Page 74 of Revert
My fingers trembled as my hand rose, reaching for it…
“Wait.” Castiel’s strained voice reached me, warped by the slow-time spell. Even through the stillness, his eyes had found mine across the chamber. He couldn’t move, but his love anchored me.
Though he gave no reprobation for what I was about to do, I could sense his uncertainty over what would happen should I undo too much of the tapestry that connected us. I hesitatedat the thought, my own fear at losing the love I had just rediscovered…before remembering that no matter how often the alternate timelines we’d lived had deviated, we had always found our way back to one another.
With this promise in my heart, I reached for the anchor thread and drew my dagger, cutting it with intention. A pulse of magic burst from my fingers as the thread snapped with a sound like thunder cracking the sky.
The hourglass flared blinding white. The suspended sands reversed for a breath before spilling downward in a golden haze that illuminated the runes comprising the chamber.
The king screamed as he was ripped from his place mid-strike, thrown backward by a force no blade could touch. Threads from the timelines he had manipulated whipped through the air and bound him. His eyes locked on mine, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear.
“No!” he bellowed. “I am Thorndale’s master. This kingdom belongs tome.”
But the hourglass had already passed judgment. A final rune blazed to life beneath him—an infinity loop, closed and sealed. With a burst of searing light, he was gone, trapped somewhere in the past.
The chamber stilled as the slow-time spell unraveled and sound and motion returned, and the last of the magic settled into silence. The constellations of memory still patterned the ceiling, the frayed timelines glowing with quiet light.
Castiel’s sword clattered to the floor and he collapsed. I rushed to his side, fearing that the king had managed to stab him before he vanished. I knelt beside him, brushing the hair away from his damp forehead with trembling fingers. Our gazes met and he looked at me with such bewilderment that for a horrifying moment I feared that the time I had changed had altered his love after all. But then his eyes softened.
“You did it. You found the one trap he never saw coming.” He extended his hand and I took his, relishing in the comfort that came from his fingers enclosing mine, the sense of at long last coming home.
“We did it,” I breathed. “Thank you for giving me the time I needed.” Both now, and in every life we’d lived before this one.
But even as relief surged through me, I felt the magical hum of the threads behind me. I turned to see them still quivering uncertainly, realigning themselves in the king’s absence. We hadn’t rewritten the past, but we had unshackled the future, allowing it to unfold as it had always meant to.
Castiel rose slowly, turning to face the hourglass. Together we watched as sand flowed at a natural pace now that time was no longer trapped under any one man’s dominion; time had resumed its natural course, even as everything still felt suspended.
Castiel’s gaze slowly met mine. For a moment, time seemed as though it had re-frozen as we stared at one another. So many lifetimes lived between us. So many betrayals and redemptions, wounds reopened and resealed. He had killed me once, saved me more than that. And now here we stood—both changed, and yet somehow still ourselves.
He reached up, brushing a strand of hair from my face, his touch gentle yet uncertain, as if he still wasn’t sure he was allowed to be with me in this way. “What now?”
I heard what he was really asking—in the future that lay before us, did I want to create one with him, now that we were no longer bound to each other by king’s edict and a desperate kingdom’s need? I reached up to rest my hand over his that cradled my face.
“You are the only path for me,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “We’ve loved each other in fragments, and those are the ones I want to keep building with you forever.”
“Like flowers blooming in the ruins.” The look in his eyes said everything: he had chosen me long before I knew to choose him back.
The chamber’s silver light cast soft shadows across his face. I studied every line of it—the furrow of his brow, the quiet ache in his expression, the awe that hadn’t faded since I’d touched time itself.
I slid my hand downward, resting it over his heart. “I don’t know what happens next, or what the future holds. Only that no matter what mistakes we make or pain we unintentionally cause, this time there will be no redo.”
“Whatever it holds, we make this life the timeline that matters most, one worth keeping.” He reached for me then—no hesitation, no distance—and I met him halfway, allowing myself to choose him without fear, and with no intention of ever letting him go.
We kissed, this time without the fear of forgetting, the kind of kiss meant to last beyond endings and time itself—a vow written into the thread of whatever life might come next.
EPILOGUE
After so many endings and redos, the hourglass marked what it had never truly offered before: a beginning. One unburdened by loops or resets, one that lay wholly before us, unshaped, ours for creating. After all the timelines we lost each other in, Castiel made sure we got it right in this one.
The Chamber of Timelines sealed itself behind us after we left it for the final time—whether it vanished entirely or merely hid in some forgotten corridor of the castle, we never searched for it again. We had no desire to look back. Instead, the future we chose would be forged not by perfection, but by intention—by doing our best with each step forward, healing what we could, and growing through the missteps we couldn't erase.
With the king finally gone, the darkness that had overshadowed Thorndale for countless years began to dissipate—not all at once, but slowly, like frost receding beneath spring light. The fear and absolute control that had defined so much of our past hadn’t vanished overnight. Time, the very power that had been used to wound the kingdom, was also what was needed to heal it.
Like the daffodils that bloomed in the ruins of our once-secret sanctuary—rising pale gold and trembling through thethawed earth after a long, cruel winter—hope surfaced in small shafts of sunlight, appearing first in whispers, then in rays. Choice by choice, person by person, joy began to return to Thorndale, gradually illuminating the kingdom until no shadows remained.
Though the past could not be undone, echoes of former timelines revealed themselves like soft footprints in unexpected corners of the palace, surprises that would give birth to a forgotten memory: the faint scent of ink in an unused wing, the haunting familiarity of a melody drifting from a distant corridor, the inexplicable sense of déjà vu when a servant smiled just so. I would stumble upon these fragments by accident, and with them would come the warm ache of memory—pieces of a life I had once lived and lost.
The remembered moments tied to Castiel felt like unearthed treasure, both the joyous ones…and the ones filled with heartache that shaped who I’d become. The romantic memories I couldn’t reclaim on my own, Castiel seemed determined to recreate for me, so that I wouldn’t forget a single moment of the story of how we’d fallen in love.
