“You saw Alton again?” she hisses.
“Not the important part,” I tell her. “You’re a visionary, so can—”
“I’m a visionless visionary who hasn’t seen more than some nondescript image in too long to even matter,” she grumbles. “But what do you mean Slade used to be more visionary? I’m no expert on creatures like you, but I don’t think you can change whatever creature you lean on the most.”
“Even if you spent centuries living in a place where all creatures, including yourself, were experimented on regularly to learn secrets no one else even knows? Slade’s the kind of guy who would keep any personal revelations to himself and not provide them with the information they thought to extract,” I remind her.
She blinks for a few seconds. “That does change things a little, but why are you turning a little blotchy, and why are your claws coming out?”
Glancing down, I focus on the werewolf claws, forcing them back, even as my bone structure continues to visibly waver under my skin.
“What the hell, Ella?” Kimber says quietly when she sees the same thing.
I force myself to deny the shift that is trying really hard to happen.
“Just read,” I tell her, putting the journal down and picking up where I left off as she reads from beside me.
To be perfectly clear, this is your final resort. As you read this, you’ll slowly start remembering why.
The memories didn’t originally stop with her flying into that invisible barrier and starting all over at the day she turned eighteen.
“He’s talking about you. The night we freed the rings,” she says on a breath. “He saw that coming?”
“Every time he closed his eyes, but that’s all he saw. I thought,” I tell her absently, confused as I read on.
They used to start at eighteen and stopped when she died.
My eyes meet Kimber’s when we both read that line. “What is this?” she asks me again, this time sounding firmer.
“It’s Slade’s journal. The journal of a man who sees magic as science and can do things none of us thought possible. I think he spent centuries planning something, but it has nothing to do with the war. I just don’t know what. So please shut up so I can keep reading.”
“You came to me,” she grumbles as we both start reading again, but I hop up and put that symbol I learned from Alton on the wall, infusing it with my own magic.
“What’s that?”
“To keep him from seeing me read his journal,” I tell her as I take a seat again, sharing the journal with her.
“I feel wrong reading Slade’s diary,” she tells me, even as she reads eagerly.
You’ve seen her death a thousand and one times, and all of those times, you’ve failed to save her, no matter how many variables change. So you changed all the variables, starting with yourself, since you needed to be stronger.
Specific memories have been erased, and you’ve limited your scope into her life, forcing the loop to end just before you see her for the first time as a free man.
With the remaining bit of your link to Alton, you’ll shield her from him completely, at all times, so that he can’t even recall her face to draw for them.
“This is visionary magic with a twin bond,” Kimber says, shaking her head. “It’s different from mine. I should have suspected he was visionary just because of his ability to show people his memories. I just assumed he picked up some tricks from the rings,” she tells me, causing me to study her face.
“He stopped his visions and put them on a loop. How?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Every visionary works different, but it’d take a lot of knowledge about one’s power to do anything like this. Why would anyone want to not know the future?”
My eyes close slowly when I read the next line of the journal, as my stomach coils with dread. “Because he wanted to learn everything to keep from missing anything important. He was a visionary who never saw his capture, because he thought he knew all the variables. How wouldn’t he have seen the capture, if he saw the future?”
“Shut up and let me read on. Maybe it tells,” she says to me.
You need to learn all over again, and to create a different future, you have to be a different man—more powerful. A man with sharp focus and a far more lethal instinct. Your new main variable is rage. Shouldn’t be hard to acquire, considering the current place of residence.
Focusing on the rage and learning to tap into that power source will make you inevitably stronger. To do that, you have to subtract variables that prevent the rage from fully festering, and to achieve such, you’ve taken these extreme measures.