The river was a grave.

  This time, there was no fight, no struggle. The water took Eliz into its cold, dark heart and simply held her. The world narrowed to the thunder in her ears, the burn in her lungs, and the shocking, absolute cold that felt like the essence of the Quiet itself. She tumbled, a leaf in a torrent, the last glimpse of the balcony and the emissary’s accusing finger seared onto the backs of her eyelids.

  Her memories—the false, impossible ones—were silent. The river had no precedent in her mind. It was pure, chaotic now.

  Her hip slammed into something submerged, the pain a bright spark in the numbness. Her head broke the surface. She gulped a ragged breath of air that was little warmer than the water. The current had spit her out into a wider, slower flow. The ghostly blue fungi were gone. The only light came from ahead—a jagged crack in the cavern wall, through which a sickly, predawn grey bled.

  An exit.

  She swam for it, her limbs heavy as stone. As she neared, she saw others caught in the eddies. Gideon, dragging Mira toward the light. Rourke was nowhere to be seen.

  The crack was too narrow for the river; the water poured out into open air beyond. A short waterfall. She could hear it hitting stone below. They were at the edge of the underworld, about to be expelled back into the dying kingdom.

  Gideon reached the lip first. He turned, his face gaunt and grim in the grey light, and grabbed Mira, helping her climb onto the slick rock shelf beside the outflow. He then turned back, his eyes scanning the dark water for Eliz. For a moment, their gazes locked. In his, she saw no revolution, no resentment. Just the raw, animal need for one more survivor.

  She kicked forward. His hand shot out, clamping around her forearm with a grip that crushed bone. He hauled her from the water and onto the shelf beside Mira, who was shaking violently, her arms wrapped around herself.

  No one spoke. There were no words for where they were or what they had seen.

  The shelf was a natural ledge on the inside of a gigantic, broken culvert—the old river outflow Gideon’s map had marked. Above them, the massive brick arch of the culvert’s mouth was choked with rubble and rusted iron grates. They were outside the city walls, but not in open land. They were in a deep, man-made canyon, the walls soaring up on either side. The air was thick with the smell of wet rot and a new, chilling scent: ozone and cold ashes.

  Eliz pushed herself up, wincing at the pain in her shoulder and hip. She peered over the ledge.

  The world below was a painting left in the rain.

  They were high up on the northern flank of the city. Below stretched the Sun-Scarred Plateau, which should have been a flat expanse of hard-baked earth under the first touch of dawn. It wasn't.

  A quarter-mile from the city’s great Sun-Scarred Gate—or where the gate had been—the landscape was wrong. It was a spreading pool of grey, textured like rough silk, utterly still and silent. It had consumed farms, roads, a small watchtower. The edges of it seemed to waver, like a heat haze, and where it met the normal world, color leached away, sound died, and movement slowed to a dreamlike crawl. The Quiet.

  And advancing toward the city, moving through the still-living land just ahead of the grey stain, was the army.

  It was not a host of glittering armor and proud banners. It moved in a grim, silent tide. Soldiers in patchwork armor of black and tarnished bronze marched in eerie unison. Among them shuffled more of the needle-armed Unwoven. And there were things that were not human at all—hulking, six-legged constructs of the same dark alloy as the door underground, their backs humming with contained violet energy.

  At their head, a figure rode a beast that seemed carved from shadow and sharp angles. Even at this distance, Eliz felt the aura of profound, weary malice. The Hollow King. Mordain.

  “Gods,” Mira whispered, her voice a thread of sound.

  But Eliz’s eyes were pulled from the horrific army to the city walls themselves. The great Sun-Scarred Gate was a gaping wound. Not broken. Not smashed. Unmade. The intricate stonework, the reinforced timbers, the proud statues of past kings—they simply faded into nonexistence halfway up their height, leaving a smooth, impossible edge, like a cookie bitten by a god. Through the hole, she could see the ordered formations of Chronos’s Eastern Legion, hastily assembled in the plaza beyond. They looked like toy soldiers. Pitiful. Doomed.

  Kaelen’s plan had failed. The Legion was not in the Scablands. It was here, in the mouth of the beast, because the beast had ignored the map and eaten the front door.

  “The Gearworks,” Gideon said, his voice hollow. “The main vents… they exit near the legion’s left flank. If we can get there…”

  “To do what?” Mira asked, despair cracking her words. “Our tech is dead. We have no army.”

  “To warn them,” Eliz said. The Prince’s voice was back, flat and commanding. “To tell them the gate isn’t just broken. It’s gone. That their swords and courage mean nothing. That they need to fall back, bottleneck them in the inner streets. Turn the city into a maze where their big constructs can’t go.” Even as she said it, she heard the hopelessness. They were strategizing the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  A new sound cut through the low rumble of the advancing army—a sharp, piercing series of trumpet calls from within the city. The Legion’s signal.

  Hold the line.

  “Fools,” Gideon spat.

  As if on cue, the front ranks of the Chronian legion lowered their pikes. A brave, beautiful, and utterly futile wall of steel.

  The Hollow King raised a hand.

  From the hulking constructs, beams of concentrated purple light lanced out, not at the soldiers, but at the ground in front of them, and at the remaining sections of the wall beside them.

  The effect was not explosive. It was subtractive.

  A ten-yard-wide swath of the cobblestone plaza simply ceased to be. The legion’s perfect front line collapsed into a sudden, screaming pit of nothingness. Simultaneously, a vertical slice of the remaining city wall on the left side vanished, exposing the legion’s flank.

  Panic erupted. The orderly formation dissolved into chaos.

  Then the Unwoven charged. They didn’t run. They shuffled with that terrifying, relentless speed, needles gleaming. They hit the scattered soldiers, and the real horror began. The needles didn’t just kill. Where they struck, the effect was localized, personal. A soldier parried a needle with his shield; the shield didn’t break, it un-became, its history of oak and iron unraveling in a second, leaving the man’s arm bare. A needle pierced a thigh; the wound didn’t bleed, it spread a patch of grey, inert flesh that crumbled to dust.

  It was a slaughter of physics.

  Eliz watched, paralyzed. This was the war. Not of nations, but of existence.

  A flash of cobalt and silver below—a cohort of the Palace Guard, led by a roaring, familiar figure, slammed into the flank of the Unwoven advance. Kaelen. He fought like a demon, his great sword shearing through an Unwoven, which collapsed into a pile of dusty rags and fading purple light. He was buying time, channeling the retreat into the city streets.

  He was also surrounded.

  The memory struck Eliz like a lightning bolt. Not a vague familiarity. A clear, sensory imprint.

  The smell of ozone and blood. The weight of the short sword in her hand, unfamiliar and useless. Gideon shouting from a rubble pile. And Kaelen, turning, his eyes meeting hers across the chaos, wide with surprise and then, horrifyingly, with recognition of the truth he saw in her face. The moment before the Unwoven needle took him in the back, its tip erupting through his chest in a spray of grey, not red.

  “No,” she breathed.

  “We have to move,” Gideon was saying, tugging at her arm. “Now! They’ll overrun this position!”

  But Eliz was already moving, not toward the safer depths of the culvert, but climbing down the rough brickwork toward the hell below.

  “Elias, you idiot! Stop!”

  She didn’t stop. The memory-propelled her. She had to get to him. She had to change it. This was the proof—if she could change this one, specific, remembered moment, then the loops weren’t a prison. They were a tool.

  She hit the ground and ran, skirting the edge of the chaos, her eyes fixed on Kaelen’s fighting form. The world narrowed to a tunnel. The screams faded. The only sound was her own heartbeat and the ticking of a clock only she could hear.

  She saw it play out exactly as remembered. Kaelen cut down two more Unwoven. He glanced toward the crumbling gate arch, looking for an exit for his men. His gaze swept past rubble, past dying soldiers, and landed on her.

  His eyes widened. Confusion. Then, the dawning, earth-shattering comprehension. He saw the fear on her face, the un-prince-like desperation. He saw her.

  In that frozen sliver of time, a silent communication passed between them. A lifetime of lies laid bare. His face didn’t show betrayal. It showed a profound, gut-wrenching grief. For her. For the kingdom. For the terrible weight she had carried.

  And behind him, the Unwoven raised its needle.

  Not this time.

  Eliz screamed a wordless warning. She threw her short sword. It was a clumsy, desperate move. The blade spun through the air and struck the Unwoven’s shoulder, not killing it, but spoiling its thrust. The needle meant for Kaelen’s heart grazed his ribs instead.

  Kaelen roared, more in shock than pain, and finished the creature with a backhand blow.

  He turned to her, his chest heaving. The grey, crumbling wound on his ribs was spreading. “You…” he gasped.

  She reached him. “The wound—it’s temporal! You have to get back!”

  He grabbed her arm, his grip still fierce. “The prince… is a…”

  “I know,” she said, the tears she could never shed as Elias finally blurring her vision. “I’m sorry. Please, you have to fall back!”

  He looked at her, really looked, and in his eyes, she saw the soldier fade, and the man who had taught her to hold a sword, to stand straight, to be brave, surface one last time. He gave a single, faint nod.

  Then his eyes focused over her shoulder. His face hardened. “DOWN!”

  He shoved her violently to the cobblestones.

  A searing line of purple light passed through the space where she had been. It struck Kaelen square in the chest.

  There was no explosion. No dramatic blast. The light simply… adhered. It wrapped around him like a net of dying stars. And then it contracted.

  Eliz watched, helpless, as Lord Commander Kaelen, her tutor, her protector, the rock of the kingdom, was not killed.

  He was unwoven.

  His armor, his surcoat, his sword, his skin, his memories, his voice—everything that constituted the man was pulled apart into shimmering, disconnected threads of light and then sucked into nothingness. It took less than three seconds. At the end, there was a faint, afterimage of his face, a ghost of his final, stern expression, and then even that faded.

  Where he had stood, there was only a faint, grey dusting on the stones.

  The beam had come from one of the dark alloy constructs. Standing beside it, his hand lowered, was the emissary. His cowled head was tilted, regarding the empty space where a hero had been.

  Eliz lay on the cold ground, the breath knocked from her, her mind a white void of shock. She had changed the memory. She had saved him from the needle. And in doing so, she had delivered him to a far worse fate.

  The emissary’s cowl turned toward her. He began to walk, his steps unhurried, through the raging battle, which seemed to part for him.

  Gideon’s hand closed on the back of her tunic, hauling her to her feet. “Move! Now!”

  But she was numb. She saw Mira, across the street, waving frantically from the mouth of a narrow alley—one of the Gearworks vents. A path to temporary safety.

  The emissary was getting closer. He raised a hand, not to cast a spell, but as if in greeting.

  Eliz turned to run. And her injured hip gave way.

  She fell to one knee. Gideon tried to pull her up, but he was exhausted, and she was dead weight.

  The emissary stopped a dozen paces away. The battle raged around them, a violent storm from which they were in a sudden, terrible eye.

  “Prince Elias,” the rustling voice said, almost kindly. “Or should I say… Eliz?”

  The name, her true name, spoken in that dead, knowing tone, was a final blow.

  “Your thread is so very knotted,” the emissary continued. “A fascinating anomaly. My master would like to study it. But I fear the pattern is too damaged. Some knots must be cut.”

  He extended a long, pale finger toward her.

  Gideon stepped in front of her, raising his dead Still-Fire pistol in a futile gesture of defiance.

  The emissary made a slight, dismissive motion.

  A force, not of wind but of absolute negation, hit Gideon and hurled him backward into a wall. He slid down, unconscious or dead.

  Eliz was alone.

  She looked up at the emissary, at the vacant cowl, at the finger pointed at her heart. She thought of her father’s confession. Of her mother’s dream. Of Lyra, somewhere in the city, searching her books for a hope that was already gone.

  This was the memory. The one she hadn't fully seen. The end of the path.

  The emissary’s finger began to glow with a soft, purple light.

  And a new memory bloomed in Eliz’s mind—not of this moment, but of the next. A memory of waking up. In her bed. The sun streaming through her window. The smell of lemonwood polish. The distant, ordinary sound of the palace awakening. A month ago.

  The loop begins with a death.

  Her death.

  She didn’t feel fear anymore. She felt a strange, quiet acceptance. And a final, defiant thought.

  See you soon.

  The purple light lanced forward.

  There was no pain. Only a sensation of immense, irrevocable untying.

  The world dissolved into a silent, brilliant, and endless shade of violet.

  (The Loop Begins)