Page 69 of Chaos Carnival

Her warm laugh over morning coffee, her frantic baking when the world felt too much. She’d worry about me, wouldn’t she? Of course she would.

Would she still sit at the kitchen table, sketching tattoo designs while waiting for me to come home? Or would my absence consume her, leave her with that hollowness I’d never wanted for her?

My chest ached at the thought—except I didn’t have a chest anymore. Just the ghost of an emotion, lingering like hunger.

My clients.

Hadn’t I promised to ink a piece for Liz next week? A phoenix design she’d been waiting years to get? Would they know I was gone? Or would they think I’d simply abandoned them?

My life was unraveling, piece by piece, but the strands that mattered most glowed brighter, more vivid.

Maverick.

The mate bond flared, sharp and piercing even in this shapeless nothingness. If I’d had a heart, it would have twisted in my chest at the thought of him. He’d claimed me without asking, turned my world upside down, forced me into a life I hadn’t chosen.

But he’d also loved me. Fiercely. Entirely.

Even when I couldn’t hold myself together, when the webs had threatened to pull me apart, he’d been my anchor. My steady flame in the dark.

Not like Ivan.

Ivan, who’d whispered lies in my ears and carved chains into my soul. Who’d broken me down until I’d thought there was nothing left but his control.

Ivan, whose fear had tasted bitter and sharp when the chords devoured him in the end.

At least he was gone now.

But Maverick wasn’t gone. He was... here?

Somewhere.

I stilled, reaching out with a sense I didn’t fully understand. And then I felt them—four points of light glowing against the infinite obscurity.

Stone.

Lux.

Maverick.

Addie.

They pulsed, brilliant and unwavering, though one outshone the others. Maverick’s presence flared like a sun, the mate bond blazing between us. It was all I had left to cling to, a thread tethering me to what little was real.

The panic ebbed, fading into a strange calm as I turned my focus inward. In this formless state, the patterns began to emerge.

Threads.

Everywhere.

Flowing and weaving through existence itself, forming the fabric of time and the universe. They shimmered and shifted, more vivid than I’d ever seen before—because I’d become one with them.

The ribbons carried echoes: of life, of death, of everything in between. If I’d had lungs, I might have gasped at their beauty, their complexity. I’d always known they were there, whispering in the corners, but now they enveloped me, as intimate as my own thoughts.

The knowledge hit like a tidal wave.

Past, present, and future crashed through me in a dizzying rush. I saw everything—every choice, every consequence, every path that could be taken. The sheer weight of it should have crushed me, but without physical form, I simply expanded to contain it all.

I watched civilizations rise and fall across a thousand worlds. Stars were born and died in the span of a thought. Witnessed the first spark of life emerge from primordial seas, and the last light fade from the universe's dying embers.

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