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How would they get there, to that moment she had foreseen? There was no denying he was attractive. He had the chiseled face and physique of the carved statues that stood outside Saints halls. If she met him as a handsome stranger in a tavern, she’d undoubtedly sink several flamebrandies and suggest they get a room. But he wasn’t a handsome stranger in a tavern. He was a murderer, a torturer. Dark and cruel to his bones.
Auria was the kind of person who, when a loved one did or said something she didn’t like—something that challenged her shiny worldview—would rather end the relationship than try to understand or reconcile. After arguments, she would give the cold shoulder for weeks or months or forever, cutting the antagonism clean out. Self-preservation was the charitable explanation, but Saff often suspected it was to do with the desire for a perfect world, a perfect life. Auria could not handle imperfect people.
Almost everyone in Ascenfall was attracted to all genders, and almost everyone was kinky as all hells.
My kind of place
Almost without forethought, Saff reached out a hand and stroked Rasso’s ridged head. The fur was soft and supple, and rather than growling in warning, the fearsome animal twisted its head back and licked her palm. She felt as though a formidable deity had blessed her, and partially regretted turning Vogolan’s heart to stone, since the fallowwolf might have liked to eat it.
“I’m sorry it came to this,” he said. “You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Saffron scoffed. “Why do you care?” A muscle feathered in his jaw. “Because I know what it’s like to feel like every choice you make is the wrong one. To understand that the world can come crumbling down with a single wrong move. My apology might not change anything, true. But you’re not alone, Silver. And if you’re anything like me, which I think you are, then that means something.”
Was she losing her touch, her killer instincts, her nose for a good gamble versus a bad one? Or did the kingpin’s son rattle her, somehow?
In the dim light of the hallway, Levan’s under-eyes were shadowed. Eventually he turned to Segal and muttered, “Don’t call her Filthcloak.”
She was on the other side of the door now. She was the knock the whole world feared.
He looked at her as though she had saved him, which she had, and as though she would be the death of him, which she would.
Saffron was getting under his skin. That much was good. It was not so good that he was beginning to get under hers.
A curious question came to her, then. Did the prophecy still exist, in this version of the world she had created? Was she still fated to kill Levan? Or had she unmade that fate too?
Her heart stilled. Matching costumes. For the Erling Tandall signing. She hadn’t wanted to wear Bloodmoon red, so Levan had made costumes.
She couldn’t reconcile all of it, despite knowing better than anyone that people contained multitudes, that nobody was either all good or all bad, that even those most confident in their convictions were riddled with inconsistencies and paradoxes, that even those with the strongest hold on their magic still did not have full mastery of their minds.
His gaze met hers again, and something shimmered behind his blue eyes. “I see you, Silver. For all that you are.”
She had endured so much, lost so much. How did it still hurt like this?
At the very moment she was hunched over her parents’ bodies, weeping and pleading with the world to undo it, a young Levan was doing the very same just a few miles away. She had always felt it: a shared grief, a shared pain, a shared fate. If she hadn’t turned that doorknob, her parents would still be alive. And so would Levan’s mother.
I’ve thought about two things on a constant loop since I’ve been here. How to survive this. And, well, you.”
Saffron stared at him. “You’re a very complicated person.”
And she knew then, in her heart of hearts, that she had to have nullified the prophecy when she unmade time. She had to have thrown them onto a different path, because right now, nothing in the world could make her want to kill him.
There was a feeling in her chest—a gathering snarl of certainty and dread—that these events concerned themselves with the fate of the world, somehow. It all felt so fucking significant. She was no Foreseer, and yet, somehow, she knew that she and Levan were at the center of something enormous and devastating, something that would end in mutual ruin. Something that would not just unmake them both—it would unmake everything. Of course, it was very possible she was just in love.
Even though she was secretly on the good side, the right side, Saffron felt like the most evil person in the world.
The more she tried to tell herself how wrong it was, the more she wanted it. He was a glittering gamehouse, a blackcherry sour, a dark prophecy. And in this moment, he was hers.
Saffron had no idea how Levan refrained from slaying his father where he stood, after everything Lyrian had done to him. And yet she knew better than anyone that these things were complicated. Love was complicated, and pain was complicated, and believing you deserved to hurt was complicated.
Dad, the broken child at the heart of her wept. You can’t be gone. Mama? Please. Please, I need you. She was six years old and cleaved in two. Looking down at her body, she was surprised to see long limbs, broad hips, the swell of breasts. Because at her very core, in every place that mattered, she was still hiding in that pantry, staring through the keyhole at the corpses of her beloved parents. Some fundamental part of her would be anchored there forever.
Without pleasure, without pain, his well would never refill. The true cost of being Risen. For most mages, it was a fate worse than death.
She might have to keep torturing and killing, keep covering her tracks, fully invest herself in the Bloodmoons and in her goal. But it would all be worth it in the end, when she was back with her parents in that round, ramshackle house in Lunes, all the pain she’d caused vanishing between the cracks of rewritten time. Was it still killing, if you knew you would undo it later, and the victims would be none the wiser?
Then came the axis tilt, the perspective shift, the great pitching of the world beneath her feet. A thunderclap of terrible understanding. Oh, she thought, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. This is how villains are born.
The first time she made her decision, she chose to betray me. In another timeline, I died at her hand. Saffron Killoran unmade my world. And now I will unmake her.
