Page 50 of Revert (The Royal Chronicles #4)

I stumbled back, breath catching in my throat at the realization. If I undo all of it to fix it…what else would I erase? Not just pain, but growth. Not just sorrow, but hope.

Even chapters of our love story, ones that seemed dark at first glance, but had made the good moments all the brighter…

like the garden of daffodils emerging from the ruins, the longing that had pulled us together again and again in every life.

Love that had never been born from safety, but forged in the ashes of broken timelines and impossible choices.

Even if I found a way to trap the king, I couldn’t undo everything, not without destroying the very future we were fighting to protect or losing the beauty that had grown from the brokenness.

Perhaps fixing time had never been the point, but allowing every event that had transpired across every life to shape me, enabling us to create a brighter future.

I turned towards the suspended hourglass, is shimmery sands pulsing with possibility. No more loops, no more erasing. This time, we change only the ending, not the beginning.

The choice settled in my chest, fierce and quiet: I would trap the king in the timeline he could no longer control, without undoing the love that had bloomed in the cracks.

I stood before the suspended hourglass, my fingers still tingling from where I’d slowed the flow of time. The magic pulsed, slow and steady as a heartbeat, waiting to be claimed. Around me, the threads hummed, straining under the weight of too many choices and too many stitched wounds.

Behind me, Castiel and the king remained frozen in that suspended moment—Castiel’s face set with fierce determination, the king’s with the cold certainty of conquest—two fates poised for impact.

This is the moment everything changes .

I stepped forward, my gaze lifting to the inscription now etched into the hourglass: He who bends time too long shall be bound by it .

The hourglass shone again, not merely a weapon or conduit, but a safeguard etched into the very fabric of time, a warning that the king had recklessly disregarded.

“He’s broken the rules,” I whispered. “Now time will bind him by them.” But for that to happen…he had to be cut loose.

I turned back towards the tangled threads.

Each one vibrated with a soft hum, like a harp string waiting to be plucked.

One stood out, an anchor thread I recognized as the king’s—thick with control, stained with blood, and coiled into every fate it touched.

It spread from the hourglass like a golden chain, grotesque in its dominion.

This was what kept him tethered to every timeline and reset—a revelation born from instinct, just like the magic that had awakened within me.

The vision of the Chronomancer and her golden scissors rippled through my mind.

If I severed that thread…then perhaps the failsafe would trigger and time would recoil.

And with no anchor left to return to, the hourglass would trap him in the one timeline he couldn’t escape: his last.

Hundreds of threads of light shimmered before me as I lifted my hands, extending to the king’s anchor.

Within it, I saw everything—the moments the king had touched, the ones he’d erased, the ones he’d rewritten to suit his will.

But one thread—dark and fraying at its edges—pulled at me like a curse, looping again and again until it was nearly ash.

This one .

My fingers trembled as my hand rose, reaching for it…

“Wait.” Castiel’s strained voice reached me, warped by the slow-time spell. Even through the stillness, his eyes had found mine across the chamber. He couldn’t move, but his love anchored me.

Though he gave no reprobation for what I was about to do, I could sense his uncertainty over what would happen should I undo too much of the tapestry that connected us.

I hesitated at the thought, my own fear at losing the love I had just rediscovered…

before remembering that no matter how often the alternate timelines we’d lived had deviated, we had always found our way back to one another.

With this promise in my heart, I reached for the anchor thread and drew my dagger, cutting it with intention. A pulse of magic burst from my fingers as the thread snapped with a sound like thunder cracking the sky.

The hourglass flared blinding white. The suspended sands reversed for a breath before spilling downward in a golden haze that illuminated the runes comprising the chamber.

The king screamed as he was ripped from his place mid-strike, thrown backward by a force no blade could touch. Threads from the timelines he had manipulated whipped through the air and bound him. His eyes locked on mine, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear.

“No!” he bellowed. “I am Thorndale’s master. This kingdom belongs to me .”

But the hourglass had already passed judgment. A final rune blazed to life beneath him—an infinity loop, closed and sealed. With a burst of searing light, he was gone, trapped somewhere in the past.

The chamber stilled as the slow-time spell unraveled and sound and motion returned, and the last of the magic settled into silence. The constellations of memory still patterned the ceiling, the frayed timelines glowing with quiet light.

Castiel’s sword clattered to the floor and he collapsed.

I rushed to his side, fearing that the king had managed to stab him before he vanished.

I knelt beside him, brushing the hair away from his damp forehead with trembling fingers.

Our gazes met and he looked at me with such bewilderment that for a horrifying moment I feared that the time I had changed had altered his love after all. But then his eyes softened.

“You did it. You found the one trap he never saw coming.” He extended his hand and I took his, relishing in the comfort that came from his fingers enclosing mine, the sense of at long last coming home.

“We did it,” I breathed. “Thank you for giving me the time I needed.” Both now, and in every life we’d lived before this one.

But even as relief surged through me, I felt the magical hum of the threads behind me. I turned to see them still quivering uncertainly, realigning themselves in the king’s absence. We hadn’t rewritten the past, but we had unshackled the future, allowing it to unfold as it had always meant to.

Castiel rose slowly, turning to face the hourglass. Together we watched as sand flowed at a natural pace now that time was no longer trapped under any one man’s dominion; time had resumed its natural course, even as everything still felt suspended.

Castiel’s gaze slowly met mine. For a moment, time seemed as though it had re-frozen as we stared at one another.

So many lifetimes lived between us. So many betrayals and redemptions, wounds reopened and resealed.

He had killed me once, saved me more than that.

And now here we stood—both changed, and yet somehow still ourselves.

He reached up, brushing a strand of hair from my face, his touch gentle yet uncertain, as if he still wasn’t sure he was allowed to be with me in this way. “What now?”

I heard what he was really asking—in the future that lay before us, did I want to create one with him, now that we were no longer bound to each other by king’s edict and a desperate kingdom’s need? I reached up to rest my hand over his that cradled my face.

“You are the only path for me,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “We’ve loved each other in fragments, and those are the ones I want to keep building with you forever.”

“Like flowers blooming in the ruins.” The look in his eyes said everything: he had chosen me long before I knew to choose him back.

The chamber’s silver light cast soft shadows across his face. I studied every line of it—the furrow of his brow, the quiet ache in his expression, the awe that hadn’t faded since I’d touched time itself.

I slid my hand downward, resting it over his heart. “I don’t know what happens next, or what the future holds. Only that no matter what mistakes we make or pain we unintentionally cause, this time there will be no redo.”

“Whatever it holds, we make this life the timeline that matters most, one worth keeping.” He reached for me then—no hesitation, no distance—and I met him halfway, allowing myself to choose him without fear, and with no intention of ever letting him go.

We kissed, this time without the fear of forgetting, the kind of kiss meant to last beyond endings and time itself—a vow written into the thread of whatever life might come next.