Chapter 50 The Price Of Victory

• The journey back from the temporal facility felt like moving through a world made of glass—beautiful but fragile, liable to shatter at the slightest pressure. The sacrifice that had contained the entity had left reality feeling thin in its wake, as if the boundaries between possible and actual had been permanently weakened.
• I rode in silence, still struggling to understand what I'd lost when my mother and grandfather's timelines dissolved. Memories surfaced and vanished like fish in dark water—fragments of conversations I couldn't quite recall, lessons in magic that had been partially erased, moments of warmth and guidance that now existed only as emotional echoes.
• Through our soul-bond, Aldric was providing what stability he could, his memories helping to anchor the parts of myself that remained intact. But even he couldn't replace what had been fundamentally erased from existence.