THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 43: May Never Be Again
“There is nothing left now but to end this song and begin anew.”
– Titania Cavainna (234 PA)
Maeve dove between a pair of Xartasia’s knights. The two fairies wheeled after her, but Allados fell on them from above, clearing the way for his queen. Maeve heard him scream once as the other Arcadians turned on him. With tears in her eyes, she folded her wings close against her back and plummeted at the Waygate.
“Xartasia!” Maeve shouted.
Thousands of Arcadians knelt below, their heads bowed and wings outstretched as they sang, remembering the White Kingdom as it was. As it would be again. Maeve called out to Xartasia once more, but if her cousin could hear her at all, she didn’t look up.
The White Queen — she was a true queen, regal and powerful in a way that Maeve had never managed — stood in the center of the Waygate, awash with writhing blue and violet light so intense that it left spots swimming across Maeve’s vision. She was sure that the visible light was only a tiny part of the energy that blazed through the Waygate.
Xartasia’s ink-black hair and flowing white gown swirled around her, whipped by the forces she had sung into existence. She raised one perfect hand and thousands of Arcadians sang together. The Waygate rang like a struck bell.
Maeve dove at the other queen, throwing all of her weight and momentum behind her spear in a deadly pinpoint of glass. Would killing Xartasia be enough to stop this? Maeve prayed.
But she slammed into something above the Waygate, an invisible wall of force as hard as any fibersteel bulkhead, and fell. Maeve landed painfully on one of the huge white steps below her radiant cousin. With a groan, Maeve hauled herself to her feet and pushed, but could not take even a single step closer.
“Xartasia!” Maeve called out. “Cousin, stop! The Alliance will be here soon. This is over!”
Finally, Xartasia glanced down imperiously from the Waygate. Her eyes danced with the brilliant indigo light and her crown rose like a circlet of blue-burning blades from the darkness of her hair.
“I can see it all,” Xartasia answered in a voice that barely reached Maeve’s ears. It was soft and secretive. Reverent. “I can see the White Kingdom again. I can see my father. I can see all I have lost…”
“Xartasia, no!” Maeve shouted. “Do not do this! You cannot just obliterate a hundred years, a trillion lives! We do not have the right to unmake their existences!”
“But they will not suffer,” Xartasia said. “None of us will suffer, Maeve. All will be as it should have been. I will fix it all. There is nothing left now but to end this song and begin anew. I will see you again in our home.”
Maeve sang a wordless note of anguish and flung herself against Xartasia’s barrier again, but to no avail. She may as well have been trying to cut through the Waygate itself with a feather. Above her, Xartasia closed her eyes and spread her arms as though welcoming an embrace. All around her, the Waygate filled the darkness with twisting violet radiance. The Arcadians’ song rose, thundering in Maeve’s ears.
Someone called her name… Logan had pushed his way through the throng of singing, swaying Arcadians. His Talon-9 was still in his hand, the barrel steaming slightly in the stale air of Axis’ long-dark surface.
Gripper was a step ahead and charged desperately at Xartasia, but he slammed into the same barrier that had stopped Maeve. He shouted in frustration. Ballad soared out of the darkness toward the White Queen, but could approach no closer than Gripper. Logan aimed his Talon and fired. The laser beam just refracted harmlessly, as though off Arcadian glass. He glanced down at the weapon and then holstered it.
Something was happening. All around them, Axis shimmered and wavered like reflections on the surface of the sea. Cold numbness seeped through Maeve’s body, a sort of non-sensation that she couldn’t describe except as… as though reality were fading away, a strange sense of distance from her own body. As though time and reality were draining away like blood from a wound.
A wound in time, Maeve thought, and we are bleeding out.
The Waygate blazed, pulsed and flared in a nova of cold indigo fire. Another Arcadian dove from the writhing purple shadows to land beside Maeve.
Anthem. The knight’s armor shone like iridescent flame.
“Titania,” he said. There was a century of pain and joy in that single word.
Xartasia’s bright violet eyes flew open and she stared.
“Anthem…?”
The knight didn’t try to hammer or fight his way to the burning Waygate. He stood in the shimmering final twilight, staring up at Xartasia.
“I lived, my enarri,” he said. “And I thought of you every day.”
“No… No, you died on Illisem,” Xartasia answered. She took a faltering step toward the stairs. “Anthem…”
“I am here.” He held out his arms. “But I cannot come to you, Titania. Not while you are doing this.”
Xartasia drew herself up. “Anthem, my enarri… All that I have done, I did in your memory… I must do this…!”
“Titania, my love,” Anthem said. “If today is truly to be the end of this chapter of history, let me hold you just once more before it closes.”
Xartasia’s violet eyes were wide and shining. She took one trembling step and then another toward Anthem, leapt and spread her wings. The White Queen fell into Anthem’s embrace and he folded his wings around her, love and pain warring across his face.
The knight closed one gauntlet into a fist and slammed it hard into Xartasia’s temple. She went limp in his arms, blood trickling from her midnight hair. Her glass crown fell to the ground, rolled once along its rim and then clattered into the dust.
“I am sorry, my enarri,” Anthem said. “But I love you more than your pain.”
The gathered Arcadians moaned as Xartasia fell. Their nexus was gone, the mind that connected theirs to the Waygate. First one and then hundreds of fairies jumped to their feet, filling the struggling shadows with a storm of wings. But the uncontrolled Waygate seared with bruised purple light, gashed through the middle with bloody red. Gripper grabbed Maeve’s shoulder.
“She didn’t close the Waygate!” he shouted. “If we don’t get that thing under control, it’s going to call the Devourers again, just like on Orindell and Prianus!”
“Duaal–” Maeve began.
“Is not here,” Anthem finished. The knight lifted Xartasia’s limp body into his arms. “You are the only one left who knows how to control a Waygate, Maeve. Go!”
“No!” Maeve said.
Her failure on Tamlin had started this whole thing, begun over one hundred years of pain and death that left her people homeless, that orphaned Gripper, that killed Tiberius and countless others.
“There’s no one else, dove,” Logan told her. “Close that thing!”
Maeve hated it, but he was right. Maeve leapt into the air. There were Arcadians everywhere, scattering into the darkness with the fall of their queen. Feathers flickered through red and purple light. The Waygate toned thunderously.
“Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen.”
Xartasia’s barrier was gone now and Maeve landed hard on the slick white of the Waygate. She threw her arm across her face as the light blazed. All she had to do was sing the closure spell and then the whole system would shut down. The Devourers probably had some simpler, faster way to interface with their ancient technology, but Maeve had no way to ask them for help.
Maeve closed her eyes. Spots of light wavered behind her lids, but she didn’t need to see. Just to concentrate. She had to get the spell right this time. Just close the Waygate and this would be over. All of this pain and loss and destruction would finally end. Maeve drew a deep breath that tasted of wet earth and feathers and blood. She found the words and opened her mouth to sing…
But Xartasia’s song, her spell sang through the Waygate. The spell was out of control, but it wasn’t dead.
I can see it, Xartasia had said.
And Maeve could see it, too. All of it. The violet light that filled the Waygate washed over her now, the filaments of time and energy Xartasia had spread like a spider’s web or nervous system across the entire galaxy, across a hundred years.
A trillion lives poured into Maeve’s mind through the Waygate, uncountable moments and trillions of possibilities. Everything that had happened in one hundred years. Everything that might have happened. The White Kingdom of Arcadia restored, never fallen. A shining jewel of glass that never faded…
But more. So much more. Maeve felt it all around her, through her — infinite threads of lives and moments not tangled in time, but a precise and intricate tapestry in a trillion breath-taking, luminous colors. It rippled against Maeve’s inspection.
“Glass!” Gripper shouted. “Close the Waygate!”
Maeve heard him. Not with her ears… her blood pounded and Maeve was drowning in the dull red roar. But she knew her friend was speaking. She saw it, felt the moment like a tiny, delicate living thing in her hand. Every single moment of Gripper’s life, from the tiny Arboran’s first infant scream, his first steps to that moment he climbed the sick old sycona tree, when it crashed to the ground and he chased Xartasia through the ancient Waygate…
Maeve reached out and brushed her thoughts lightly across the tapestry. There were dark threads, pain and loss sewn through the boundless beauty. Maeve plucked at a single one and all of time shuddered at her touch.
“I can see it,” she said. “I can see it all. And I… I can change it…”
“What are you doing?” Gripper cried.
“It does not have to be like this,” Maeve told her friend. “You do not have to be alone out here. I can send you home. You will never come here.”
“What?” Gripper’s eyes were huge and he took an involuntary step closer to the burning Waygate. “I… You can… I could go back to Arborus? But everyone there is dead, Glass.”
“I can fix it. I can change time…” Maeve whispered.
She could. It would take only a touch, not the crude hammer that Xartasia would have used. Maeve didn’t have to change all of time, just… just a few moments…
Ballad landed on the white stairs. “Maeve, this is exactly what we came to stop Xartasia from doing. Shut down the Waygate!”
“No,” Maeve said. “I do not have to change everything. I will not unmake anyone’s lives… But there have been so very many painful, terrible moments. So many have died! The Alliance fights even now to contain the last of the Devourers on Level One. They will win their battle, but at such cost…! Tens of thousands are dead, dying!”
Maeve reached out one trembling hand. She could touch them, trillions of lives, so many points of pain. With just a tiny nudge, she could fix them all. So many other lives, so many possibilities…
Tiberius alive. Alive.
Gripper perched in a healthy sycona tree, never falling. Living a long life on green Arborus.
Xia married to Xen, with an adorable brood of healthy, well-bred silver children.
Gavriel on Tynerion, a teacher of philosophy once more.
Duaal under the bright sun and approving smiles of his own people.
Logan in his worn blue police uniform, holding his wife and son.
“Maeve, stop this!” Anthem said from the dark, distant ground.
She looked at the knight. “But I can send you through the same Waygate as Titania, Anthem. You never have to be separated from your love!”
“I am with her now.” Anthem brushed Xartasia’s black hair back from her face. “Perhaps she will hate me when she wakes, but at least I have held my enarri one last time.”
“Tiberius does not have to die,” Maeve said, turning to Gripper. “Duaal does not have to be taken from Hyzaar. He does not have to die here! Ferris’ daughter and Ballad’s sister… They can live! Xia will never be taken by pirates. I can fix it, all of it! You can finally go home, Gripper. It is the only thing you have ever wanted.”
“No, Maeve,” the Arboran answered. “I… I just want you to close the Waygate and come down from there. I just want this to be over. We can’t play with time. You have to stop.”
Logan had climbed the stairs, pushing past Ballad. The Prian bounty hunter was a silhouette, a shadow in the brilliant Waygate light… Except for his left hand. The brilliance broke into a hundred rainbows against the glass.
“Maeve,” Logan said. “Close it.”
“I can give you back your hand,” she told him desperately. Why could they not see? All she wanted to do was make things better, just a few small fixes to time so that those she loved didn’t have to suffer. “Hallax’s sword will miss its mark. Reginald will live. You will keep your heart, Logan. I can save you…”
The wild storm of possibilities whipped around them. Winds of a hundred worlds tore at his clothes and hair. There was rain and snow, lightning in slashed fragments and sunshine lit the Waygate as Maeve reached through time. Silver moonlight and the flashing green and red of the Prian police car lights. Just the lightest touch and Logan would be whole again. Maeve could give him that with just a wish…
“What use do I have for a heart except to give it to you?” Logan asked. He held his glass hand out to Maeve. “If that Emberguard didn’t take my hand, I would still be a cop on Prianus. I never would have become a bounty hunter. I never would have met you.”
“I have hurt you,” Maeve said.
“Yes,” Logan agreed. “But pain shapes us, Maeve.”
“It breaks us!” she wept. “Look what it did to Titania, to me… To you, my enarri.”
“It makes us who we are. That’s why we came here, dove, why so many people have died today. To defend the right to bear our scars. I wouldn’t change a moment of my life, no matter how painful, if it meant I never met you.”
Logan still held his gun in his right hand, the Talon-9 that had been at the center of their chase, their hunt for one another for so long. Tears shone in his hard blue eyes. But there were so many lives in Maeve’s hands, so many terrible losses and moments of unbearable pain. They drowned Maeve in more tears than Logan could ever shed.
How could she turn her back on such suffering?
“I love you,” Maeve whispered. “I only want to help.”
“I only want you.”
Her hunter raised the gun, aiming at Maeve. Logan would kill her and suffer another terrible scar rather than live his whole life without her. His hands were steady even as tears streamed down his cheeks. Logan Coldhand would kill the woman he loved to save that love… and the worlds. His scars were still raw, painful. They would never stop hurting. But they made him strong, too.
“We have been through so much,” Maeve said.
“But it brought us here,” Logan answered.
Maeve took Logan’s glass hand and pulled him into the center of the storm, into the Waygate. The wind and storms of a thousand worlds whipped them as Maeve stood on her toes and kissed her enarri.
There was pain, yes, as his cybernetic fingers clutched too hard at her arm, but the pleasure of his touch outshone it all. Her hunter was right. There was no pleasure, no life without pain. Taking away the pain was just as terrible as anything Xartasia had tried to do. Even the dead had lived. Too short a time for too many of them, but those lives were their own. Maeve could not take them away.
She drew another deep breath and let go. Maeve sang Caith’s song carefully and perfectly, singing the first Waygate to sleep again with Logan’s arms around her. At last, the purple light faded and darkness fell once more beneath Axis.
