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A thread snagged on the long sleeve of a mender’s robe, pulled by a phantom hand. It moved up one arm, then split at his neck, sweeping over his head and down his chest, then across the floor to the next person and the next.

“You’re going to regret this,” Aneirin said with a heavy sigh. He cast an eye at the chaos unfolding around him. “They always d—”

Then he was gone too. His face, his body, split into threads that rapidly uncoiled, the ends flying free.

It kept moving—that ripple—eating up the walls, the floors, even the bed beneath her as fabric and metal burst apart. But she didn’t fall. She didn’t need solid ground anymore. Not with magic all around, a swirling maelstrom of sparkling gold with her at the heart of it.

“Do you see how it could be?” the voice whispered.

The threads snapped taut, each one fine as spider silk but bunched so close together they appeared as a solid, shining mass.

“How you could be the master of every moment?”

The threads shifted, light sweeping across their surface, and through them, images appeared.

There was Sarina fighting in the North Square, hair wild and flaming as harpies circled.

There was Ivain, clutching a bloodied hand to his side as he staggered out of the temple to a cacophony of screams and fire.

The threads changed again. More images flashed.

Aimee guiding a group of people through the street, concealing them with her magic.

Aiden kneeling in a ransacked grocer, blood on his face. He was injured, in pain, but still doing everything he could to breathe life into those broken and bleeding on the floor around him.

From every angle, she watched her family fight. Watched them bleed. Would she watch them die too?

There was Kato searching through the panicked throngs of the Swap for a healer.

There was Eula, glowing with shadow magic, roaring as she hefted her sword and plunged it clean through the chest of a shade with scraps of leather for armor. In the background, magic flashed red, blue, and green as explosions sounded, but the shades kept coming, spilling from the surrounding forest.

Through the endless threads of time unraveling around her, Taly saw it—Aneirin’s plan unfolding in perfect, horrifying clarity.

He’d attacked the city gates first, prompting Ivain to mobilize the bulk of his mages to deal with the threat. Leaving the festival with only a skeleton force—enough to keep the peace or to oversee an evacuation, but not enough to defend.

Which would’ve been fine, if the ward shield had held.

But the explosions had been targeted—from up here she could see that now, the devastation laid bare. He’d taken out the generators, brought down the shield, leaving the city helpless in the face of what was coming.

Like lambs awaiting slaughter.

Through the storm of gold, shades rushed from all sides. Some nothing more than mismatched collections of bones clanging beneath rusty armor, some half-decayed; some freshly killed, with graying skin and eyes that were at once dead and unseeing yet far too sharply focused.

And through them, through the line, the legion—there was Skye.

Blood streaked his face and stained his clothing. He was fighting, a sword in one hand, a shield in the other. Shades surrounded him, with more still spilling from the forest. She could feel the chill of the night, the moisture in the air—she could smell the rot and tang of blood all around her.

The threads were still shifting, rearranging, and the image changed. Moving outward now, beyond Skye, beyond the city, beyond their blue ocean planet, now a distant speck.

And beyond that—beyond this place, this time, this body… there waseverything.

Stars, and planets, and the suns they orbited. The million upon billions of lives upon them.

For a heartbeat, Taly could see it all with perfect clarity.

The whole of creation. The entire picture.

Every moment. Everywhere. All at once.