They didn't sleep that night.
The manor trembled under a weightless pressure—like the world was being held just slightly out of sync with itself. Doors creaked without wind. Candles dimmed without flame. People whispered without knowing why.
Evelyne paced the war room long after everyone else had retreated to prepare. She traced the patterns on the map again and again, as if they might finally yield a route that didn't end in disaster. The "rift," Chron said, was not a destination. It was a fracture of fate. A wound.
And they were all tumbling toward it.
Mirena returned at dawn, her features thinner than before, shadows pooled beneath her eyes. She placed three crystal shards on the table.
"Memory anchors," she said. "They'll let you remember who you are—when everything else is trying to rewrite you."
Evelyne picked one up. The crystal pulsed with faint warmth, like it remembered her.
Alaira entered next, donned in a dark cloak stitched with silver runes—armor for a battle of stories, not steel. She carried two blades: one enchanted, one mundane. One for creatures of magic, the other for those still clinging to their illusions.
"I sent word to the rebels in the north," she said quietly. "If we fall, they'll still act."
Chron appeared last, silent and abrupt, his presence like a skipped heartbeat in time. His eyes lingered on Evelyne longer than necessary.
"Are you ready to leave the story behind?"
"No," she said, with steel in her voice. "I'm ready to finish it."
—
The rift waited in the Valley of Lorn—a place erased from maps and memory, where the sky never quite aligned with the earth. They traveled under the illusion of a merchant caravan, but it was a hollow disguise. Evelyne felt it even in the silence between horse hooves: the hum of unspoken things.
Each night, the stars blinked in different patterns. One evening, Mirena recited a poem she swore she had written as a girl—only to realize she had never learned to write. On the third night, Alaira kissed her.
Not her lips. Just her temple.
Quiet. Steady. Meant to anchor, not awaken.
But Evelyne still didn't sleep.
She dreamed of herself as a child—though she never was. She dreamed of Alaira kneeling, then bleeding. She dreamed of fire and a broken throne and a girl in white laughing at her from the other side of a mirror.
It was the first time she woke up crying.
—
By the fifth day, they reached the Valley.
And they saw it: a fissure in the air itself, like a painting torn down the middle. The rift shimmered in and out of sight. On one side, Evelyne's world—the cursed nobility, the burning of the Capital, the betrayal to come. On the other, fragments of futures that could be: Evelyne in exile. Evelyne crowned. Evelyne dead. Evelyne forgotten.
Time was not moving forward here. It spiraled. Collapsed. Restarted.
Chron held up his hand. "Once we step inside, you'll be tested. Your sense of self, your loyalties, your endings. Not all of you will emerge."
Alaira looked at Evelyne. "Do you trust me?"
"With my whole story."
Evelyne stepped forward, heart pounding like a war drum. Her fingers curled around the memory shard Mirena gave her. She glanced at the women who had followed her to this edge of reality: Mirena, once her enemy; Alaira, always her protector; and Chron, the wildcard.
Then she stepped into the rift.
—
The world shattered like glass.
Evelyne found herself in the palace gardens, sunlight dappling her gown. Music echoed from a distant ballroom. She looked down—
Blood.
Her hands were red. Her dress soaked. Across from her, a figure lay crumpled, hair dark with gore.
Alaira.
"No," Evelyne whispered. "No—this isn't real."
But it was a reality. The one the story had always promised: the villainess turned mad, the protector sacrificed. The tragedy that would fuel the heroine's rise.
"Come back," she begged the image. "I'm not her. Not anymore."
A voice behind her answered.
"But you were. And you will be again—unless you choose differently."
Chron appeared, though his face was blurred, shifting through versions of himself. He gestured, and the world rewound like a film in reverse. The garden faded.
They were in a mirror maze now—each reflection a version of Evelyne. Some cruel. Some kind. One wore the crown. One wore chains. One knelt before a burning pyre.
"This is your story's spine," Chron said. "Choose the ending—or destroy the book."
"What happens if I destroy it?"
"You become the author."
Evelyne turned—and saw Alaira's reflection watching her. Steady. Present. Real.
"I'm not here to choose endings," Evelyne whispered.
She reached out and touched the mirror.
"I'm here to write new beginnings."
—
She emerged from the rift not alone.
Beside her, Alaira blinked back into form—solid, breathing, alive. Mirena followed, gasping as though surfacing from deep water. Chron stood last, fragments of himself flickering like dying stars.
"It's done?" Alaira asked.
Evelyne looked around.
The world had changed.
The sun rose from a different angle. The trees were taller. The air, crisper. Her dress was stitched differently, her sigil now a phoenix instead of a snake. A symbol of rebirth.
"We're not in the same version," Mirena murmured. "We… jumped."
Evelyne stepped forward, hand in Alaira's.
"No. We rewrote."
—
They returned to the Capital three days later.
No one recognized them.
In this version, Evelyne had been missing for months. The Kingdom was fractured, the court desperate for unity. The Prince—once her former fiancé—was engaged to someone else. Her estate had never burned. The villainess had never fallen.
It was a clean slate.
And Evelyne would not waste it.
She visited the orphaned, held court in the libraries, and rewrote trade policies by candlelight. People were wary of her at first, but slowly, word spread: she was different. Changed. Unbroken but rebuilt.
Alaira stood beside her through it all.
Not as a knight. Not as a tool.
But as a partner.
—
One month after the Rift, Evelyne stood before a crowd gathered at the Capital's central square. She wore no crown. Just a midnight-blue cloak and the phoenix crest stitched over her heart.
"I was once a footnote in someone else's story," she said. "A villain to make a heroine shine brighter. But no one is born evil—and no one is written in stone."
She looked to Alaira, then to Mirena in the crowd.
"I changed my fate. You can change yours."
—
That night, as the fire crackled in the hearth and the world didn't collapse around them, Alaira asked:
"Do you think we won?"
Evelyne leaned into her.
"No. I think we began."