control.
I know this moment.
I know this exact shape of it, the timing, the way her movements start to destabilize, the way the power begins to burn too hot, too fast, pushing her past anything her body can hold.
This is where it starts to go.
This is where I lose her.
I force more speed, every ounce of strength I’ve got pushing into the distance between us, but it isn’t enough.
It’s never enough.
All those years, and it still comes down to this.
Still comes down to being just out of reach.
What if… The thought cuts through hard, sharp enough to feel like it comes from somewhere outside of me.
What if I hadn’t hesitated the first time?
What if the second I saw the change in her, the first crack, the first sign that something was wrong, I didn’t wait, didn’t try to understand it, didn’t give it time to become this?
She stumbles.
Just slightly.
Barely enough to notice if I didn’t know exactly what it means.
My chest locks tight around it.
That is the point.
That is where it starts to slip past the point of saving.
What if I’d moved then?
What if I’d ended it before it became this, before it took her, before it turned her into something I have to fight through to reach what’s left?
“Astrid!” I’m closer now.
But not close enough.
The distance still stretches between us, as though it’s been set that way on purpose, like no amount of speed I have is ever going to be enough to break it.
Her head snaps in my direction for half a second, something in her focus catching, flickering, and I see her.
Buried under it.
Still there.
And then it’s gone again.
The rampage surges back in, harder this time, the last of it burning through her system in a violent spike that I know exactly how this ends.
I push harder anyway.
I always do.
What if I had never loved her at all? The thought lands like a blade, and I stop moving. In the loop. In whatever place inside my own blood this toxin has dragged me to.
I just stop.
Because that one is new, it is the cruelest variation yet, and it has knocked something loose in the thin, small, fraying part of me that knows this isn’t real.
What if you had never loved her at all?
Then she would have died in someone else’s arms. Or in no one’s. She would have died alone inside what Mordain made her, with no one who knew her before to hold her as she went.
She thanked me.
I have spent centuries using that as proof of how completely I failed her.
The sentence that meant she knew what I was doing, that she felt it, that I had driven the blade into the woman I loved while she was coherent enough to recognize my hands, and still she forgave me—the forgiveness itself was the punishment.
That’s what I’ve carried.
That is the cage.
Something shifts beyond the black.
The sensation drags at me from a distance I can’t measure, working its way through the heavy, dreamless weight holding me down. Sound follows in scattered pieces, warped and broken as it forces its way through whatever separates me from the waking world.
There’s stone cracking somewhere. The thunderous collapse of something big enough to shake the ground beneath it. Voices are buried inside the noise, rough, urgent, and achingly familiar. I can’t make out the words or separate one voice from another, but I know the shape of them—my brothers.
The realization settles deep, instinctive and certain.
Something is happening. Something bad. I try to reach for it, but the darkness drags me back before I can get a grip.
Then another sound slips through the cracks. Softer than the rest. Stronger.