Cole moved first, a flash of desperation cutting through his fear.
His hands glowed crimson as he carved symbols into the air, blood magic pooling from his palms, coiling around Calista's broken form.
It took shape like a beating heart of liquid iron, pulsing with each wordless incantation.
Runes crawled up his arms like veins of molten red, glowing brighter, threatening to burn him from within.
But the darkness did not wait.
It surged from my feet like a living tide, an absence of color, an erasure of meaning. The heart shattered in his hands.
Cole's arms blackened from the fingertips inward as though reality itself was rejecting him.
His mouth opened in a silent scream, but even sound was stolen.
His body unmade in an instant, disintegrating into nothingness, Calista's lifeless remains dragged into the void alongside him.
And that was when the sovereigns truly acted.
Midir blurred.
Time itself bent around him, his form flickering in and out of seconds like a stuttering film reel.
His sword appeared at my throat before he did, the edge carrying the echo of future strikes already made.
Had I been a fraction slower, my head would have rolled across the snow.
I twisted, wings flaring, weaving through frozen time, my kick catching him mid phase and launching him skyward.
He spun upward until his body vanished into a streak of burning daylight, fragments of shattered seconds raining down like broken glass.
Merlin was next.
Her robe peeled away like ink spilling from parchment, her true form a silhouette of writhing glyphs.
She unleashed a wave of spells, each a condensed apocalypse.
Firestorms coiled with razored wind, lightning arcs braided with molten stone, ice blossoms detonated into shrapnel of frozen suns.
Entire languages of destruction spoke at once, reality groaning under her effort.
But the void devoured all.
Spells struck my armor and unraveled, unwoven like cheap thread.
For a moment it seemed nothing could pierce me, until Arthur's fist met my chest.
The impact cracked through me like a hammer into porcelain.
Fire wrapped his knuckles, not mere flame but the pure, unfiltered heart of a star, and my body shuddered under it.
Pain lanced through me, hot and alien, enough to drag a curse from my lips.
I rose into the sky, wings cutting the air, but Zaratas's command magic seized me mid flight.
His words were law; his tone carried the weight of a king whose orders moved armies.
"Cease this action, Nicholas."
The sound lanced through my skull like iron nails.
For the briefest moment, my limbs locked against my will. In that instant, Jaquline was already there.
Her blade slipped past my ribs like a whisper.
The cold edge speared my heart.
Bronze hair framed her pale, venomous face as she leaned close, her voice a dagger wrapped in silk.
"I'm sorry," she murmured. "But not really. You have been a plague on my kingdom for far too long."
I was on the ground before I registered falling.
Snow hissed beneath me, blackened where my blood touched it.
Stella's foot pressed against my neck, pinning me like prey.
Her eyes glittered like falling stars as she spoke with a mocking softness.
"I really did like Mirabel," she said. "Sad you could not control the nature inside you."
She whispered a curse. Stars fell through my veins, burning as they tore along my blood.
My mouth filled with iron and fire as it erupted out of me in a spray.
And then Uhana moved.
The queen's hands traced spirals in the air, pulling from life itself.
Her magic smelled of earth after rain and the iron tang of birth and death. She seized the laws of decay and rewrote them in reverse.
Cole's bloodied remnants began to swirl where he had vanished, flesh reknitting from the void as Calista's sundered body reformed beside him.
Breath returned to their lungs with a sound like drowning.
Their eyes opened in terror, snatched back from oblivion by Uhana's command of life.
And with that, she turned, her expression calm as a surgeon, and resumed weaving spells of restraint made from abstract nothingness.
"Smart girl." I whispered.
The king and queen of Veritas came next.
Together they moved as one, blades drawn and glowing with opposite light, twin arcs of gold and black stabbing into my stomach.
Pain blossomed, sharp and liquid, and I felt the edges of myself thinning.
"Baltin," I said through clenched teeth, struggling against the chains Zaratas's commands still wove around me.
"Do you truly aim to do this?"
It was not Baltin who answered but his queen, her voice a cold verdict.
"Yes," she said. "As do I. Because you are an existence that must be put down."
My vision swam. Katelyn's words, brutal, boring, but persistent, buzzed in my ears as I shifted my gaze to Ruari.
Midir fell from the sky then, brushing fragments of shattered stars from his shoulders with an irritated swipe.
Time magic still clung to him like frost, seconds trailing from his body.
And then Ruari spoke, calm as still water.
"Endless Fool," Ruari said, and in his tone there was no anger, no malice, only inevitability.
His voice carried like a law written before time, a judgment older than any god.
I ground my teeth until they cracked. "Do not call me that. I just watched my entire reason to live vanish before my eyes."
My voice broke like glass, raw with rage and grief.
His fist descended without warning. Bone and void collided; my throat tore open under the strike.
Pain erupted and my scream was reduced to a wet hiss.
"Shhh," he whispered, not unkindly, but with a cruel tenderness. "It will be alright, little fool. Return to your True Self and lament."
This bastard. They are all bastards.
My family vanished, and they are furious at me for trying to bring them back.
Do they not know what they are to me? If they are not here because of me, then such a thing can only mean I am the curse.
[You finally realize it now, do you not, Nicholas.]
A smile, half broken, half mad, pulled at my mouth.
I blinked, and in the space between heartbeats I was no longer there.
I stood instead in the Void, the place of my soul, basking in its nothingness.
The silence pressed against me like an ocean without water.
Ruari followed, stepping through the absence as if it were smoke.
He shook his head, a small, deliberate motion. "Was that an attempt to run away?"
I frowned and sealed my wounds with a flicker of will. My voice rasped back, whole but colder.
"Explain what happened. If you do, I will refrain from casting the Void onto Earth."
He crossed his arms slowly. "I could simply erase this realm."
"If you could, you would have done so the moment I came here," I said, letting my words fall like lead.
"You know this place is my soul, or rather, my real soul."
He bit his lip and smiled in something close to ecstasy. "Damn, you are good. Fine. I will explain."
This had all happened too fast.
That message on the star, the one that said Dodge, meant someone knew about it beforehand. I had thought perhaps they planned it.
But no.
Thinking rationally, no one could erase them so blatantly, so absolutely, before me without notice from Mirabel or me.
Judging by how I cannot feel them in any world or reality, they are not simply dead. Nor are they erased. They just are not.
[Thus it is clear they have ascended beyond this world, in hopes of something.]
Ruari raised one hand, palm open. "The something is you. When you rewrote events, you rewrote all of Earth. So now you must pay."
My jaw clenched until my teeth ached. "Meaning what exactly?"
His eyes, for only a flicker, showed something like true pity.
"Kill yourself, Nicholas. If you exist, they cannot. It is a law I have decided just now."
I slowly brought my sword to my own chest, the blade whispering with voidlight.
Piece by piece, I removed everything that made me: name, thought, warmth, form. Until I was reduced to nothing.
"I have to be less?" I asked, my voice an echo of itself.
He nodded once, confirming it like a priest sealing a ritual.
[The events were rushed, but that is fate, that is life, or rather, that is the story. It is also the result of messing it up, you damned fool.]
I smiled, a cracked, empty thing, and plunged my blade through my heart.
At that exact same moment I let go and flew into Set Time, into the lattice of everything.
Using Alter, I rewrote everything bound to its rule, and as I unraveled, I began to relish in absence itself.
[The remaining story is finished. A conclusion met instantly, now rewritten once again. Nicholas is quite the fool.]
I opened my eyes and stood back before Mirabel, just as I had been before. My arms crossed like nothing had happened.
"I accept," I screamed, my voice a vow and a curse.
[What Nicholas had just seen was a future. He now knew he could never make the wrong choice, or everything would fail.]