Page 11 of Revert
If there were answers waiting in the forgotten corners—ones I’d missed the first time—I had to find them…even if it meant taking such a calculated risk. I would walk the path again, not because I trusted him, but because I trusted myself to see what I hadn’t before.
And if it was a trap…then at least I’d know where we stood.
Later that night,once the palace had quieted and the corridors emptied of their usual patrols, I slipped from my chambers and returned to where it had begun, like a shadow revisiting the place of its own death.
My heart beat erratically as I crept through the dimly lit halls, each step a ghostly echo of those I had taken before. The hush of night blanketed the palace in silence, thick and watchful. I knew these turns—had walked them just before I died—but this time, I was not running; I washunting.
In my first life, I had stumbled upon the hidden stairwell purely by accident, shortly before my demise. Beneath a long-forgotten tapestry in the old servants’ wing, I’d discovered a narrow corridor leading to a crumbling spiral staircase that descended into the castle depths. At the bottom a heavy door blocked my path, sealed with an enchantment I’d been desperate to unlock.
I hadn’t gotten the chance, for that was where he’d found me…and killed me.
Despite the dread coiled tight in my chest, I retraced that path now with trembling resolve, determined to understand what I had found and why it had cost me my life.
But fear of discovery wasn’t the only shadow haunting my steps—this was my first deliberate deviation from the events of the original timeline. In that life, it had taken me weeks longer to find the hidden passage; accessing it so soon would likely alter the path.
Though it was Prince Castiel’s words that had pushed me to act, I reminded myself it was likely too soon for him to have gathered the evidence that led him to that dungeon corridor in the first timeline. And yet, I couldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility I had already crossed that unseen pivot point when he first began to doubt me, and his inaction thus far had been nothing more than the illusion of safety.
Regardless of whether his scrutiny and crafted suggestion was a carefully set trap, I would need to make this pilgrimage eventually. The sooner I faced it, the better chance I had of changing the outcome from its previous tragic end.
I ventured deeper into the darkness. To the untrained eye, it looked like any other corridor in the neglected wing of the palace, but I knew better—veiled secrets slumbered just beyond reach, waiting to be uncovered.
I drew a steadying breath and ventured into the corridor I hadn’t visited since I’d been sent back in time, each footfall cautious and measured, as if the proximity of the site of my death was enough to stir my survival instinct.
I reached the faded tapestry and brushed it aside. The passage yawned before me, dark and unchanged. After scanning the surrounding shadows to ensure I was alone, I cautiously stepped inside. I crept down the spiral stairs, the air growing damper with each careful step.
Though I was investigating this forgotten section of the palace earlier than I had in the previous timeline, something felt…off, more than just a date different than my previous explorations, as though the stone itself remembered something I did not.
The descent didn’t take as long as I remembered, and when I reached the bottom, the door I expected to greet me with a looming sense of finality was gone. Instead, the passage twisted deeper than before, disappearing into shadows. Where once the narrow stairwell had ended in a sealed door, tonight the path veered left, leading down a corridor that hadn’t existed before, a wall that should not have been there barring the way I remembered.
I faltered, heart thudding in warning. Had I taken a wrong turn? But there had only ever been one path down, with no deviating fork that would have misdirected me. I retraced my last steps, but the original staircase was no longer there. Only smooth, unbroken stone met my searching fingers, sealing off the path as if it had never existed at all.
Panic prickled at the edges of my composure. Was this some cruel trick of the timeline? A memory lost, or a fragment rewritten? But no, my death had been too vivid not to have been real. Something had changed, but not my memory—it was the palace itself that had shifted.
A faint draft whispered from the direction of the new corridor, carrying a tingle I recognized as ancient magic, beckoning me to follow. I hesitated before turning towards it. I had no reason to trust Thorndale magic any more than I trusted its rulers. And yet I couldn’t afford to ignore a potential clue that could aid me in my mission.
I took slow, careful steps down the path, my footfalls muffled by dust, scarcely echoing off the stone. The passage opened into a small circular chamber, sealed off from time. Dust carpeted thestone floor, undisturbed for years, and yet the air wasn’t stale—it smelled of parchment and forgotten secrets, thrumming with a resonance deeper than magic, a resonance that felt like recognition.
The walls curved inward, tiled with faded mosaic. Though their colors had dulled with time, their shapes remained vivid: spirals, loops, and strange hourglass-like glyphs overlaid upon shadowed silhouettes of kingdoms—some familiar, others unrecognizable—a mural of time itself.
I froze, pulse racing. To my knowledge, this room hadn’t existed in my first life. I had never seen anything like it—not in the palace records I’d stolen glimpses of during my time here, nor in any of my studies. And yet I sensed it had always been here, hidden and waiting for my discovery.
At the chamber’s center stood a pedestal carved from dark stone, inlaid with silver lines forming the same spiral sigil echoed throughout the mural. My breath caught the moment my gaze landed upon it. I knew that symbol.
I’d seen it once before—half-concealed in a forbidden archive during my earliest days in Thorndale, its meaning unexplained. I hadn’t thought much of it then, but now surrounded by the silent pulse of time and memory, faced with its echo in this hidden chamber, I felt its weight settle over me.
Some unseen force I couldn’t name beckoned me, a silent whisper drawing me forward. I stepped closer and reached out tentative fingers. I’d barely grazed the sigil when the air shifted, and the room responded.
A soft glow stirred beneath my hand, not harsh or bright, but a gentle heartbeat beneath the stone. Light laced outward along the silver channels, threading through the pattern like threads catching moonlight. The mural shimmered as its symbols came alive, flickering faintly just for a breath.
A whisper suddenly curled into my thoughts, not spoken aloud but felt.One path unmade, one path undone…
I staggered back, breath catching. The words vanished as quickly as they came, but their echo lingered, vibrating through every tremor.
My mind whirled as I stared at the sigil. This was no ordinary relic, but I couldn’t even begin to understand its true purpose. Only that the magic within had responded to me, as if in recognition, as if it remembered me from a time I no longer recalled.
Was this tied to whatever force had spun time backward? The silence filling the chamber felt charged, almost watchful. I tried to still the rising tide of questions flooding my thoughts, but I had no answers. Only the growing certainty that I was more deeply entangled in these secrets and mysteries than I had realized.
I needed time to think, to reassess, to plan.
