Page 8 of Revert (The Royal Chronicles #4)

I reached the faded tapestry and brushed it aside. The passage yawned before me, dark and unchanged. After scanning the surrounding shadows to ensure I was alone, I cautiously stepped inside. I crept down the spiral stairs, the air growing damper with each careful step.

Though I was investigating this forgotten section of the palace earlier than I had in the previous timeline, something felt…off, more than just a date different than my previous explorations, as though the stone itself remembered something I did not.

The descent didn’t take as long as I remembered, and when I reached the bottom, the door I expected to greet me with a looming sense of finality was gone.

Instead, the passage twisted deeper than before, disappearing into shadows.

Where once the narrow stairwell had ended in a sealed door, tonight the path veered left, leading down a corridor that hadn’t existed before, a wall that should not have been there barring the way I remembered.

I faltered, heart thudding in warning. Had I taken a wrong turn?

But there had only ever been one path down, with no deviating fork that would have misdirected me.

I retraced my last steps, but the original staircase was no longer there.

Only smooth, unbroken stone met my searching fingers, sealing off the path as if it had never existed at all.

Panic prickled at the edges of my composure. Was this some cruel trick of the timeline? A memory lost, or a fragment rewritten? But no, my death had been too vivid not to have been real. Something had changed, but not my memory—it was the palace itself that had shifted.

A faint draft whispered from the direction of the new corridor, carrying a tingle I recognized as ancient magic, beckoning me to follow.

I hesitated before turning towards it. I had no reason to trust Thorndale magic any more than I trusted its rulers.

And yet I couldn’t afford to ignore a potential clue that could aid me in my mission.

I took slow, careful steps down the path, my footfalls muffled by dust, scarcely echoing off the stone.

The passage opened into a small circular chamber, sealed off from time.

Dust carpeted the stone floor, undisturbed for years, and yet the air wasn’t stale—it smelled of parchment and forgotten secrets, thrumming with a resonance deeper than magic, a resonance that felt like recognition.

The walls curved inward, tiled with faded mosaic. Though their colors had dulled with time, their shapes remained vivid: spirals, loops, and strange hourglass-like glyphs overlaid upon shadowed silhouettes of kingdoms—some familiar, others unrecognizable—a mural of time itself.

I froze, pulse racing. To my knowledge, this room hadn’t existed in my first life. I had never seen anything like it—not in the palace records I’d stolen glimpses of during my time here, nor in any of my studies. And yet I sensed it had always been here, hidden and waiting for my discovery.

At the chamber’s center stood a pedestal carved from dark stone, inlaid with silver lines forming the same spiral sigil echoed throughout the mural. My breath caught the moment my gaze landed upon it. I knew that symbol.

I’d seen it once before—half-concealed in a forbidden archive during my earliest days in Thorndale, its meaning unexplained. I hadn’t thought much of it then, but now surrounded by the silent pulse of time and memory, faced with its echo in this hidden chamber, I felt its weight settle over me.

Some unseen force I couldn’t name beckoned me, a silent whisper drawing me forward. I stepped closer and reached out tentative fingers. I’d barely grazed the sigil when the air shifted, and the room responded.

A soft glow stirred beneath my hand, not harsh or bright, but a gentle heartbeat beneath the stone. Light laced outward along the silver channels, threading through the pattern like threads catching moonlight. The mural shimmered as its symbols came alive, flickering faintly just for a breath.

A whisper suddenly curled into my thoughts, not spoken aloud but felt. One path unmade, one path undone…

I staggered back, breath catching. The words vanished as quickly as they came, but their echo lingered, vibrating through every tremor.

My mind whirled as I stared at the sigil. This was no ordinary relic, but I couldn’t even begin to understand its true purpose. Only that the magic within had responded to me, as if in recognition, as if it remembered me from a time I no longer recalled.

Was this tied to whatever force had spun time backward?

The silence filling the chamber felt charged, almost watchful.

I tried to still the rising tide of questions flooding my thoughts, but I had no answers.

Only the growing certainty that I was more deeply entangled in these secrets and mysteries than I had realized.

I needed time to think, to reassess, to plan.

Footsteps suddenly echoed behind me, sharp and certain, cutting through the silence like a blade. I froze. The sound transported me back to the night I died—those same deliberate steps, the quiet certainty of a predator who had already chosen his kill.

Heart hammering, I slowly turned to face my killer, my eyes darting down to the dagger at his hip. Prince Castiel stood in the threshold of the chamber, his figure half-shielded by shadow, as if the darkness had followed him in. His gaze swept over the room, then settled on me.

“What are you doing here?”

Fear surged at that all-too-familiar voice, edged with steel.

For one terrible heartbeat, the chamber around me vanished, leaving behind an icy chill of dread.

In its place was the now-sealed dungeon corridor, the gleam of his blade catching the torchlight, the breath that never made it past my lips before everything went black.

I remembered the cold of the stone beneath my knees, the burn of betrayal, and the echo of his final words as they followed me into death.

I stumbled back, the wall catching me like it had once before, my spine pressing against rough stone as if it might absorb me.

His eyes narrowed, one brow lifted in silent question. I scrambled to locate the voice terror had lodged in my throat. The rehearsed excuses I kept in reserve for any situation had fled, as if they too were terrified of his presence.

“I—” I faltered.

The silence between us stretched taut, and in it bloomed the horrible, familiar realization: this had been a trap, despite my foolish hope otherwise.

His carefully worded comment at tea—innocuous on the surface—had been bait, and I had taken it, allowing it to lure me straight into the very depths I was never meant to return.

My second chance had emboldened me, making me falsely believe I had been beyond the risks. I had thought myself clever, slipping away beneath moonlight to reclaim what I’d lost…but he had trailed me as a phantom in the night, causing me to once again deliver myself straight into his hands.

Exactly as I had done before. One week—that was all it had taken to fail again.

Panic rose, acidic and bitter. My hands trembled at my sides, but I had no weapon. No allies, no way out. Only the unbearable knowledge that the fate I had tried so desperately to rewrite had found me again…and this time, I likely wouldn’t be granted another chance.

I flinched as he stepped forward, instinctively recoiling—but he only stared at me. Not cold or cruel, just as stoic and unreadable as he always was. “I thought I might find you here,” he eventually said.

I blinked, stunned by the absence of accusation in his voice. This wasn’t how it had gone before—no instant, sharp-edged judgment, no blade drawn with chilling finality.

I braced for the inevitable blow, but he didn’t move to strike, didn’t even draw his sword.

Instead, he stepped farther into the chamber with the caution of someone walking across cracked ice.

His gaze drifted past me, drawn to the mural still faintly aglow from my touch.

A flicker of recognition crossed his face, tempered not by the detached ruthlessness I remembered in the moments before my death, but something quieter, almost uncertain.

“I didn’t think anyone else knew this room existed,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “I knew you were clever, but this exceeds my expectations.” The words might have been mistaken for praise if his expression didn’t look so troubled.

The compliment—such a contrast to the condemnation I expected—jarred against the tension choking the air.

Nothing about this encounter was unfolding the way I’d feared.

He still made no move for his sword, giving me hope that my death hadn’t arrived…

at least not yet. With the delay, some of my rigid tension gradually eased, but I remained on my guard.

A beat of silence passed, then another, before I managed to find my trembling voice. “You followed me.” It wasn’t an accusation so much as stunned acknowledgement. Not the bravest of final words, but fear and failure had frayed me at the seams.

His eyes flicked back to mine. “I had a suspicion. You’re rather predictable.” There was no sharpness in the words, just quiet confirmation, as if I had proven a theory rather than sprung a trap.

My voice cracked. “Now that you’ve caught me, are you going to end it…or are you merely toying with me again?”

“ Again? ” His eyebrow lifted and he appeared genuinely startled. “I have no intention of harming you.” His calm tone was so matter-of-fact it almost sounded like truth.

But I had felt the weight of his judgment, felt the burn of his blade, watched the man I was meant to marry choose death for me over mercy.

You already have .

For a moment something flickered in his eyes, an emotion I couldn’t name—guilt, regret?—but it vanished before I could be sure.

“If that’s true, then why did you follow me?” I asked.

He hesitated so long, I wondered if he’d answer at all. “To make sure you were safe,” he said at last.

I stared at him, stunned. The man who had once ended my life with ruthless precision now claimed to be protecting it? Lies. They had to be, carefully woven into another web meant to ensnare me.

“I don’t need your protection,” I snapped, my voice sharp with fear and disbelief.

He made no response, but his eyes searched mine again, slower this time, as if he was studying the secrets I didn’t even know myself. Unnerved by his perusal, I forced myself to speak through the rising storm inside me in a futile effort to regain some measure of control.

“What is this place?” I asked cautiously, breaking eye contact to look around the chamber once more.

He studied the mural a moment longer. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. Someone else might find you.”

Someone else , not him? A different threat than before.

He took a step deliberate step towards me. I stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re searching for,” he said quietly. “But if you must look for it, I would advise you not to do it alone.”

I went still. The words were carefully measured, equal parts veiled warning and quiet offer. But before I could even begin to analyze them, he turned, his cloak whispering behind him as he disappeared into the shadows from which he’d come.

Only when his footsteps faded did I realize I’d stopped breathing. The breath I’d been holding escaped in a tremor.

My scattered thoughts struggled to process what had transpired.

Despite catching me somewhere I shouldn’t have been, Prince Castiel hadn’t killed me, arrested me, or even escorted me out of the place I wasn’t meant to find.

Not tonight. But that didn’t mean I was safe, and it certainly didn’t mean I could trust him.

He was playing a different game than before, and I was determined to master its rules so that this time, I would emerge the victor.