Page 70 of Revert
Despite the seriousness of our conversation, a small smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “I suppose they were right, to a degree. While I have no intention of sabotaging the mission, I can’t deny I’ve certainly been creating a…newalliance.”
His fingers curled around mine. “I promise that I will never turn against you. Any illusion to the contrary was done solely for your protection.”
My smile grew. But much as I wanted to continue this more pleasant line of conversation, I knew our time was limited before the king made his next move.
“So the assassin wasn’t working with the king. For all his threats, for some reason he doesn’t seem to want me dead at this point.”
Castiel’s voice dropped. “A reason I am beginning to believe is tied to your blood.”
His words stirred something in me, a detail buried beneath the tangle of recent memories, something small and quiet that suddenly pressing against my awareness—a memory I hadn’t yet seen that I sensed mattered more than the rest.
Instinct more than awareness directed my attention to the ancient, time-worn script carved beneath the mural, written in a language I must have learnt in one of the timelines that had passed:“He who bends time too long shall eventually be bound by it.”
The moment I whispered the phrase aloud, a glyph near the edge of the mural flared with light, so faint it might have been mistaken for a crack in the stone. I stepped forward, reaching towards it instinctively.
The glyph responded to my touch. Magic sparked beneath my fingertips, causing a ripple of light to spread through the chamber wall like ink dropped into water. As the light expanded, it revealed a hidden panel—etched with runes long buried, forgotten for centuries.
Unspoken understanding drew both of our attention to the hourglass at the heart of the chamber. Its sands still hung suspended, but something had changed—a new thread pulsed outward from its base that hadn’t been visible before, glowingfaintly, fraying at the end like a rope unraveling. Castiel inhaled sharply, his posture stiffening.
“What is it?” I asked.
He stepped forward, eyes narrowed with focus. “That thread…it's the king’s original anchor, the first timeline he always reverts to, no matter how much he reshapes the world.” Castiel reached towards it, as if drawn by some pull only he could feel. “But it’s unstable,decaying. Whatever’s holding it together appears to be starting to collapse.”
The glyph behind us pulsed again, light shimmering over the wall as the runes beneath it shifted and aligned. A translation formed in my mind, the same way one might know a memory before remembering it, pieced together from everything I had uncovered:
“A loop cannot trap what sees its end. But blind the master with his own reflection, and the loop becomes a prison.”
Those words provided the final piece, causing all those I’d painstakingly gathered to snap into place all at once. The clues folded inward, gathered in quiet symmetry and lined up like a deck of cards—all shuffled, dealt, and laid bare before me. I stepped into the center, each circling me like threads of a tapestry, no longer like the chaos I had once tried to stitch together with trembling hands, but finally whole—a design created by the lives I had lived and lost.
All the years I’d lived and relived had come together to create knowledge, a power I could have never possessed with only a single timeline. I finally realized that all of the agony, the fear, the pain we’d endured was not a grievous waste, but that each of my winding paths could now be woven into a powerful cord that led straight to the destination we’d been seeking.
I turned to Castiel. “You often spoke of your fear that the king would create an irreversible timeline after my death, but is it possible for us to do the same—to somehow trap the king insidea time loop where he can no longer wield its power? If we sever his connection to the magic and there’s no fixed point to return him to…”
Castiel’s eyes bulged. “Then perhaps…we could trap him, lock him in a final timeline, one he can’t reset or escape.”
The chamber stilled, the weight of all our past lives pressing against us, as if even time itself were listening. We stared at one another in hopeful wonder.
“This is what we’ve never done before,” he murmured, voice fierce and reverent. “We’ve fought the outcomes, tried to undo the damage after it’s already been done. But this time…we break the rules.”
Despite the hope rendered by our discovery, a shadow passed over him.
“If I hadn’t kept my distance… if I’d fought harder to involve you instead of trying to protect you from the sidelines, determined to carry the burden alone—we might have uncovered all of this sooner.” Castiel’s voice was low, rough with regret.
The ache in his words pulled at another tender remembrance—a quiet promise once shared between us in another timeline, forged in the space between trust and uncertainty. The shape of his hand over mine, the vow that next time we would face whatever came together.
I cradled that memory a fragile moment…then let it go. “What’s done is done,” I said gently. “We don’t know the ripples of that choice, whether it would have led to progress or only more sorrow. But those decisions led us to this moment that is ours to act, and for the first time we hold the key to truly succeed.”
He laced our hands together, holding fast in a new promise that would allow us to finally move forward.
The king had been resetting the world for longer than I could comprehend, but the power he wielded had never truly been his. The longer he pulled the weave of time, the closer it came to unraveling. But threads didn’t only unravel…they could alsoloop.
He had trapped me in timelines again and again. It was finally time I did the same to him.
CHAPTER 20
Time was a force I had always believed to be beyond control—seconds, minutes, hours…days bleeding into weeks, months into years—all marching unyieldingly onward. No slowing or stopping it, only surviving within its current.
But within the Chamber of Timelines lay possibilities I never would have imagined. Here time did not march—it listened, waited. Potential lay within that stillness, a quiet, surging power of possibility I had never known in any life I’d lived. The sense that I might no longer be a victim to time’s whims, but at last seize control and use it to finally reclaim what had been taken.
