Chapter 5 The Cost Of The Goddess

• The presence did not announce itself with thunder or light, the way Gideon had always imagined divine attention arriving.
• It arrived instead as silence, complete and suffocating, swallowing the wind, the insects, even the distant hush of the river he could usually hear from anywhere in this stretch of territory.
• "You have torn my fabric a thousand times," a voice said, neither male nor female, layered somehow with the sound of every moon that had ever risen. "I grow tired of watching the seams fray."
• Gideon turned slowly, half expecting nothing there at all, and found instead a figure standing at the field's edge, silver and shifting, never quite settling into one shape long enough for his eyes to fully grasp it.
• The Moon Goddess. He had grown up hearing prayers offered in her name, had never once expected to stand in front of her, least of all like this, filthy and half feral in a field soaked with a version of Thalia's blood that no longer even properly belonged to this timeline.
• "Then stop me," he said, too exhausted for reverence. "If I'm such an offense to you, undo what I did and be done with it."
• "I cannot undo what your grief already unmade." The figure drew closer, and Gideon felt the temperature of the air drop with every step. "The rift you tore exists because I allowed it to exist, once, long ago, as mercy for a soul in unbearable pain. I did not intend for a single soul to walk through it a thousand times."
• "Then take it back," Gideon said. "Take whatever's left of me and end this."
• "You misunderstand." Something in the goddess's voice softened, almost pitying. "I am not here to end you, wolf. I am here to warn you that you are ending yourself, and soon there will be nothing left worth saving, in any timeline."
• Gideon's jaw tightened. "You should care." The goddess circled him slowly, silver trailing off her form like mist rolling downhill. "I have watched countless wolves grieve their mates over the centuries. Most learn, eventually, to carry that grief forward into whatever life remains to them. You alone chose to declare war on time itself rather than carry it."
• "Because most of them didn't have a door to walk through."
• "No," the goddess agreed, something almost sorrowful entering her shifting voice. "They did not. Perhaps that was mercy, though I doubt you would have called it that in the moment."
• "I don't care what it costs."
• He said it flatly, without any of the fire that usually accompanied his conviction, and somehow that flatness was more unsettling than any shout could have been. A man screaming his defiance could still be reasoned with. A man stating it as simple fact had already moved past the reach of argument.
• "You should. Your soul frays at the edges with each fold you tear. I can see it even now, threads of you scattered across a thousand versions of this same field, a thousand versions of this same failure.
• Continue much further, and there will be no single Gideon left to walk through the door when you finally get it right. Only fragments and echoes wearing your face."
• The warning landed heavier than any threat could have. Gideon had felt the gaps opening in his own memory for a while now, had chalked it up to exhaustion, to grief, refusing to consider that he might genuinely be disappearing by inches.
• "What do you want from me," he asked quietly. "A goddess doesn't appear in a bloody field just to deliver a warning."
• For the first time, something that might have been approval flickered across the shifting silver features. "You are not entirely a fool, then. Very well. I offer you a bargain, one final concentration of the mercy I extended long ago. I will grant you the clarity to see every variable that led to her death, every rival pack, every hunter, every road she should never walk alone. In exchange, you will pay with what little humanity still clings to you."
• "I already have nothing human left."
• "You have more than you know," the goddess said. "The part of you that still weeps for her. The part of you that still calls her name instead of simply hunting for the correct combination of choices. That is the price. When you finally stand in front of her again, truly stand in front of her, you will remember every death you've caused her to avoid, but you will feel none of the grief that drove you here. You will be a blade with no memory of the hand that forged it."
• Gideon stared at the endless shifting figure, weighing a choice that had already, in truth, been made the moment he tore open that first rift.
• "Do it," he said.
• "You will not be able to take it back once it's done."
• "Good," Gideon said, voice hollow. "I'm tired of feeling this."
• The goddess extended what might have been a hand, silver light unfurling from her palm like a wave building offshore, and Gideon felt something ancient reach into the deepest part of his chest and begin, gently but irreversibly, to carve away the last soft pieces of the man he used to be.
• The pain of it was almost a relief. Almost.
• But as the light swallowed him whole, plunging him toward the next fold in the endless timeline, a single fractured thought rose unbidden through the encroaching numbness, sharp enough to cut through even the goddess's careful work.
• Somewhere, in some fold of time he had not yet reached, Thalia was about to meet a version of him who could no longer remember why he needed her to live.
• The goddess watched him go, silver light dimming slowly around the empty field, and for a long moment she remained there alone, studying the space where a broken wolf had knelt and made a bargain she already suspected he would come to regret.
• She had offered mercy the only way mercy could be offered to a man who refused every gentler kind. Whether it would be enough to save what remained of him, even she, with all her patient centuries of watching, could not yet say.