Page 66 of Revert
The admission chilled me—but another question pressed close behind it, one I already half-feared the answer to. “For what purpose would he create so many timelines?” Though I could guess.
“Why else? Complete power. Perfect control. To mold Thorndale into the kingdom it is now. A masterpiece, built through hundreds of adjustments—choice after choice, deviation after deviation. Countless trials. Countless errors. All erased and rewritten until the king shaped the world exactly as he wanted it—a realm that bows unswervingly to him, that caters to his every whim and leaves him the legacy of Thorndale’s most powerful ruler.”
I turned towards the hourglass, watching the sands shimmer in their suspended dance, glowing faintly, forever frozen mid-fall, like hearts that never learned to beat in time.
“So this is what’s been shaping everything,” I murmured. “Undoing lives as if they were nothing more than pieces on a board.”
Castiel nodded. “Anything that threatens that vision, he reverts. That’s how he’s maintained control for so long. Despite the fear he commands, people have tried to resist. I’ve lost count of how many uprisings there have been, how many sparks of rebellion…but he simply turns back time and extinguishes them before the fire can ever catch.”
I’d never understood how everything in the court operated with such cold, mechanical perfection, but now it made perfect sense. The unnerving precision of the court, the impossible way fate always seemed to tilt in his favor. He hadn’t been lucky, but had simply been rewriting reality until it obeyed him.
A quiet ache bloomed in my chest. How many lives had I lived beneath that magic? How many rebellions had I fought for, how many secrets had I carried, only to have it all erased? I yearned to remember them, the versions of me the king had stolen.
As if sensing this pressing question, he beckoned me through a narrow stone arch into a second chamber, deeper still than the first. I followed. The moment I crossed the threshold, the air changed—quieter and more reverent, as if we’d entered a cemetery of the forgotten past. The magic here felt heavier, almost older, like time itself had come to rest, exhausted from all its rewinding.
The vast room was circular, the high-domed ceiling vanishing into a darkness that shimmered with soft points of light, like stars scattered across a midnight sky, as if we’d stepped into the heavens themselves.
“This,” Castiel said softly, “is the Chamber of Timelines.”
I stared around in wonder. Delicate threads of light wove through the air, each a glowing tether between stars. They drifted and spun, unfixed by gravity, weaving themselves into shifting constellations. At first, they formed abstract shapes—curving ribbons, clusters of color—but as I looked closer, the images began to take form.
A burning city.
A coronation.
A rebellion crushed beneath blade and fire.
Scenes shifted and dissolved like breath on glass, only to form anew—one pattern collapsing into another again andagain, the threads ever-changing. Each one was a version of Thorndale, each thread a choice that led to another deviation.
Castiel stepped beside me. “This is the king’s design,” he explained. “A constellation of altered timelines—dozens, likely hundreds. They change constantly, reforming as events are rewritten. Some are so similar you’d never notice the difference. Others... diverged wildly. All of them shaped to secure his power.”
I stood still beneath the stars of rewritten history, humbled by their weight. But I was distracted when something in the air shifted again, as if in recognition. A new set of threads unfurled from the constellation above—finer, tinted with silver instead of gold. They drifted downward, curling gently towards me like ribbons caught in a breeze.
I lifted a wondering hand towards the silver filaments, and the chamber responded—a section of the wall shimmered to life, forming a glowing doorway.
“Step through,” Castiel said quietly. “This is your thread.”
The wall gave way as I moved towards the light. I stepped into a smaller gallery, somehow intimate and achingly familiar. Threads of soft silver traced along the floor and walls, guiding me like starlight. Each led to a scenes hovering midair, suspended like glass panes on invisible strings, windows I could peer through to see the memory that lay beyond.
Together, we walked deeper into the chamber of timelines—through memories lost, found, and waiting to be rewritten. My heart pounded as I walked slowly past each one.
There I was, the day I’d first entered court and met Prince Castiel, an event with dozens of iterations—some warm, most cold and wary. Several captured moments in the early days of my time at court. As the months passed, I eventually watched myself hiding messages beneath flower pots in the conservatory, slipping poisons into my sleeve, spying beneath the guise ofdiplomacy, mapping escape routes in the event of betrayal. Most of these ended in failure—imprisonment, banishment, even execution—until I thought I would drown in the despair.
Another thread glimmered and pulled my gaze, a welcoming glow that drew me closer. My breath caught as I turned a corner…and sawus.
The early records of our courtship were cautious at first, but no matter which timeline we lived, eventually I had learned to see past his emotionless mask to the warm heart that pulsed beneath. A game of trying to get him to smile, his eventual opening his heart up to my eager prodding.
These soon shifted into something tender. Staring across the ballroom at Castiel with unreadable longing in my eyes, or within the circle of his arms in several variations of our first dance together. Him brushing hair from my face beneath the boughs of a snow-dusted tree. Sitting with me in the ruins, our fingers laced, foreheads resting together like we couldn’t bear to be apart. Kissing me in the privacy of some hidden room, his expression open and aching.
The scenes played one after another, moments my mind couldn’t remember, even as my heart did. For no matter how drastically the timeline deviated, there was one constancy—again and again, timeline after timeline, our hearts found each other. Sometimes with laughter, sometimes with tears, sometimes in moments stolen in the dark.
And yet no matter how he tried to keep his distance or attempted to pull away, in each one, the unmistakable pull between us allowed us to always find our way back—the magnetic ache of our love that refused to die, no matter how many times it was erased.
Sometimes we were still in the shy, early stages of opening our hearts to each other when the hourglass pulled us apart. Other times we carried on a secret relationship for months,plotting our dearest hopes for a future together. But inevitably each tender moment ended as time spun backward, distancing us.
My heart constricted, filled with both the joy at the recollection and regret at having lost so many cherished memories. “How could I have forgotten all of these moments?” Whether precious or painful, they had all once been part of me. I didn’t understand how they could have simply faded away, out of the reach of my recollection.
“You only remember the timelines if you’re inside this chamber when time is reversed,” he explained. “The only reason you remembered the one where you died by my hand—” He swallowed hard, his voice trembling as he forced the words out. “—is because you were just outside this chamber when I rewound it…to save you.”
