Page 63 of Revert
“However…” The king’s tone shifted again—colder now, calculated. “I am a man of my word. You pleaded for her life when I struck her down after sensing your dangerous devotion to her. Claimed she would make you a better king, that if she lived you would give me your will in return. A bold promise from an heir I had shaped to serve me.”
My breath hitched.
“Because of your oath—and the nuisance her death would have caused with her kingdom—I spared her. I had no intention of being troubled with war or consequence at the time. Besides, I knew that if I had made the wrong choice, I could always undo it. After all, we have infinite time, do we not? But now?” His voice turned lethal. “Now I see how thoroughly I’ve wasted it.”
Castiel’s voice broke through the silence, ragged with desperation. “Please, don’t revert time again, not for this.”
The king arched a brow. “Is that why you think I’ve summoned you here?” He gave a long, theatrical sigh, pacing slowly before the pedestal as if lecturing a tiresome pupil.
“The people are so terribly particular. Always squawking about liberty, justice, free will—as if they know what’s best. Theydon’t. Resistance festers in their hearts like mold. No matter how clean we make the slate, they find a way to ruin it again.”
He touched the edge of the hourglass, and its suspended sands shimmered with a dull pulse.
“How many times have we had to redo everything? How many revolts crushed, how many traitors dealt with, only to find new ones rising in their place? Best to act now—go back far enough to catch the roots before they have a chance to sprout into something deadly. Identify the key players. Eliminate them early. Before they even have the chance to speak treason.” He smiled thinly. “A few public executions. A scroll of fabricated charges. Plant a dagger or two. They’ll fall like dominos…just as they always have.”
My blood ran cold. So this was the cause of the whispered rumors—of people who had vanished in the night, accused of crimes no one could prove, convicted not for what they’d done but what they might one day do. Each had been executed for crimes that had taken place in another timeline, a way for the king to use infinite redos in order to exert his perfect yet devastating control.
Just like I almost had with Castiel.
The king turned, robes whispering over stone. “You will see to it. Prove your loyalty. Spill the blood of those who stand in our way, and I will grant her one final reprieve. One last chance to exist. Perhaps, once you’ve carried out your orders, the weight of their lives will harden your heart—temper it against this foolish attachment.” He stepped closer. “But hear me, Castiel. If I evensuspecthesitation—I will erase her as if she never breathed. Do not defy me again.”
A breathless moment passed before Castiel bowed his head. “It will be done, Your Majesty. I’ll…take care of them all.”
The anguish in his voice wrenched my heart. I pressed a fist to my chest, blinking back the tears that blurred my vision. Iached to go to him, to hold him, to whisper that he wasn’t alone in his suffering. But I didn’t dare move.
“Excellent,” the king purred, rubbing his hands together in a villainous mimic of glee. “Then let us proceed.”
I dared to shift the tapestry just a sliver to better peer through the crack. The king stood before the pedestal bearing the hourglass, holding up the same sigil Castiel had used to open the door. Magic bloomed from his palms—crimson, gold, and shadow—writhing like smoke made of memory.
The hourglass responded instantly. Its suspended sands began to glow brighter, pulling into a spiraling storm that churned within the glass. I stared in confusion, wondering how the king planned to use the artifact of healing. Was he suffering from a mysterious, hidden illness?
He began to chant, words in a tongue older than the kingdom itself. The runes carved into the walls flared to life, spinning and shifting, creating new constellations in the stone. Time itself groaned beneath the magic’s weight, like a great beast being roused from slumber.
The light grew blinding. My ears rang. The ground shuddered beneath my knees. Then came the sensation…like the world around us was being unstitched—hours, minutes, seconds all unraveling.
As though I were a tapestry slowly coming undone, threads scattering across a sea of moments. Past, present, and future collided in dizzying succession. Faces I hadn’t met flickered through my mind. Names I didn’t recognize curled on my tongue. My own memories blurred—twisting, doubling back, branching into paths I couldn’t follow.
I clung to one image—Castiel’s face, the pain in his eyes, the quiet plea in his voice.
The world blurred. Sound vanished. Color inverted. My body felt both weightless and crushed…and once again, timereversed.
CHAPTER 18
ANOTHER TIMELINE
Time stitched itself back together, filling in details of my surroundings as the world reassembled.f I sucked in air like someone who’d nearly drowned, my body trembling with the force of return. I was no longer in the time chamber, but in my bed, soft linens tangled around my limbs.
Early morning light spilled through the tall windows, a golden contrast to the cold, silvered shadows of the surreal chamber where magic had pulsed through the air like a second heartbeat. I sat up slowly, my limbs heavy and my movements sluggish, as though every part of me had been pressed between the pages of time and was only now being peeled free.
The scent of lavender lingered, just like it had the last time I had woken up this disoriented. For I knew this morning, intimately—the same one I had returned to on thefirstoccasion that time reversed. But unlike then, I hadn’t woken up screaming, clawing at my chest in terror as I relived my murder.
This time I woke upremembering.
Through the haze of confusion and unanswered questions was something sharper, clearer. Not quite certainty, but purpose—a fragile kind of armor I would need as I stepped onceagain into this repeating world. This wasn’t my third timeline, as I might have once believed, but one of many whose count I couldn’t remember, the others swallowed in the fog of forgetfulness.
My heart sank as I realized that I’d failed yet again to obtain the artifact my kingdom needed. I had finally entered the room after countless attempts—most of which I couldn’t even remember—and yet still had come out not only empty-handed, but in a different time.
But something niggled at the back of my mind. I recalled the king standing over the hourglass, bringing it to life with his magic. I hadn’t seen any evidence of healing, only…change. The king had wielded time as a cook might wield dough, shaping it to his preference and moving all of existence back to the moment of his choosing.
