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I reached for August.

And he was there.

Faint. Impossibly distant. A thread stretched so thin it was like starlight, ancient, still traveling, from a source that had burned out long ago.

But there.

The relief nearly broke me. Then the understanding caught up, and the relief curdled into something worse.

He was there the way a letter is there after the person who wrote it has died. The way a voice on a recording is there. Present and absent all at once. Gone, but not severed.

I reached again, not for him this time, but for the rest of it. The Weave. The threads. The golden light that had lived inside me since my gift had awakened.

Nothing answered.

No. Not nothing. Something, but knotted. Tangled. Unreachable. My breath caught. I knew this. The same hollowness I had carried for twenty-six years. The same dormant ache Lorien had finally untangled in the Weaver hideout.

It had always been him.

August's magic, cutting me free of time, severing what shouldn't have been severed. Saving my life and breaking my magic in the same desperate stroke. I had spent the last few months wondering why my power had slept. Now I knew. It had been waiting. Waiting for me to live through the moment that broke it.

The first sob caught me off guard, ripped from somewhere below my lungs, and then the rest came in a flood I couldn't close. I folded forward over the cold metal of the vehicle, my fingers clawing at the smooth surface for something to hold onto because the ground was tilting and my body had forgotten how to stay upright. My chest convulsed, each breath a jagged thing that cut on the way in and burned on the way out. His name was in my mouth but my throat wouldn't shape it, just kept producing this raw, animal sound, the grief of a woman who could feel her other half breathing a hundred and thirty-three years away and couldn't reach him, couldn't touch him, couldn't do anything except kneel on a strange street in a strange time and break.

He had done this. He had cut me free.

The realization crashed through me with terrible clarity. I had kept Ruth's vision from him so he wouldn't stop me. So he wouldn't take my choice away. And he had done the same thing. He had seen the burning taking me, the same way it had taken his mother, and he had made a choice I couldn't fight. Severed my thread from that moment. Pushed me forward. Saved me at the cost of everything we had.

We had both sacrificed for each other. We had both taken the choice away.

The world tilted.

“Ma'am? Are you alright?”

The voice came from behind me, warm, uncertain, careful the way people speak to strangers on the edge of breaking. I turned.

A woman stood a few steps away, brow knit with concern. Jeans, boots, a wool peacoat buttoned to her throat. Her hair was pulled back in a loose knot that had begun to come undone. She wasn't looking at me like I was mad. She was looking at me like she understood.

“I . . . ” My throat closed. No language existed for what had just happened. I had left him. Left my other half in a century that no longer existed. Left him in a world I could never reach again. “I'm not—“ The words shattered. “I can't⁠—“

Her gaze dropped to my dress. To the soot-stained bodice. The torn hem. The boots that did not belong in this world. Something in her expression changed. Not alarm.

Recognition.

“Oh,” she said softly. Not what happened. Not should I call someone. Just. Oh.

“I've got you,” she murmured.

Golden threads unwound from her fingers without flourish, without hesitation, quiet as breath in winter. They drifted toward me and settled across my shoulders, my arms, my chest like sunlight made tangible.

I froze.

Magic. Here. Open. Unhidden.

The threads sank into my skin, dissolving without pain, leaving behind a spreading warmth that loosened the vice around my lungs. The shaking in my hands eased. The gold flickering at the edges of my vision faded. The sobs still shook me, but they no longer threatened to tear me apart from the inside.

She had healed what she could see, the panic, the trembling, the aftermath of nearly burning out. She couldn't know that the woman she'd just saved was hollowed out where magic should be.

The woman watched my face carefully, the way a nurse might watch a patient for signs of distress. “There we are,” she murmured, as casually as if she were offering a blanket. “Slow breaths.”