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“I’m just going through her favorites.” Cori growled her frustration. Calcifer knowingly patted her cheek. “Damn it. I think I know what it is…”

This revelation didn’t seem to bring her any joy. She took a breath, steadying herself, and grimaced her way through it.

“Ivain is my sexy battle daddy.”

The runes flared green.

“That bitch,” Cori muttered.

Skye was equally horrified. He had to ask. “Azura and Ivain… they didn’t.”

“Oh yeah. A long time ago. It was hot, heavy, and Azura hasnevermoved on.”

Skye shuddered. He didn’t want that information in his head. “This is utterly surreal…”

But the wind stirred his hair. The ground held firm beneath his boots. Real enough.

Maybe this was what going insane felt like—when your senses agreed with you, and your brain politely disagreed.

He pinched himself. The pain was immediate. Unfortunately, it didn’t transport him back to a world that made sense.

He tried again. Different arm. Just to be thorough.

The wind still blew. The ground still held. And nothing—nothing—snapped back into place.

“Hey, stop daydreaming, loverboy.”

Cori was already through the door. And it was closing.

He had a choice to make. But some choices weren’t choices at all.

Following her? That was instinct.

Hurrying to catch up, Skye slipped through right before it slammed shut.

The door vanished behind them. The air smelled… off. Stale. And it was too quiet. Not a single bird or insect buzzed in the forest around them. There was no breeze.

At the end of a weed-choked gravel drive, Infinity’s Edge rose against a storm-dark sky. Lightning flashed, illuminating the shadow of something behind it. Like crosshatching on a dark canvas, the image faded back into the storm clouds, waiting for the next strike to bring them back to life.

Were those the threads Taly always talked about? Maybe here, in this fractured space, they became visible to the naked eye.

The towering front doors of the palace creaked open to a long receiving hall. Inside, shattered pillars hovered where they had once stood—more compact at the base, their broken pieces drifting outward as if the stone near the groundrememberedits shape, while the rest had already forgotten.

“Like I said, physics gets weird in the Stitches.” Cori’s voice echoed through the cavernous, hollow space.

Moving deeper, past frescoes flickering between images and shattered furniture hanging weightless in the air like suspended debris—yeah.Weirdwas the right word. The walls warped if he stared at them too long, and the light would occasionallyfluctuate, casting alternate shadows and brightness. Doors, debris, even the vines hanging from the ceiling would suddenly move, there one second, somewhere different the next.

“You still haven’t told me why we’re here,” Skye said. On a nearby table, a vase rattled in place as if possessed.

Cori glanced over her shoulder, a cold, wet wind that blew from nowhere ruffling her hair. “Because I need you to help me steal something. This is Azura’s vault. And afteryearsof painstaking negotiation with the bastard she locked inside, he’s finally agreed to give it to me.”

“The bastard being the mad mage who almost destroyed time itself?”

“Bingo.”

This was not his Taly, but Skye could still read the tension in her shoulders.

“What did you promise him?”