Page 170 of To Fight and To Fold

Thea closed her eyes and released a breath. "Dangerous words, Aaryn," she uttered.

"No, they aren't," she challenged. "You'll take care of me."

Thea shuddered and rolled Aaryn to her back. "Yes. I will."

Magic settled beneath her skin, somewhere deeper than Aaryn had the language for. After two days of the fever, she felt clearheaded. On her own, with no runes for assistance.

It was over.

Her thoughts were her own again, but as tangled as they were, she wished she could return to the comfort of the haze.

Her thoughts spun in circles, like what time meant to a dragon. Because dragons lived a long time, longer than humans. What was time to a druid, for that matter?

Time was… passage. Life.

What came after life but death? A cycle. Without one there was not the other.

Was what she'd done an interruption of such a sacred cycle? Was the magic she had so looked forward to wielding, to learning, abhorrent in the eyes of those she protected?

The wound in her hand throbbed, a reminder that it was real. That her vision had gone blank when she’d slashed her hand, but instead of darkness, greens and purples and pinks had molded into something incomprehensible.

And yet, she had comprehended.

She had known, for once, all the angles, all the facts, all the options and their outcomes. It all stretched out before her like constellations, connecting and showing her the possibilities, their consequences.

Aaryn was given the chance to change an outcome, and she had made a choice. Then Thea was whole again.

Aaryn had saved Thea, and she held her tightly as if afraid it was all a fevered dream.

She tried to think about this while she studied the bandage on her hand, as if she could see the new scar beneath it.

"Are you okay?" Thea asked.

Aaryn shook her head. Her eyes wouldn't close.

She was afraid if she did, Thea wouldn’t be there when she opened them. She buried her open eyes into Thea's back, her hand resting against her torso, expecting to feel blood seep between her fingers at any moment.

Without the distraction of the awakening, without a fever sending her into a fitful sleep, she couldn't seem to find rest after so much had happened.

She hadn't felt that rip in her reality since.

Not as the battle ended. Not as she had leaned against Thea and felt the throb of her wounds compete with the throb of magic in her veins. Not as it swelled, thickened into a heat that boiled beneath her skin—a dragon's breath all on its own that only slipped out as a mere whimper. Not as she'd reunited with Starspark, who sparkled from the magic he now had untethered access to.

And not now, after she passed her hand over that spot on Thea for the hundredth time, half expecting it to be a battle-fueled dream, that her hand would come away bloodied.

It never did.

Thea had never been stabbed.

Because Aaryn and Starspark had made it so. In exchange for another.

She felt days behind, because her mind had been so filled with nothing but the ache of the Hoard opening within her, rethreading each vein with magic, that everything else had paused. Until now, when she was catching up on the days she had missed.

Carissa had not returned. But she was still out there, somewhere in Rishika, unlike Rolim. Carissa had made sure Evergale paid for the death of her husband, leveling the execution grounds before she'd fled with Stormstrike.

Aaryn heard the news of his death, and once again she thought of that sky-opening truth. The possibilities she had felt. The consequences she had not known but somehow understood.

Carissa would hate Aaryn if she knew, wherever she was.