Vraska can't take her hands off the cup. The tea inside is already too hot. It burns at her fingertips, but despite the heat, she keeps her hands where they are. This feeling is potent, real. It makes her feel something other than grief.

She has come to know Vryn almost as well as he did. He's everywhere, in this flat. Ranna Beleren purged it of his belongings long ago, and the two of them settled into a routine of mutual effort to keep the other functioning—a duality of loss, mother and beloved. Vraska does the dishes. Ranna plays with Loot. They take turns keeping the house in order while the other breaks down in the bedroom. Sometimes, for the span of a heartbeat, Vraska will feel like her old self—wandering through the market or taking Loot out for a walk—before she's reminded of him again and feels the crushing shock of living for a moment without mourning. Those moments sting the worst. She suffers a secondhand shame, as if Jace must know that she forgot, however briefly.

Mostly what plagues her is guilt. She turned away from him. He was enacting the plan she had helped form, but when the time came for action, he took a step that she couldn't. Was it cowardice? Moral superiority? It was the look on his face that had stopped her in her tracks. He'd been so calculated, so direct and narrowly focused in his righteousness. Jace looked like a leader. A revolutionary.

A terrible thought passes through Vraska's mind as she grips the blazing-hot cup harder.

He looked like a monster, she marks. He looked like me.

Ranna joins her at the kitchen table, and Vraska shoves down the nausea in her stomach. She meets Ranna's eyes (his eyes). His mother doesn't smile.

"How long does it hurt like this?" Vraska asks. Her voice is just above a whisper, as if speaking any louder might summon his ghost to the table.

The healer turns her cup of tea (tea, these days, just tea) in her hands. "Forever," she replies, "until you figure out how to carry it."

Vraska commits the advice to memory. Ranna knows best. Her son died twice.

There's a knock at the door, and the two of them share a glance. Jace's warrant hasn't departed from either of their anxieties. Vraska charges her eyes to petrify. Ranna readies a scalpel spell. The two of them abandon their cups, focus on the door, Vraska's hand instinctively feeling for the little horns on Loot's head.

"Vraska?" says a bright voice.

Loot bolts for the living room. He wiggles and chirps, jumping excitedly. Vraska negates her charge. "It's a friend," she assures.

Ranna calls, "Come in!"

Chandra enters, Ajani close behind. The two look tired, heavy, but Chandra kneels and tackles Loot as he rams himself into her. She laughs and hoists him up under one arm.

Chandra! Loot hollers through their minds, chirping aloud and yelling mentally at the same time. Chandra is inside our house!

Ajani approaches Ranna with a gentle bow. "Mother Beleren. My name is Ajani. I am honored to greet you."

"We came with news," Chandra says. Ranna gestures to the empty kitchen table. Chandra puts down Loot and takes a chair as Ajani sits side-saddle to let his tail hang freely. Vraska and Ranna reclaim their respective seats, and the four of them sit for a moment, strange company indeed. A noise from under the table. Loot scurries around Chandra's boots, piling up toys he wants to show off. Vraska puts a hand on his head to quiet him for a moment.

Unease displaces Vraska's nausea. Whatever Ajani and Chandra are here for isn't more unwelcome news—what more could there be? Half her heart is dead as dust—but they don't come with good news, either. Vraska wonders with creeping certainty if they still think she wants to continue her beloved's work. Are they here to try to stop her? Could she petrify them both in time if she wanted to?

"Jace is alive," Chandra says, and in three words, Vraska's entire world falls apart.

Ranna cries out in an intersection of relief, exhaustion, and distended grief.

But Vraska says nothing. Her world goes silent save for the thunder of her pulse. Her chest tightens and strains.

She feels herself stand. Walk to the bedroom. Shut the door.

Quiet. Everything is quiet and dark, curtains drawn. She's in her bedroom, but she's also in the featureless void of a plane. Isolation, silence, confinement. She hears her own breath, feels the hitch in her chest, the mumbling of the others outside as they comfort a sobbing Ranna. But Vraska cannot cry. She just feels like her heart is on fire. This is too much. He's alive. He's alive. He's alive.

Shaking, her breath slowly coming under her control, she returns to the kitchen. Ajani's arms surround a still-sobbing Ranna. Chandra stands and approaches Vraska with caution. The woman's hands are out; she's visibly uncertain what the gorgon will do.

"He survived, but we think he's still up to something."

"We met someone," Ajani says. "She told us she was working for Jace, and she kidnapped an oracle of Arcavios."

Vraska blinks, her mind still blurry and weary from emotion. "What allies does he have left?"

"She was another gorgon …" Chandra says with no small amount of discomfort. "We thought you might know."

"An illusion," Vraska says quickly, then with deeper uncertainty, "I don't know."

"Do you know why he would need an oracle?" Ajani asks.

Vraska swallows, remembering the plan they'd come up with. "There was knowledge he did not possess, specifically about the fusion of planes."

Chandra's eyes go wide. "I saw that," she blurts. "When he attacked me, I felt something secondhand—frustration, lacking. He wanted to see something."

"He found someone else," Vraska says in a broken voice. "Someone to help him proceed."

How can he still want to continue the plan? she thinks, before an equal voice in her mind counters, He has nothing else since you abandoned him.

But her self-admonishment is matched by her partner in misery.

"Vraska, this was your idea, too," Ranna sputters. Vraska's stomach drops, and the healer glares at her. "If there's a chance to make good, it has to be you."

Vraska knows her culpability. "The idea to fix the world by making a new one was our shared idea. He's not wholly evil—" She stops herself.

A past version of myself would have deemed him so. Is anyone wholly one thing?

"Will you come and help us try to get through to him?" Ajani asks.

"Yes." Vraska nods, wincing. "But I think it'll take more than a waterfall and a concussion to bring him back to himself this time."

Ranna wipes her face and sighs. "No. It won't be straightforward. Reason won't save him like it did you."

Vraska doesn't say anything. Reason didn't save her.

Loot scrambles around the base of the table, crawling onto Chandra's back before she dutifully pulls him around to bounce on her leg. She scoffs at the other adults. "Sure it will. Reason and logic are his entire personality."

"He's a telepath," Ranna says. "His world is everything but reason and logic." The pyromancer shrinks a little. "He's lost, but he's a good man. How did he survive?"

Chandra and Ajani look at each other uncertainly. Ajani answers carefully, "He has the gifts needed. If he was able to hold on to enough of his mind, he may have … put himself back together. He was in the Meditation Realm. It is possible."

"He's used his will to stave off death before," Vraska says, arms tightly folded. This is too much. She's going to lose her composure if she stays any longer. A little noise from Chandra's arms draws her attention to Loot. His eyes stare back, huge and hurt. Vraska holds out her arms and picks him up, swinging him onto her lap.

"That's right," she says softly, ignoring the others. "Jace is alive."

Loot's tail wags. He chirps in sad joy, panting and wiggling and overwhelmed with too many emotions in one tiny body. Can I see him? he projects, followed immediately by a frown. Why are you sad?

"Grammers and I are sad because it's a big, complicated feeling, learning that someone we love is alive again. But I know that Jace loves you. And when he's feeling better, he can come home again. But first I need to go help him remember how to be okay."

She looks to Ranna, who nods. "I'll watch Loot. But I want you to give him something from me."

Ranna stands, walks to the back.

Chandra turns, her eyebrows raised. "His mom is intense."

"Didn't your mom lead two different revolutions?" Vraska counters.

"Mine was a pushover," purrs Ajani, then quickly adds to Chandra, "Little candle, your mother is a bonfire."

Vraska sets Loot down with a kiss and brings over some paper and pencils. With coaxing, and a destination Chandra says they got from someone named Zimone, he dutifully draws Vraska two maps—one to help her find the right Omenpaths and another for their guest from Muraganda. The sketches are cubistic, a riot of lines and shapes in multiple dimensions at once, translated from an infinitely complex mind through the whole-handed clutch of a child's grip. They read more like an ox falling down a flight of stairs than maps, but if Vraska squints, she can make out the path.

Ranna returns with a small, flat object wrapped in a blue embroidered sash.

"Don't look at it. Just give it to him from me," Ranna says to Vraska.

Vraska stuffs away the package and her questions and embraces Ranna. Their shared grief burns brightly between them, an unspoken connection sealing the bond with steel. Loot hugs their knees, and both women kneel to let him join in.

Vraska rises, dabbing a tear from her eye. "I'll meet you there," she says to Chandra and Ajani, "but while I'm making the journey, I need you both to stop on Muraganda. And take this." She hands them the other map.

"Why Muraganda?" Chandra frowns. "Is there some, uh, rock or dinosaur you need?"

Vraska explains. "We tracked individuals we thought might be of use in executing our plan. For a while we considered bringing a Planeswalker named Garruk to Thunder Junction, but Jace said he was the only one resistant to his illusions and that it wouldn't work. If we want a chance at making our way to Jace, then we'll need Garruk's help."

Chandra nods in seeming comprehension. "Garruk." She glances at Ajani and whispers, "Are we supposed to know who that is?"

Chandra is greeted on Muraganda by the fug of jungle musk and flies, and in the medley of vines and fenestrated plants and rubber trees is a rounded wooden lodge.

It's guarded on each side by a thicket of spined creepers and the bones of what can only be dinosaurs. Chandra takes a step forward but is stopped by Ajani's arm—he nods at their feet. Thin tripwires crisscross the grass. Both the human and leonin grimace as they tread between the wires, slowly making their way to the hut.

A thin curl of smoke rises from the chimney of the lodge; no windows greet them, and only a solitary door indicates that a person can enter. They approach carefully, and as they do, a voice grunts, "Who are you?"

They whip around to face the largest human Chandra has ever seen, bare to the waist and seated on a stump near the lodge. Strange, angular markings cover his exposed flesh, the fingers of his right hand slick with some kind of war paint. A clay pot of the substance sits beside him on the ground. He wipes his hand on a patch of moss, shrugs a pelt over his shoulders, and stands, forearm bulging as he slings an axe taller than her over his shoulder. Without looking down once, he walks across the field of tripwires, instinctively lifting his feet in just the right places. This tower of muscles can only be Garruk Wildspeaker.

"Explain," he growls.

"We are here to appeal, Garruk Planeswalker," Ajani growls back. "Someone who once sought to help you needs your help in return."

Chandra watches as Garruk pauses, weighing his options. His nostrils flare, the grip on his axe tightening. She has no doubt that he could do great harm if he desired.

"We just want to talk," Chandra assures him.

Garruk places a finger to his nose and blows a wad of mucus. Without another word, he strides back across the field toward the lodge.

Ajani and Chandra share a bewildered glance. The leonin shrugs and pats her on the back before following.

"Inside," Garruk announces, and as they enter, Chandra notes that he's taller than Ajani, wonders what her friend thinks about that.

The interior of the lodge evaporates any sense of dread. It's downright cozy—lovingly worn chairs with fluffy pelts on the seats, a hand-laid hearth of fossil-rich river stone—belying the brooding nature of its inhabitant. The wooden walls feature all manner of hooks and shelves holding druid tools for wayfinding and truth-seeking. This is a place he clearly made himself. It lacks a craftsman's touches, instead displaying a hunter's pragmatism. An immense helmet rests on the table. Beside it sits a rucksack bursting with hardtack and salt beef—the kind of provisions you'd need on a long journey through harsh terrain. The only thing that turns Chandra's stomach is a massive set of antlers on the wall above the table. Garruk sits underneath it and leans just slightly to the left to grab the kettle from the hearth—his body clears half the room with the movement.

"Drink," he commands, passing out modest wooden cups and filling them with a brew that smells of sharp florals and bergamot.

"Thank you for your hospitality—" Chandra tries to say.

But the immense druid interrupts. "Your blood pressure is raised, pyromancer."

Chandra checks her pulse under the table. The huntmaster isn't wrong. Something about him feels … dangerous. The way he does everything is deliberate, considered—as though if he were to stop thinking about each action, his hands might move to some other more vicious purpose. She gathers her courage and speaks.

"My name is Chandra Nalaar. This is Ajani Goldmane. Our friend has lost his way. He seeks to end the suffering of the Multiverse by creating one of his own. We fear it will overwrite this one. Do you remember Jace Beleren?"

Garruk doesn't say anything.

"We understand you're the only one his illusions haven't fooled," Chandra adds.

"How do you know?" he says.

Ajani sets his cup down delicately. "He shared the memories with a friend."

"Telepaths," Garruk growls. He takes a sip from his own cup, considering.

Chandra's heart won't ease. It's hard to tell if he'll jolt into violence at any moment or sit and talk through the offer like a man half his size.

"What about the rest?" he grunts.

Chandra blinks. "Rest of what?"

"Illusions are a courtesy for a mindbreaker."

Ajani and Chandra grimace. They know full well what Jace can do. He always seemed so non-threatening when he was on their side. "We have to try," Chandra says.

"An appeal to personhood," Ajani adds. "Camaraderie. He will remember the oath he made."

Garruk seems skeptical. Chandra decides to shift the conversation. "How are you able to see through his illusions?"

The huntsman sniffs a little too hard. "They don't smell real."

Chandra leans forward, amusement overtaking reason. "What does real smell like?"

The huntsman shrugs.

Ajani intervenes. "Your olfactory abilities aren't impacted by Jace's deceptions, then. Impressive. They've always fooled me."

"That makes sense," Garruk says, refusing to elaborate. Ajani's ears flicker in irritation.

Chandra steers the conversation back. "Everything in existence, Garruk. All of it will be overwritten if we can't stop Jace."

"All of it?"

"All." At least, that's what Vraska said will happen.

He scratches at his stubble. "This world dies."

"The world, its people, its wilderness. I know for Planeswalkers like you how vital that connection is between yourself and the land. All of that is at risk if we can't bring Jace to reason."

The huntsman looks up and around him, taking in his small lodge. "You need me," he says, as if confirming something for himself rather than stating the obvious. His mouth is a straight line. "Lucky you. Another day and I would have been gone."

"Where were you headed?" Chandra asks.

"That's my business," Garruk says. "I'll help bring the telepath back. But I need something in return."

"Name your price," Ajani says.

"Information," growls Garruk. "I need people who understand wards, seals, magical containment. Do you know anyone like that?"

Chandra blanches. She glances briefly at Ajani, who glances briefly back. With silent conversation, the human and leonin reach mutual agreement.

She turns back to Garruk. "I think we can help you out."

Cast Away Doubt | Art by: Zara Alfonso
0051_MTGFRA_MainUP: Cast Away Doubt

Here, in one of the many memory-prisons of the tower, is the part of Jace that is honest about himself.

He holds the memory of every injury, every slight, every injustice, and sees the cause. He was the part that revolted at the math, that saw the solution of the equation and declared it a violation of existence. He was the part that was ripped out first, but he is the only severed part the Theorist will still give visitation. He is the Guildpact, and he stands to greet his captor, for the Theorist has come to him for counsel.

He greets the Theorist, colonizer of their own body, and doesn't bother with a hello. The Guildpact was the first of them to grow a gray hair, the first to face the long torment of insomnia. He was the one who was able to look at himself and his abilities. He is the wise one.

"Check my work," says the Theorist, handing over a long piece of parchment. His white glove meets the Guildpact's blue one, but the scars and plugs of phyresis are only under one cloak.

The two parts of a single person stand in the ruins of the Chamber of the Guildpact. A great gaping hole exposes his sanctum as a wound to an imaginary Ravnica. Gray rain patters outside; a chill wind begs the torn tapestry to dance. The Guildpact is imprisoned here, unable to rejoin his body or even walk among the many (false) Ravnicans below. He reads while standing, framed by the window of rubble at his back.

"It's collapsing," concludes the Guildpact. He hands the parchment back, but the Theorist doesn't take it.

"Double-check it," he replies with annoyance.

The Guildpact shakes his head. "I don't need to. It's clear by the second proof."

"Check it again."

"Yes, sir," the Guildpact says, sucking his teeth.

He hates the Theorist. Hates how much he understands him, sure, but mostly the Guildpact hates how much this guy hates being a person. The Guildpact can understand—people are annoying. They yell at you to go to your desk and to fix their problems and to make decisions no one human should be able to make. But this Jace seems to have forgotten the most important truth of a telepath—that no one understands people like them.

"How's the body?" he asks.

The Theorist looks away, eyeing the immense hole in the wall of the Chamber of the Guildpact and the rainy Ravnica outside. "I still can't contain the map we got from Loot."

"I remember the feeling. How are you still upright?"

"I've stored it in Theorix."

"In the Theorem Hall?"

"No, in the cadets."

The Guildpact closes his eyes. "And how are they surviving?"

The Theorist is quiet. "I kept what I could of the map with me. The cadets will manage."

"We shouldn't have copied it from Loot. I guess I'd feel worse if the Theorix cadets were fully people."

"They will be," snaps the Theorist.

The Guildpact ignores him and picks up a broken pen from the rubble. He kneels and, placing the parchment on the floor, turns the proofs into chicken scratch. He scrawls on the paper, circling some numbers, underlining others. "Fourth proof, you slip up halfway through. There's not enough to balance your variable. You need a stronger starting point for the overlay to take."

"The tether is enough."

The Guildpact tenses in anger. This guy, this automaton. He doesn't bother to contain his anger. "The tether is our body, you inhuman machine."

"What about the fifth proof?" presses the Theorist. "Factoring in the oracle, witnessing the generation process firsthand."

The Guildpact shakes his head and stands, scoffing. "You know, it's funny. You cut us out of our body, but did you know we still get to see what you're up to?"

"That isn't your business."

"We see it in the back of our mind. Everything you do, all the shitty choices you make. Trillions of people is fine in theory, but in practice you can't even kill one oracle, huh?"

The Theorist glares a migraine into the Guildpact's left frontal lobe. It burns like ice, grips at his temples, and sends an aura around his vision. The hole in the wall winks with a painful shine. The Guildpact groans in angry response, and the Theorist asserts, "This Multiverse needs to tether itself to something real. The theorems prove that. The old Multiverse can support—"

"Our home," groans the Guildpact as he screws his eyes shut through the migraine. "You intend to overwrite our home."

The Theorist gets close, his white cloak whipping behind him with the motion. "What good did it serve us?"

A breeze chills the open sanctum. Little motes of dust fly up from the rubble. The Guildpact catches his breath and does quick work sweeping the migraine away. "You know what happens if you fail."

"There are alternate options," says the Theorist. "If the Multiverse collapses, then it's the model that fails, not—"

"You. You fail." The Guildpact shakes off the last of his migraine with a flash of his eyes and assesses the damage around the Chamber of the Guildpact.

This is what it looked like hours after Nicol Bolas's imprisonment. Both parts of the same person remembered what had happened in this room in that moment, how they'd mourned Gideon's sacrifice while privately gritting their teeth that it should have been them.

"You prioritized the potential of life over reality," the Guildpact spits.

"Don't!" the Theorist yells.

The Guildpact seems taller, his shadows darker. He knows full well how incapable he is, and he speaks truth with Ravnican directness. He draws close once more, combative, the temperature in the air chilled like glacial melt. "You know why you cut me out? Because I'm the only part of us willing to admit we are in way over our head."

The Theorist turns his back and summons a portal at the end of the room. "I don't have to listen to this!" he yells.

The Guildpact doesn't budge. He spreads his arms wide in appeasement. "No one can fix it but us! And there's too much for us to fix!"

The Theorist flicks a hand, and the Guildpact collapses to the rubble with a sick thud, dead asleep.

The embarrassment of having to travel by Omenpath has not yet vanished into memory. Vraska feels impotent, a shadow of herself, as she tightens the straps on her backpack and fords yet another stream on yet another poorly maintained trail. There were services that could have gotten her to Strixhaven faster, but so long as they were run out of Ravnica, they were unavailable to her.

She has spent the last day traversing a plane of swamps and mosquitoes. Her feet sink in two inches of peat with every step. The only other sound is a distant ker-plunk of something eating something else. She hates the indignity of the journey. This method of travel still feels like a sick joke.

There's no chance of making the next Omenpath by nightfall. When she finds a patch of ground large enough to make camp, she busies herself preparing it, burying her grudge alongside her tent stakes. She didn't used to have to camp. She never needed a route. Vraska prepares her bedroll all the same, lays out her sleeping furs on the sphagnum moss. She's learned by now to carry flint and pick up twigs along the way, and she hates that. Some city girl she is.

Vraska crawls onto her sleeping furs and looks at the stars. Fireflies and will-o'-the-wisps dance through the tall grass around her. It's nice for a moment. Then she closes her eyes.

Her dreams have been off since Jace reunited her mind, three years ago on that Ravnican rooftop.

Not off off, but saturated. More potent. Memorable to the point of embarrassment. Like someone electrocuted her imagination and left her to sort out sense from the vibrancy, her hands slipping further from the reins of her dreams. She's now subject to them. It's a nightly force that overtakes her.

She hopes she will dream of reunion, of a welcome embrace and the victory of cheating death. She hopes to dream of Jace, the old Jace, her beloved. What if he were wholly that?

But the dream takes over, and any hope of safety from her own inner turmoil is gone.

A sensation—meekness, paralysis, unpreparedness, and subordination.

The air is thick with incense. It pulls at her vision and makes the woven rug at her feet dance. Or is that something else in the smoke? Is it the smoke at all?

She is in the center of an alder-lined war room.

Panels of wood coat every inch, and a broad skylight streams cloudy half-light across the intricate slate stonework of the floor. Her most treasured garment spills across it.

She is dressed as she once was, as queen of the Golgari. The room is full of observers, clad in thick wool and silk garments to keep out the cold, each woven with a slight variant on the same blue pattern. Vraska knows the pattern well. It's the same that Ranna hangs from her mantel, the same she promised Vraska would wear if she agreed to marriage.

And there, before her, suddenly present, seated in front of an immense (human?) skull as tall as his seated form, is Jace.

Sorrow seizes her heart for a split second before she remembers that in the waking world, he is alive. But this Jace is not her Jace. With the logic of dreams, Vraska knows who this is—the Jace who did not kill Alhammarret. Or, judging by the skull, the one who killed him later.

General Beleren sits broadly in his chair, his wrists on his knees, his robes five layers thick, draping his frame and multiplying his silhouette. He holds his head high and his brow low. His tattoos now cover his face, piercing blue eyes glaring out from a thicket of white lines she is certain are rife with meaning. He sits in front of a wide, painted panel—mage-rings intersecting with knots and knives, the impression of a city at each end, and in its center an upturned half-circle that trails downward around a central circle. Beleren's signet.

She loves him, she fears him, she hates him—Vraska isn't certain. Her skin prickles with fear that it is something else.

The doors no longer exist.

Vraska does not let her body betray her discomfort. There are suddenly more people in the room than she first realized. The ceiling feels one hand's length shorter.

"Who are you?" she asks Jace Beleren.

"The part that frightens you," General Beleren says. She tries to hold his gaze but can't help taking in the story written on his skin.

He rises, robes pooling in silk and wool and fur at his feet. Vraska finds she cannot move. It may be her nerves, it may be Jace, it may be her own hypocrisy pinning her to the ground. Jace's robes trail behind him, a soft scrape on the ground as they glide across the slate. He approaches Vraska, still stuck in place, and leans in close to her face, his lips speaking against the angle of her jaw. "I am who you feared becoming."

Suddenly, Vraska can't move. She can't speak. She can only glare. She charges to turn him to stone but can't bring herself to do it.

"I am your lover and I am a killer and I am a leader. And I am a monster. I can look at my own darkness when you cannot, my dear hypocrite. See, love? I can even petrify."

Vraska's heart pounds in panic. Her brain won't let her move. She's stuck. She cannot scream, she cannot fight, she can only breathe and blink.

"You are frightened by that darkness, aren't you?" the general purrs, his eyes alight with cerulean.

"Yes," she says, truth and compulsion in equal measure, and suddenly the bindings are gone. She kneels, hand on her heart.

"So, who am I? Am I someone who should die the death they deserve? Did I lie to you about who I truly was? Did you lie to yourself?" Jace says, face drawing close to hers, hands under her chin. "Are you a good person, or are you a monster? You agonized over such naïveté and chose as a child would, Vraska, when I never once wrung my hands in worry."

General Beleren is close, close enough she can smell vetiver in his hair, curls of smoke still stuck to his furs.

The warlord with her beloved's face kisses her gently on the cheek. "Am I a good man, or an unforgiveable monster?"

She knows it's his illusion as she watches his mouth stretch too broad, a blue fire behind his eyes. She knows it's his praestigial influence when he reveals his teeth and they are too sharp. All of it is a vision because his limbs are too long.

His lips graze her cheek. "I can be both."

Vraska gasps awake.

She feels at her face, her throat.

The swamp awakens around her. Stars sparkle above, and little lights dance around her sleeping furs. The wind rustles at the sea of muhly grass around her.

She pants, terrified.

A dream.

It was a dream.

But it wasn't a dream so much as a window.

She sighs down to the pit in her heart. Vraska knows the names of her anxieties. She knows exactly why this dream is the one that upset her the most.

Who is Jace?

When she saw Jace before—when she thought he had died … she left. She abandoned him, appalled at his fluidity, his shifting values. But the dream was right. Vraska lets out a shuddering breath. She holds her furs close and breathes in the too-humid air. Who was her life's love, really? Who was Jace?

He is both, she realizes with mournful shame, with defiant fierceness. He is neither.

But she isn't certain anymore.

The water is quiet. The stars are far away. She feels like she has made a mistake.

Vraska will reach the Omenpath tomorrow and face a new Multiverse on the other side. But in this sad, lonely night, she watches will-o'-the-wisps dance across the feathered grass tips and sleep does not return.