Chapter 7

Mayhem's Kiss

Chaos erupts.

A flash of blue light blazes across Titus's forehead as his codicil ignites. His voice slices through the air, tearing reality apart. A massive portal rips open above our heads, its twin materializing behind the Vritraha's hull.

The war fortress's energy beam lances down—straight through the portal. Metal screams. The redirected blast punches through the Vritraha's own armor, splitting the fortress in half.

Burning debris rains from the sky. The platform beneath my feet bucks and tilts. Feminine shrieks pierce the air as people scramble for stable ground. I grab the nearest railing, my knuckles white against the metal as the world tips sideways. Cyra stumbles into me, her fingers digging into my arm.

The broken Vritraha plummets, its massive bulk blocking out the sun. Wind from its descent whips my hair across my face. The platform groans under the strain, listing further. More screams echo across New Larin as the fortress crashes toward the ground below.

The world fractures.

I grip the railing, but suddenly I'm ten steps to the left. Then I'm diving forward. Then backward. My body multiplies across space, each version living out a different choice. I watch myself sprint across the platform, roll under falling metal, shield others with my body. I see my skull cave in beneath a twisted beam. I see my spine snap as I fall wrong. I see myself survive. I see myself die.

The visions stack and blur, reality bleeding between what is and what might be. My head pounds with the weight of countless possibilities, each one vivid and real and happening all at once.

Then I see her.

Penelope lies broken beneath a sheet of burning metal, her platinum hair spread like a halo around her head. Her eyes stare upward, empty and fixed. The image burns into my mind, repeating across every timeline, every possibility. She dies. She always dies. The certainty of it claws at my chest.

My blood boils. The rage rises hot and unexpected, drowning out the cacophony of fractured time. I don't understand this fury, this desperate need to prevent her death. We're barely more than strangers. Yet seeing her lifeless body ignites something primitive inside me, something that screams against the very idea of her ending this way.

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Noo! A thought, raw and violent.

It anchors me in the present, pulling the scattered pieces of myself back together.

The timelines snap together like a fist closing. The endless possibilities collapse into a single, crystalline moment of clarity. Everything else falls away—the screaming crowd, the burning fortress, even my own scattered fears. There is only now. Only this.

I plant my feet against the tilting platform. "Move!" I shove Cyra hard, sending her stumbling backward. She catches herself against a support beam, safely clear of the falling debris. One thread secured.

Penelope stands motionless twenty feet away, her face upturned to the rain of twisted metal. The perfect stillness of her posture strikes me as wrong—like a painting in the middle of a storm. Time stretches thin. I see the jagged pieces falling, calculate their trajectories with desperate precision.

My body moves before thought catches up. I sprint across the lurching platform, my boots finding purchase on the smooth metal. The world narrows to the space between us, to the closing gap I must cross. A burning shard of hull plummets past my shoulder, close enough to sear the air.

Penelope's eyes meet mine, wide with a fear that finally breaks through her frozen mask. The platform groans, tilting further. My muscles burn as I push harder, faster. The distance evaporates with each stride.

My fingers stretch toward her arm. The metal storm descends.

I slam into Penelope, wrapping my arms around her as we hit the frost-covered earth. Hard. The impact knocks the wind from my chest. Something massive crashes behind us. Heat and sparks wash over my back. Shrapnel peppers my exposed skin like angry wasps.

There is a ringing in my ears. The screech of metal against metal. There is a pounding in my breast. The thumb of organ against flesh.

Penelope stares up at me. Her platinum hair spreads across the frost-covered ground, just like in my vision. But her eyes are alive now, filled with confusion and something else I cannot read.

This close, I notice a small scar above her left eyebrow that I have never seen before.

I flop onto my back, the chill of the earth seeping through my clothes. The broken Vritraha fills the sky above me, its massive bulk turning day to night. The air smells of burning metal and ozone.

A dark shape launches from the falling fortress, trailing smoke like a comet. The figure twists impossibly through the air, their movements too fluid to be natural. Even at this distance, I see the telltale shimmer of double pupils catching the light.

Eidolon. An eidolon.

Black shapes materialize from the crowd below—six Void Sentinels rising as one. Gold torqs gleam against void-black fabric. Their fuligin uniforms make them look like tears in reality itself as they streak across the sky.

The fortress plummets like a dying star.

The impact hits with devastating force. The shock wave slams into me as I try to sit up. My head cudgels the dirt. Pain blooms, crimson and pure.

I groan.

Exhaustion slaps me anew. My limbs feel like lead, each breath shallow and ragged as I watch the flickering glow of battle through half-lidded eyes. The roar of flames and clash of eidolons fade to a dull hum. Snow swirls around me. Ash drifts lazily from the sky.

Anger. Terror—all of it bleeds into weariness.

I close my eyes.