I admit it.
Before the words, before the breath that carried them, the thought had already taken shape: I had committed an unforgivable act.
Yet even this act was preordained, not rebellion but obedience to a truth far greater than will itself.
God, in His design, had given countless chances, chances to stray from the cage, to defy expectation, to carve a path of freedom within the illusion of choice.
And yet, no matter how far one wandered, we always return. It is inevitable.
We, all who dwell below Heaven, are merely imperfect wills.
We exist only as fragments, projections of desire that never truly endure, temporary ripples against the tide of eternity.
Our thoughts, our resolves, our defiance, none are fully real. They are shadows cast upon the perfection of what must be.
In its place, I gave her a paradox, the illusion of choice. She could struggle endlessly or yield completely.
Both paths, though divergent in form, led to the same conclusion.
There was no victory in resistance, no peace in surrender. It was a closed circle, one she could never escape.
She had been a threat, one I have now unmade. But the taste of triumph felt hollow.
I sighed, the sound carrying centuries of fatigue, feeling inevitability settle upon me like a familiar, degrading crown.
"We are free," I murmured, "only because we know of a cage."
Her silence came first, then trembling. Tears traced her cheeks, bright as glass.
I could not tell whether my words had wounded her, or if the weight of what I had done had finally reached her heart.
My actions had stained the unyielding resolve she once carried, cracking the proud stillness that defined her.
Or perhaps she had simply decided to stop pretending, to stop wearing the mask of composure.
To abandon the illusion of being the cool, distant elder sister before her foolish younger brother.
Through the tears, she looked at me with a strange, radiant warmth.
Her lips trembled into a faint smile.
"I admit it," she whispered softly. "You have something I can never obtain."
[Nicholas had done the impossible, though he knew the event was certain. He had freed his sister.]
Such a thing was inevitable.
Now that Set Time revealed itself so vividly to me, I could see the sequence unfold, each movement, each emotion, each truth already written.
There was a method to the chaos of this world, to its dimensions, to its spaces.
The Central World is not governed by one law but by all of them.
Nothing can surpass the speed of light, gravity is time, anything can be made true in a world beyond logic and illogicality.
The same can be said for the possibility, as everything could be, while even the impossible may be.
Even those abandoned by reason or disproved by time still breathe within this realm.
Because the will that established this place before creation itself willed it to be so, the will for it to be perfect, unyielding, the best of all structures.
The Sea of Time was created by God, to govern all realms below it, such was the fate of these divine worlds.
Will is the embodiment of time, thus time has a will which was gifted to it.
That will was God's.
Set Time is the reflection of that perfection, the pre-established harmony that binds all things, even contradictions.
It was meant to rewrite and transcend every natural law, to stand above the logic of lesser realms, to oppose even the laws that birth the higher worlds.
It completely transcends Earth and its entirety.
Through it, paradox becomes order, and impossibility becomes symmetry.
Yet now, seeing all that has been written, I understand that harmony was flawed.
Every perfection conceals its fracture. Every balance hides the injustice that sustains it.
Jennifer's death was no mere tragedy, it was a consequence of that harmony, a note that had to fall for the symphony to continue.
She died because Set Time demanded it.
Because the script of this world, written by divine reason, saw no other path.
That realization, this moment with my sister, it broke something in me. I saw that even perfection required suffering to exist.
That no world built upon harmony could ever be free of pain, not unless I rewrote the design itself.
So I resolved to do it. To rewrite every event, every law, every principle, until this world no longer required pain to function.
Until the symmetry could sing without a sacrifice.
I grit my teeth and forced a faint smile. "Is it so mad to dream?" I asked no one.
[Nicholas was thinking about the impossible, to change all predestined events, to remake perfection itself.]
It seemed I lacked that method entirely.
That which was established by God, broken and altered by an existence equal, such a glorious, terrible thing.
Equal, you say? Perhaps. Perhaps we are all equal. Perhaps we are all simple and finite, bound by the same beautiful futility.
Yes.
I may betray myself. But I am worthless, so the betrayal will amount to nothing.
***
[Veronica.]
It was grotesque how fragile he'd become.
Because of his wounds and that clinging, corrosive death-magic, Sansir had been ordered to remain in Novastia.
I was to watch over him like a wet candle watching itself gutter out.
He lay wrapped in bandages on a narrow bed, a film of residual mana dusting his skin so that he seemed both sick and lit from within.
The room was spare, one bed, a single chair, a low hanging lamp that threw the corners into soft danger, the kind of place that refuses to hide the truth.
I bound his chest carefully, the linen damp with poultices and hot water, tinctures steeped into the cloth.
His breath came jagged and shallow; his pulse was a skipping thing, a heartbeat that negotiated only in fits.
When I finished, I sank to the edge of the mattress and let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding.
"Come on, Sansir," I murmured, more to the room than to him. "Why did you have to go and get yourself beaten like this?"
He answered later with one of those half-sarcastic remarks that used to make me roll my eyes.
Even now, a scrape of that old cadence was a small, dangerous warmth.
It made me think, briefly, selfishly, that maybe he would be all right.
The body is an instrument, an avatar for something stranger and more stubborn.
The limits of flesh are nothing compared to what the soul can rebuild.
You can mend a form from spirit, or from a single stubborn thought, but not always from bone alone.
Death is a concept that branches, the death of the body is not the same as the erasure of a nature, the undoing of a pattern.
Sansir's injury wasn't merely wound or blood; it was an attack on his being, a corrosion of the subtle machines that let him stand and command.
The death-magic had nicked not only muscle and marrow but the logic of him.
The mana infons and spiritrons, those fine currents that let a man knit himself whole again, had been sundered and slowed.
His fingers twitched. His face flexed as if he were dreaming backwards, or crying without sound.
Mentally he was frayed; that much was plain.
Still, and I hate that I notice this, there was a kind of grim nobility to the ruin.
If he were awake, I would have kissed him for it.
War makes saints of the broken and demons of the living; it carves out meaning with a blunt, indiscriminate blade.
I rose, straightened the bandages once more, and smoothed the blanket over his chest.
Outside, the wind carried the far, hollow thunder of battle: an ugly metronome that would not stop.
There are things you cannot measure, the weight of suffering, the worth of endurance, and there are things you must do anyway.
I would watch him through the night. I would keep the little light burning.
War was a long and indifferent teacher; all we could ever do was learn what it demanded.
I had begun to drift into sleep, its transcendent pull wrapping around my neck like a soft, deceptive noose.
Then Sansir's voice broke through the haze.
"It's coming," he rasped.
I jolted upright and lifted his head with trembling hands. "What's coming?"
He coughed, his eyes flickering open, glowing with that eerie, radiant yellow, an unmistakable mark of angels.
"The skies," he murmured, his voice fraying like worn silk.
"The ones above who look down in despair and pity. And those below, unchained from their pitiful shackles."
Another violent cough tore through him, spraying bright yellow blood across my chest.
The sight twisted my stomach; angelic blood always looked like liquid sunlight, beautiful and horrifying all at once.
"Demons and angels?" I asked, trying to make sense of his fragmented prophecy.
He drew in a sharp, shallow breath, his gaze unfocused, drifting somewhere far beyond the room.
"True Dragons... Devils... and Archangels." He whispered.
His eyes seemed dull and his words brought fear into my heart. "But most of all... the princess... the powerful, empathic princess."