Reality Fracture | Episode 9: Unafraid
Reality Fracture Story
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Meanwhile, the worlds begin to overlay.
On Ravnica, high above Tin Street, a troupe of Rakdos fools steps outside for their break. They look up and see a second Ravnica floating above the first, a ghostly mirror lined up perfectly, roof by roof, spire by spire. They scramble to the center of the road, pointing and screaming—largely ignored at first, as pointing and screaming is the way of Rakdos fools—until the banker driving his thrull pulls the reins to stop and sees his own doppelgänger upside down in the sky above.
And on Bloomburrow, great trees curl alongside existing ones, strange doppelgängers scurrying from bottom to top. Squirrelfolk chitter downward with grim warnings and dire reports. A world is appearing alongside theirs, shifted slightly to the west by a paw's length. The illusion is harder to see, but when Mabel squints her eyes, she can make out a shadow of a tree, of her home, of her littles.
Amonkhet is the most alarmed. Snow-capped pyramids float above Naktamun, ready to descend. The air feels cooler. Bright day feels balmy as night. Samut shivers, looking up to Hazoret beside her for guidance. The god nods at her, at Djeru, and the three of them venture into the chill of daytime to face the illusion high above.
And simultaneously, on Dominaria, Danitha Capashen sees mirrored, on the wide plain before her, a specter of an army, vast and imposing, the hint of a bog beneath them and a great many-toothed beast at its center. She unsheathes her sword and calls to the host of angels above to ready for an attack. But she holds, uncertain, watching as the center moves, waiting for its form to become corporeal.
The world twins overhead, and as Tam bolts out of the tower, she can almost feel this world combining with its double. The true Strixhaven hangs above as a canopy, and all around her it merges into fullness.
She's too late. Jadzi must be dead.
It's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault …
Part of her senses, knows, that Hexhaven merges first in the overlay. It's woven into the spell. She can feel it in her fingertips. The people will merge last, but first they all must spill into the same place. Sure enough, as she runs, she starts to see more appearing—Strixhaven students emerging as ghosts that solidify into corporeality, entire buildings shoving in alongside existing ones, even birds and creatures spilling over as spirits and flying off as matter. Hexhaven and Strixhaven are becoming one.
The alternate and original curl together. Half the tower's exterior takes on an entirely different stone, while errant Strixhaven students appear, then wander, frightened and confused. The blank-eyed doppelgängers of Hexhaven flock to these new students, to the familiar features of the true Strixhaven, and attack without hesitation. As Tam bolts for cover, she sees them corral a professor she recognizes from her time at the university. Dellian Fel does not run, because he does not need to run. His black robes billow as he walks with cold purpose, conjuring vile-looking plants with each step, vines with broad leaves trailing high overhead, shielding himself from falling rubble with a flick of his fingers. His ever-present sneer remains on his lips, as if the merging of worlds were a mere annoyance rather than a catastrophe. Tam keeps running. Professor Fel can handle himself.
Rubble falls, pieces of Strixhaven dislodging as Hexhaven overtakes its form. She hears screams, senses terror projected from the minds around her. Tam feels what they feel. The barrier between her mind and theirs is as thin as the one between worlds. She tries to lock it out, shove it away.
"827," she says aloud as she runs. "829. 839."
It's calming enough. The voices in her mind vanish, replaced by the voices in her ears. Tam grits her teeth.
But what can she do about the overlay? She runs, and thinks. The Theorist taught her everything he knew, all of it except for the one final observation he saved for himself. He knows how two planes combined … but not how to separate them once the process begins. Surely there's part of her study she could summon. Surely this Multiverse will hear her blood sing the same song as her maker. Perhaps it can see her as its god, too.
Tam pauses in the throng of cadets and students, blank-eyed Hexhaven and terrified Strixhaven alike, and reaches with her mind. She feels for the edges of the Echoverse high above and can sense its seam. She grimaces, and tries to push, to no avail. A thousand threads of connection are woven between this world and that. The sky is filled with falling debris and panicking sphinxes. It is hard to tell which parts belong to this world and which belong to the original. A handful of Konstrari cadets attempt to move the pieces midair, nudging them to fall as keystones in arches or alongside existing buildings.
Somewhere in the screams of the crowd, she hears a single voice. It stops her in her tracks. The crowd moves around her as a river around a rock.
Kirol.
They're yelling, somewhere, and as Tam looks up, she can see pieces of rubble falling on the throng of moving people. She instinctively runs toward their voice. But as she does, she remembers.
I betrayed them. Her heart races. I betrayed all of my friends. She grits her teeth in self-hatred and shakes her head. Screw it. They can hate me, so long as they're alive.
Tam sees them, spots the brawny vampire from a distance, sees the cobblestones of another world falling toward them from the sky. She reaches out, angles and lines of light a cage around her hand, and pulls at the threads of chance that crisscross high above.
A flying sphinx suddenly swerves to the right, wings wide, and in a moment of forgetting to glance up is pummeled by the clatter of cobblestones raining from the sky. It cries out, a catlike howl, and careens to the earth a distance away. Tam negates her spell and looks for Kirol. They stare back at her, eyes wide, body frozen in shock. Their expression is overcome with emotion. This is someone happy to the point of tears to see that she is alive. This is a friend.
"Kirol!"
Kirol lurches forward, shoving past the throngs of people between them, and envelops Tam in a hug.
Tam clings back, shocked, desperate, hungry for the care of her friend. "Are you hurt?"
They shake their head. "No. How are you? You're here. You betrayed us. You kidnapped … I hate y—" They squeeze her with anything but hate. "How could you do this to us?" Their breath shudders. "I want answers, Tam."
She buries her face in their chest. "I'm sorry, Kirol. I'm sorry. I was answering to someone I couldn't say no to. Jadzi is dead. It's my fault." She wants to cry, but there isn't enough in her to get there. She grips tight, unwilling to be parted from her friend again.
The noise above is getting worse. More of Strixhaven appears around them.
Kirol looks down at Tam. "I don't trust you in the slightest, but I don't want you dead."
"I don't want you dead, either."
"Cool."
"Cool."
Resolution achieved, the vampire blurts, "Tam, what in two halves is happening?"
She startles at hearing Arcavian slang for the first time in months. Right. Task at hand. "Two Multiverses, one is a copy. The copy is overlaying the original. We're watching them combine."
Kirol steps back. "No, Tam. You. What is happening?"
Why did you betray our trust? is left unsaid. Tam feels like half a person still. She wishes she had courage, so she pretends it's there and answers truthfully. "You trusted me, and I failed you. So it's my job to fix it."
Kirol doesn't say anything. Their face is unreadable. Familiar and unfamiliar at once.
"What am I supposed to do?" they ask in monotone. "Hide while you fix it?"
"I don't want you getting hurt."
They don't seem to buy that.
Tam's explanation tumbles out. "My teacher didn't make a way to undo it! He created a theorem that can't be reversed. It just keeps going as long as part of him is alive." Her chest hurts. She grimaces. "I have to find a way because it's on me, Kirol. Every living thing in the Multiverse dies if I can't find a way to stop the overlay."
Kirol is breathing deeply. A harsh line is carved between their eyebrows, and their chest rises and falls. They close their eyes, then open them with sudden clarity.
"You're going to solve it," they say with certainty.
Tam shakes her head. "How?"
"I don't know. But you're the smartest person I know. Use your whole head."
"Kirol—"
"I'm gonna find the others. This is Strixhaven-but-not-Strixhaven, yeah? There's a Biblioplex?"
"It's a Folioplex," she corrects, near tears.
They make a face. "Folio-plex?"
"I know," Tam says apologetically as the tears arrive.
They put a hand on her shoulder. "Find me when you have the answer. I'm going to look for our friends."
Our friends.
"Hold in your mind where you want to go," Tam says. "My maker's telepathy is a part of this plane. It'll lead you there."
Kirol groans.
"I know!" Tam groans back.
They bolt, and Tam watches. Her chest feels tight. Did they forgive her? Was her act of saving them enough? They're alive, and so are our friends, she reminds herself. That's what counts.
One world appears on another.
Trees, now, are surfacing and solidifying. Dragons, too, high above and far away. More students arrive, and what was already a crowd begins to thicken into something more chaotic and dangerous. As Tam runs through them, they crush around her, and with effort, she makes her way to a pocket of calm to catch her breath. They're running, but no one knows where to. Screaming, but no one knows why. The volume of people in danger becomes clear.
And this is happening all over the Multiverse. Every plane, every world, looking at its double.
Tam feels small. She's only one mage. She's not a peerless telepath. She's an apprentice, a student.
I'm not even an entire person. She is unfinished, incomplete, the creativity and cleverness of one of the greatest mages in all the Multiverse and nothing more. In this moment, Tam feels that she is inadequacy. She is swallowed once more by the crowd, and she tumbles into the throng lost and afraid.
The final memory room is not a trap but a reunion.
The mage-ring spits Vraska out in the center of what she knows—only from stories—is the center of the Implicit Maze. Banners of the ten guilds flutter high above, and she stands in a broad forum with an immense floating monolith at its center. Mana pulses within, and there are stone pillars around its perimeter, one for each guild. It's clear a fight has taken place. A massive suit of armor has been blown to pieces, its sunburst shield on the ground, its helmet lodged in the wall.
"Vraska!"
She flinches and turns—and is met with a full-body tackle-hug from Chandra. "You jumped off a building!"
"I did. I landed in a portal. I got the last three parts. Soldier, Guildpact, Survivor. What about you?"
Chandra grimaces. "We tried to face him. Got pretty far, but we weren't enough to stop him. He had our doubles tackle us through portals, which sent us here. Now we've been dealing with you."
Me? It takes a moment for Vraska to realize who she's talking about. "The other me," she groans. "I can't stop a moving statue."
"Well, you need to try so we can get back to the other versions of us, because they're blocking the one mage-ring out of here."
Vraska tries to sort out where here is. This is the Implicit Maze, the moment Jace became the Living Guildpact. He hasn't told her much about that moment, only that the rest of the runners were about to kill each other. Is that what they'll have to do here to escape?
"Where's the other Vraska?" she asks.
The answer is a loud boom that shakes the ground. Vraska follows Chandra's wide, panicked stare and finds the source.
The other Vraska sits atop the head of a stone Niv-Mizzet. It towers over the (already tall) walls of the maze—once a statue, now the living will of the gorgon at its crown. The dragon's wings spread with the rumble of tumbling gravel; its claws scrape the ground like pickaxes on a mountainside. The dragon bellows, and the sound is a landslide. It seems preoccupied with something at its feet. Vraska is relieved that it doesn't seem to take notice of her arrival.
"Where are the others?" she asks.
"Near the tail. Garruk's trying to get up top."
"No other doubles?"
"I told you, they're guarding the mage-ring in the back."
"And it's just the dragon?"
Chandra's face contorts between exaggerated anger and exasperation as she snaps, "Yeah, it's just the dragon!"
Vraska runs for the nearby rubble and drags the suit of armor's shield out with great effort. Chandra does nothing for a moment, then joins her.
"Closer," Vraska instructs. "Make sure it doesn't see us."
"What is your plan, exactly?"
"You're going to launch me high enough that I can petrify my double."
Whatever negative feelings have been roiling in Chandra vanish as soon as Vraska says launch. Her face erupts in a ferocious grin. "Oh, I know this trick! Just tell me when to fire."
The dragon lumbers forward, and from their side of the wall within the maze they can tell it hasn't taken notice of their machinations. Vraska hears Garruk and Ajani, the clash of their axes, the laugh of the other Vraska high above.
Vraska realizes she doesn't know how to aim whatever Chandra is about to do. Help? she asks the geniuses in her brain.
Turn the shield toward the target, says the Guildpact.
Tell Chandra to aim it at forty-seven degrees, says the Detective.
Don't flinch, says the Nihilist. Fly like there's no tomorrow.
Tuck and roll, adds the Survivor.
And kill swiftly, finishes the Soldier.
"Forty-seven degrees!" Vraska yells.
The two of them hoist the shield on top of a piece of rubble, and Chandra eyeballs the sides. "Good!"
Vraska climbs on top. "On my mark!"
She watches the statue, sees its head turn to face them. The gorgon on top flinches, realizing who's below.
"Now!" Vraska calls.
Chandra's explosion takes her breath away, and the propulsion beneath her feet vibrates through her shinbones. She is launched, and the wind—the wind! It hisses past her head, and her breath catches in her chest as she is thrust high into the air.
The dragon turns below her, and Vraska tucks her head to roll on impact.
She feels her spine bruise instantly as she hits the rock, but it's better than broken legs. She ducks around the stone frill of the dragon's head and looks down toward its tail.
"Hello, me!" the other Vraska calls. She laughs, and her gown ripples in the breeze as the dragon statue takes another step forward.
But the true Vraska isn't watching her doppelgänger. Far below her are the other doubles, guarding the mage-ring and looking around to see what caused the explosion. The dragon's tail lifts and lands between them and the mage-ring.
Vraska bursts from behind the frill and looks her double straight in the eyes.
This other Vraska has never known pain. She is proud and flawless. "Why not make this fun?" she says. "Let's fight as assassins do. Knives on knives." She pulls out her own blade for emphasis.
Vraska doesn't consider it for a second, because when she locks eyes with her other self, all she sees is a pair of lovely blue irises, dull and mundane, not a flicker of gorgon magic within them. She's already won. She's been charging her gaze since she launched into the air. She grabs her double by the shoulders, holding her in place. Skin turns to stone, and the other Vraska solidifies with a look of mild confusion on her face. The dragon freezes, its spell broken, and Vraska shoves the gorgon statue over the side of its stone snout.
"Now!" she yells, as the other Vraska hits the ground in a spray of broken rock.
Below, her friends trade targets.
Garruk bounds over the dragon statue's tail, nimbly traversing the ice field the cryomancer Chandra summons, knocking her to the ground with a swing of his axe. Ajani picks his way through every beast the Chain-Veiled Garruk summons, roaring as he rips the ancient artifact away with a swipe of his claws. And Chandra howls a war cry as she sends a wave of fire toward the battle-scarred Ajani, overwhelming Vraska's senses with the stench of burning fur.
"Leave them!" Vraska cries, skidding down the back of the dragon statue, and they abandon their distracted counterparts to join her.
She looks around for her petrified counterpart and finds her nearby, her body shattered but her dress intact. "I've got a plan," she says to Chandra. "Help me get her dress off."
Chandra blushes.
"For a disguise, lady-killer."
"Oh."
After some shimmying, Vraska raises the hood over her head. With a nod, she leads the others through the mage-ring to their final stop.
For the first time in years, she feels proud.
The Theorist is hard at work.
He understands how it all fits together, a single gargantuan machine with infinite parts. He feels for the edges of both Multiverses, omniscience still ringing through his veins, and reaches his gift through space and time to seize them both, weaving them together with threads of himself. They bind with ease, a fiber poked with a needle into felted wool, but he's losing himself, thread by thread. There's so little left.
The Theorist grits his teeth and concentrates, continues the overlay. A wad of consciousness is stuck to his handiwork. He swears aloud, pieces it apart from the sides of each Multiverse, and recognizes as he does that he's forgotten the order of the alphabet.
The Theorist swears louder. Sweat stings his eyes, and he tries to blink it away with his body while his mind once more grabs hold of the far edge of the old Multiverse. His perception is multitudinous—inside himself and outside himself and underneath what feels like time itself. Somewhere, his back hurts. Somewhere, fingertips without a body brush the tops of fourteen planes, like skimming a hand across the surface of the ocean. It is too much. It is just enough. He can wield it now that he knows the pattern. The mind sculptor laughs, and it thunders through Kaldheim. He blinks away sweat, and it rains on Innistrad. For a moment, he sees outside himself and marvels. I know everything. I am everything. I have reached the apex of ability. Beyond sphinx and dragon, I stand at the end of the Multiverses.
He summons the mage-rings in his room and arranges them to the side. With a flicker of blue light and not an ounce of effort, the Theorist reaches through the tower and commands his doppelgängers, his soldiers, Kill anyone who attempts to stop the overlay. The repercussions don't matter. He is everything. He sees all.
The Theorist aligns his mage-rings, stand-ins, dummies, maquettes of his alternate planes, in the order he now knows is correct. But something isn't perfect. Despite his omniscience, his body is falling apart. He's a mess, bloody nose and red eyes. He presses further, and away go his memories—of extorting Ravnican bourgeoisie, his first fistfight, his first kill, his first kiss. But none of that matters in the mind of a god. He tightens his grip, and an earthquake trembles through Dominaria.
He feels taxed and invigorated, boundless and tethered at once. It nearly sends him careening back to the ground. But as he works, he senses something through the netting of space. An error. A thread out of place. He investigates, pressing his consciousness forward to see …
The aberrations are up to something.
From his all-seeing height of consciousness, the Theorist wavers.
"What a mess," says a voice near his body.
His omniscience is interrupted.
Consciousness careens through space-time back to his small, confining, annoying physical form, and he sees in front of him Liliana, Professor Opal at her side as a lich.
The Theorist sneers and raises a hand to snap them both to sleep. "I'm busy."
"I know what you're feeling right now, Jace."
He nearly snarls back that he doesn't have time for her, but she keeps going (she always kept going).
"This doesn't have to be how your story ends."
The Theorist glances upward to return to omniscience once more, then stalls. His lip curls in distaste. "Did you have a change of heart after you betrayed us for the dragon? I let you live then. I won't do it now."
"I was wrong, and I chose to change." She's serious. He's never seen her serious. "There's no Gideon here this time. Only you."
"Stop," he commands Liliana.
She does, but it's her reanimated doppelgänger that replies, "I am unstoppable, and you know it."
Hairs rise on the back of his neck. He hates her. Even with so little of him left, he hates her. She was always like this, always so domineering. There's a part of him, still, that remembers how she'd grab his leash and force him to her will. It's this part that negates the command.
"Jace, I need you to do what I couldn't."
"A do-over is in your interests, too," the Theorist notes. "You could have a life where you were loyal to the rest of us."
Liliana and her doppelgänger share a pithy glance. The lich breaks first and laughs, a bubbly and lovely sound. "Loyalty's cheap. But authenticity? That's wealth."
The sanctum is vibrating with power. The Theorist still has astral hands on the edges of the two Multiverses. His eyes are faraway and infinite. "How much suffering did we put each other through? How much pain and misery could have been avoided?"
"Can it, Beleren!" yells her lich, and the original Liliana continues, "When I was in your shoes, it didn't earn me safety, or freedom, or power."
"Even now, you're a manipulative snake," the Theorist says.
Liliana ignores his insult. Instead, her eyes dart to his hands. "Why are you fidgeting?"
The Theorist tries to still his hands. Ten trillion leagues away, his consciousness momentarily pauses its busywork. "You were my partner, yet you treated me like a dog you found on the street. Why should I trust you?"
"Because I was you! I betrayed my allies and I betrayed myself and all I won was loneliness!" He can see the Chain Veil in her mind, see the woman he once adored become a god of death. Her eyes grow dark. "I know what it feels like to wield the power you do, and I know that all it brings is emptiness."
A nearby portal glows, and this Multiverse's Vraska steps through. She smiles, moving to his side without fanfare.
The Theorist opens his mouth to address Liliana, but he doesn't get a word out before the reanimated corpse of Professor Opal tackles him. He hits the floor in a daze, head cracking against the tiles.
The distant self among the cosmos vanishes, but the worlds continue to weave themselves together.
All of him crashes back to earth, and before he can put Liliana to sleep, the lich kicks him in the head. He looks to Vraska for help and sees a blur of white as the lich kicks him again.
The world spins, and both Lilianas yell, "Undo it, Beleren! Come on, genius!"
"No!"
"Do it now!"
"I can't undo it!"
The lich lifts his head up and smashes it against the floor. Why isn't Vraska helping?
Enraged, he unleashes his mind.
His power hurtles toward Liliana as a wave, first pulling her consciousness out and toward him, then pushing forward with a violent psychic shove. He launches himself into her mind and, as he does, brings every torture he can think of with him. In a millisecond he scrapes up the worst memories at the bottom of her psyche—her brother sputtering and ill, Gideon's skin curdling again and again. He drowns her heart in the image of himself failing to stop Phyrexia. To top it off, he crams a scribble of a theorem between her frontal lobes and lets a tumor charge into existence.
"Bastard!" Liliana chokes out.
As she does, her double puts a hand to her head, and a surge of magic blinds the Theorist. He blinks away the pain as Liliana shakes herself off, healed. She launches at him, pummeling with her fists. But the Theorist swims through her mind still, finds the node that reminds her heart to beat, and curls himself around it with dark curiosity.
A flash of white cloth, and he realizes Vraska has at last decided to intervene.
But it isn't …
It isn't what he expects.
Something sharp pierces the Theorist's heart, and he gasps. The only mortal to have achieved omniscience failed to see it coming.
"Now," says a voice from behind him.
Chandra, Ajani, and Garruk, bruised and battle-worn, emerge from a portal in front of him. Too late, he realizes that it is his Vraska at his back, her arm wrapped around him, clutching the knife in his chest. He reaches to pull it out, but he is interrupted as every single one of his aberrations rushes into him at once.
They overtake his mind like a tsunami.
The Theorist panics, tries to contain their incorporeal forms, but they're him. They're too fast, too agile. They hit harder than they should. Weaklings, faults, as easily carved away as the peel of an apple. Why didn't they stay out of my body like I told them to? The Theorist tries to build a levee to keep them at bay, but he cannot stop the strength of the sea. They bombard his mind, taking hold one by one.
The Nihilist slams a wall around his consciousness; the Theorist cannot get out. He tries to reach out telepathically for Liliana's mastery of death, for Chandra's pyromancy, for Garruk and Ajani's muscle, but he is met with lead and the weight of endless hopelessness.
The Detective snips the connection between the Theorist and the weaving of the Multiverses; he cannot continue. The Theorist scrambles and reaches for that feeling of omniscience, that tantalizing velvet of the grip he had on two entire planes, but it slips through his fingers, frayed and forgotten. The Theorist cries out, desperate to prevent it, clinging to life, to success, to victory.
The Warden forces him to kneel; he cannot move. He pulls against his own body and cramps in the process. He rages to feel his muscles controlled again, and the Warden fills his mind with visions of Alhammarret, of Tezzeret, of Elesh Norn, of all the monsters that forced him to hurt others. The Theorist feels small and helpless. He howls in fear.
Amid that terror and fury, the Clean Slate carves out a clean path to their body's brain stem; the Theorist is raw and vulnerable. He watches as the space of his mind parts, unable to stop it and painfully aware of the area exposed. He breathes and savors his breaths; he knows he has few left.
The Guildpact grabs hold of each aberration, binding them all together; he is reintegrating. It is gentle, like stepping into a warm spring. Each part slips into place with ease, warmth, as many slowly form back into one. His pragmatism, his curiosity, his guardedness, his courage, his grit, his empathy—they grab hold of the Theorist's cold logic and suddenly all are united save two.
For the Survivor stands aside, his duty unneeded, and the Soldier slips through like a trained assassin, locating the part of his body's mind that remembers how to breathe. He plucks it out.
The body gasps, and the Theorist, that cold and wounded child, is embraced by the rest—taken in, soothed, and sent down and away to rest.
Plural becomes singular. The aberrations, the parts, become one. The man opens his eyes.
He is kneeling in a tall sanctum built by the part of himself he hates the most—which, despite his feelings, is also him. An orrery spins above, and scattered around the room are mage-rings … and friends.
His name is Jace.
He feels something cold and sharp piercing his chest. He feels warm hands on his shoulders, a body against his back.
Jace blinks, feels a trickle of blood run down from his mouth, and moves his hand over Vraska's. They grip the knife together. It worked. The tether between the Multiverses is fragile. Holmberg's Paradox—the illusion is inherently connected to the wielder's physical body.
Vraska guides him down. They lie back, her legs curled around him. The Ochran dagger in his heart is a promise fulfilled. How strange it is to be complete.
"Did it work?" Vraska asks.
Jace knows it did. But before he says so, he looks at each of his rescuers, his opponents, his friends. One by one, he gifts them what he needs them to hear.
He offers one reassurance … and an apology. We fought like cats, but you're the little sister I never had. I'm sorry I did a bad job at showing it.
Another gets instructions. The overlay is stopped, but the Multiverses are still intertwined. You need to eliminate mine. Find Tam. She'll learn the plan shortly. Thank you. You were the best of us.
He offers another a warning. Thank you for protecting the most vulnerable part of me. I'm sorry I couldn't cure you. The problem you're trying to solve won't be fixed in the jungle.
A fourth gets a fond farewell. Thank you for the lessons you taught without meaning to. You can feel however you like when I die. I'm fine with that.
But that fourth says something back, silent, unheard. A feeling, rather than words. An aching grief, a genuine warmth, the notion of centuries and memory. Earnestness. Apology. It makes Jace's eyes widen in surprise.
Really? he asks, touched.
Liliana smiles. I'm sorry, Jace. Rest unburdened.
He coughs out a breath. Lip trembling, he nods. Thank you, Lili.
"Yes," he finally says aloud to Vraska, squeezing her hand.
She squeezes back and places her forehead against his. "Do you want to talk somewhere else?"
"No," he says aloud, voice thin. "I want it to be real. I want to look at you."
He feels … heavy. Above, the orrery has paused, the threads tying the two Multiverses together fading with the beating of his heart. He doesn't feel sad to see it fail, now. Suffering will continue, because that is the cost of being alive.
"The cost is worth it," he says, looking into his beloved's eyes. He feels the warmth of those who care for him, despite his barbarism, despite his flaws. They are here for the totality of him, the summary of a man who is their friend.
Vraska hugs him close. He hates this. Anything he says carries weight, too much weight.
"I don't want you to go."
"I won't go far." He smiles.
He refuses to say goodbye. He knows she will, too. He reminds himself of something important, something he sears into his very self. I must ask for help.
Jace feels tired. His coat is soaked with his own blood. He holds the knife in his chest like a talisman. Death is a change in state. Death is transformation. And courtesy of Vraska's final mercy, his passing is swift and just, a death he deserves.
"Thank you, Captain."
He loves her. She'll be all right. She's a survivor, too. He keeps his gaze on Vraska as his eyes blur, as his hand goes slack, as the world goes dark. He tries to say more but is too weak to speak. Instead, he feels death pull at him as a wave, a steady tug toward something quiet, something safe, something peaceful.
Jace slips away with Vraska's voice in his ear, echoing his own words back to him. "You are my curiosity. You are my empathy. You are every time I am unafraid to start over."
He has fixed his mistake, but he is no hero. He is only a man. He did it after all; he remembered who he was. His beloved kisses his forehead, and the last feeling in his heart is joy.
In the quiet of the sanctum with the now separated orrery overhead, Jace goes still.
Vraska holds him tight as he lets go.
And all along, Jace's clear-water eyes look directly into hers, unafraid.
Reality Fracture Story