Chapter 10 #2
"I mean, the gate should have worked the way he intended. But clearly, it didn’t.
Something interfered with the transfer of power.
" He presses his palms against the floor, and his marks flare.
"It didn't pull her to him. It pulled him toward her.
Into the iterations. He'd have been drawn in and deposited somewhere in the timeline, but not necessarily where she is. "
Vashael's hand goes to her mouth. Nimor has gone very still beside me.
"You're telling me," I say, keeping my voice level because one of us has to, "that Kaelren is lost in the iterations. Without a way back. And Elle is still scattered across time."
"I'm telling you they're both in the iterations, most likely in different ones, and neither of them has a clear path home.
" He pulls his hands back and folds them in his lap.
"The bond between them still exists. If they can find each other across the timelines, if Kaelren can locate enough of Elle's consciousness to anchor her back to a single moment, they might be able to return. But that's a lot of ifs."
"Can we reopen the gate from this side? Pull them through?"
"Not without the locket. Kaelren must have it with him." He shakes his head. "We can't reach them. We can't help them."
I let that settle. It's not the information that gets easier the longer you hold it.
"The chasms," I say, steering us back to what we can actually affect. "Tell me what's happening to Wynmire."
He places both palms flat on the floor again, and his marks flare.
Light threads outward from his hands, spreading across the stone.
"The realms are held together by the bond between the two anchors.
Root and Bloom, fae and human, Kaelren and Elle.
Without both anchors present and bonded in the current timeline, the connection degrades. The boundary between worlds thins."
The floor trembles. Just enough to rattle the jars on the shelves and send fine dust drifting through the air.
"The chasm east of the river colony," Nimor says.
"That's the beginning. More will form. From the weakest points outward, the ground will open, the boundaries will dissolve, and Wynmire will fold in on itself.
" His marks pulse faster. "I've seen it happen in three other iterations.
The ones that collapsed before Elle could visit them. The ones where the anchors failed."
"How long do we have?"
"I don't know. Weeks, maybe. Months, if we're lucky.
It depends on how fast the degradation accelerates.
" He looks at each of us. "Kaelren is stubborn, and he loves her beyond reason.
If anyone can find her, it's him. But we need to keep this realm standing until he does, because if Wynmire falls apart while they're still in the iterations, there's nothing for them to come back to. "
The trembling doesn't stop. It deepens.
The shelves sway, and from above us comes a low, structural groan, stone under pressure it wasn't built to handle.
Corivel looks around nervously. "We need to leave. The wards are reacting to the instability. If the locking sequence breaks—"
The ceiling cracks creating a full split that races across the stone, dropping chunks of rock. One of the sealed jars on the shelf behind Eltrien shatters.
"Move," I say. "Now."
Eltrien grabs three texts and shoves them into his pack. I don't argue with his priorities.
We run.
The Athervault is reacting to the tremors by contracting, causing wards to flare in panicked bursts, sealing corridors we need to pass through. Corivel shouts sequences at the walls, his fingers flying across stone surfaces, but the wards are fighting him. They're trying to close.
"This way!" He redirects us down a side passage I don't remember from the way in. The floor tilts, ten degrees, maybe more, the stone shifting beneath our feet.
On level seven, a section of shelving has collapsed across the corridor. Beneath the wreckage, a voice. Weak, muffled.
I don't hesitate. My thorns extend, and I cut through the fallen wood and stone, Nimor beside me with hands that phase through the rubble and solidify around the pieces that need moving. We pull out a young fae, a researcher by the look of her, clutching a scroll to her chest.
"Can you walk?" I ask.
She nods, shaking. We keep moving.
Level six gives us two more, an archivist and his apprentice, both trapped behind a ward that activated and locked them in when the tremors started. Corivel disables it, cursing under his breath, and we add them to our group.
By level four, the ceiling is dropping. The mountain is compressing around us. We're running bent over, the fae we've collected stumbling behind us, and Vashael's breathing has gone ragged.
"Corivel—"
"I know!" He's running his fingers along the wall, searching for the ward sequence for level three. His hands are shaking. "The sequence is twelve points; I need—"
A chunk of ceiling the size of a table drops five feet behind us. The young researcher screams.
"Seven seconds," Corivel says, fingers finding stones and pressing.
The ceiling drops another six inches. I brace my arms against it, thorns digging into stone, buying what I can. My back screams. Two thorns snap; the pain shoots from my forearms to my spine and whites out my vision for a half-second.
"Now!" Corivel shouts.
The ward releases. The door appears. Nimor shoves everyone through, and I throw myself after them as the ceiling meets the floor behind us.
We don't stop. The Athervault is sealing itself level by level, and we're racing upward, against the closure, through corridors that narrow, wards that flash, doors that appear only long enough for us to dive through.
When we burst out of the entrance into the open air, gasping and bleeding and covered in dust, the mountain makes a sound like stone exhaling. The entrance seals, closing the Athervault. Whatever we didn't take with us is locked inside.
I count heads. Vashael, Nimor, Eltrien. Corivel. The three fae we pulled from the wreckage. Everyone is breathing.
My broken thorns ache. I can feel new ones already pushing through to replace them. It'll take days. In the meantime, my left arm is useless for anything requiring precision.
"The texts?" I ask Eltrien.
He pats his pack. Still there.
"Then we move. Whatever's happening back at camp isn't waiting for us."
We make the return journey in a day and a half, pushing through exhaustion. By the time we crest the ridge overlooking camp, I know something has changed. The ground carries a low, constant vibration that wasn't there when we left.
And I can see it.
The chasm has grown. What was originally fifty feet across is now easily three times that, a dark wound in the earth stretching toward the river colony in one direction and the Thornwood border in the other. Mist rises from its edges, carrying a damp, rotten smell that turns my stomach.
But that's not the worst of it.
The plants have changed. Along the chasm's edge, where the new blooms had been growing strong and healthy since Elle's sacrifice, the vegetation has changed.
Vines that should be dormant are now sentient.
They coil around rocks and pull. They reach for passing birds and grab.
A copse of trees near the southern edge has developed thorns the length of my arm, and as I watch, one of them swipes at a deer that strayed too close. The animal bolts. The tree tracks it.
"That's new," Vashael says.
"Without the anchors, the Root's power is unregulated," Eltrien says. "The plants are responding to raw, unchanneled energy. They're not malicious; they're flooded with power they weren't designed to hold."
"That distinction won't matter to the people they kill," I say. "We need to evacuate the nearest settlements. Nimor, get word to Vyn Hollow and Silverpine. Pull everyone back to Willowmere. It's far enough from the chasm to buy us time."
He's already phasing. "On it."
"Vashael—"
A horn sounds. From the north. Deep, resonant, and I recognize it because I've fought alongside the man who carries it.
Thrak's army crests the northern ridge twenty minutes later with two hundred soldiers, armed and organized, with Thrak at the front. He's got a new scar across his jaw, and his one good eye carries the focus of a man who's been fighting his way here. So much for needing to alert Silverpine.
"Sarnyx." He dismounts and crosses to me. "Where's Kaelren?"
"Gone. Into the iterations. Searching for Elle."
He processes that for a few moments, then nods. "So then, you're in command."
"I'm not—"
"You are." He surveys the chasm, the writhing vegetation. "We ran into the plant problem on the march south. Lost three scouts along the way. My people have been cutting a path through the worst of it, but it's spreading faster than we can clear."
"The Root's power is unchanneled. Everything with roots is reacting to it."
"I don't care why they're doing it. I care about keeping people alive." He turns back to me. "What's the plan?"
The plan. As if there's a neat strategy for holding together a realm whose two anchors are both lost somewhere in time. Right. Time to do this.
"Evacuations first. Every settlement within five miles of the chasm needs to be pulled back to Willowmere.
Thrak, your people form the perimeter to contain the sentient vegetation.
Nothing gets past the line. Vashael, coordinate the civilian movement.
Eltrien, I need you working on anything that can slow the chasm's growth. "
"I can try a stabilization array," Eltrien says. "Root wards anchored along the rim. It won't stop it, but it might slow the expansion."
"Slow is enough for now."
"And long-term?" Thrak asks.
"Long term, we need Kaelren and Elle back. Both of them together, bonded in this timeline. That's the only thing that fixes this."
"And if they don't come back?"
The chasm groans a deep vibration I feel in my chest. Along its edge, the sentient plants thrash harder. A vine as thick as my torso lashes out and shatters a boulder. The pieces fall into the darkness below, and I don't hear them land.
"They'll come back," I assert, and I make it sound like a fact instead of a prayer. "We just have to keep things standing until they do."
Thrak nods once, turns to his army and starts barking orders. Within minutes, his soldiers are moving. Perimeter teams are heading south, evacuation squads forming, and a forward unit already engaging a cluster of sentient vines that have wrapped themselves around a nearby bridge.
I stand at the edge of the chasm and look down.
I try to calculate the rate of expansion against remaining stable ground, and the math isn't kind.
But I don't share that. I retract my thorns, set my jaw, and walk toward the perimeter line where Thrak's soldiers are already fighting.
There's work to do.
Kaelren, wherever you are—hurry.