Chapter 229
The world around me is frozen. Not just still—frozen. Suspended in time like a painting, or a memory that refuses to fade. I can hear my own heartbeat pounding, feel the electricity still crackling over my skin, but everything else is silent.
I’m in the Ether. But not.
I’ve been here before, but this is different. The usual fog that swirls in my mind when I drift into this place is absent. Instead, there’s a clarity, a sharpness to my surroundings. The air hums, charged with something vast and unknowable, something that makes my skin prickle with awareness.
And then I feel her.
Electra.
Not as a whisper or a presence at the edge of my consciousness, but everywhere. In the very currents of energy surging around me, in the stillness that stretches infinitely outward. She is the storm and the silence, the breath before the lightning strike.
I inhale, bracing myself. “Electra?”
Her laughter rings out, not distant, not weak, but strong—stronger than I’ve ever heard it before. It echoes around me like a hundred million stars exploding at once, like the collision of celestial bodies, deafening and exquisite all at once. It fills every corner of this suspended reality, leaving no room for anything else.
“Three links in my chain, three worthy vessels connected as one,” Electra muses, her voice a melody of countless tones, countless women. “I have not felt so much power in a long, long while.”
A chill lances down my spine. “What’s happening?” My voice wavers, and I hate it.
The light around me shifts, condenses, and suddenly—she is there.
Electra appears before me, and I swear my breath is ripped from my lungs.
She is... impossible.
An entity both formless and more solid than I’ve ever seen her. Where before she was a mere flicker, an ethereal shimmer of energy, now she stands before me in undeniable form.
Her skin changes with every breath—one moment, it is the purest ivory, the next, the richest mahogany, then a golden tan that glows in the light.
Her hair morphs—cascading curls of deep, sunset red become braids of ink-dark black, then windswept gold, then the delicate silver of moonlight.
Every shift, every flicker, makes my stomach lurch. It’s mesmerizing. It’s terrifying.
Her eyes— Gods, her eyes—they are every color at once, shifting like galaxies colliding, like the fabric of time unraveling and restitching itself with every blink.
She smiles, stepping toward me. And for the first time, she is fully real.
A goddess in the flesh.
“You are beginning to unlock the full breadth of my power, little star,” Electra murmurs, tilting her head.
I force my mouth to work, my thoughts sluggish, still reeling from the sheer immensity of her presence. “Your power,” I repeat, my mind racing. “Khale can control magma because his dominion is over a tectonically active region. That makes sense. But me? I’ve called lightning, turned things into crystals, and now—” I motion vaguely to the absolute impossibility around me. “I stopped time. What does it all mean?”
Electra laughs again, and the very air quakes at the sound.
“Your understanding is not wrong, per se,” she says, lips curling in amusement. “But it is so…very human.”
I bristle. “That’s not an answer.”
Her expression softens. “Then let me ask you this: when you stopped time, what were you feeling?”
I pause, my thoughts flashing back to the moment it happened.
The chaos. The fight. The sickening crunch of Arista’s skull cracking like an egg.. Cora bleeding out. Marina dying.
The utter helplessness clawing at my chest, the desperate, bone-deep need to make it all stop.
And then… it did.
I exhale shakily. “I just—I couldn’t take it. I needed it all to stop.”
Electra nods approvingly. “And so it did.”
A shudder wracks through me. “That’s...” My throat is dry. “That’s insane.”
Electra’s luminous eyes shine brighter. “Is it? Or is it the truest expression of power you have ever known?”
I don’t answer because I can’t. Because I don’t know.
I feel like my chest is about to cave in, like I’m standing on the precipice of something enormous, something I can’t comprehend.
Power like this—the ability to bend reality to my will—it’s too much. It’s terrifying. And then—a memory slams into me.
Kota, sneering down at me, his eyes wild, fevered with desperation and obsession.
"The Twilight is where it all started. It’s where it will end."
My breath catches.
I look up at Electra sharply. “Is this why the Twilight is so important? Does it have something to do with Leviathan?”
Electra tilts her head, considering me. Then, softly, she says, “If the Twilight stays sleeping, Leviathan will wake.”
Ice races through my veins. “What does that mean?” I demand. “No riddles, no cryptic bullshit—I don’t have it in me to think in circles, Electra! Just tell me what you want from me!”
Electra kneels before me, placing her hands on either side of my face.
Her touch is everything at once—fire and ice, wind and rain, the deep crush of the ocean and the weightlessness of the cosmos.
“You hold eternity in the palm of your hand, little star,” she whispers, and the entire world trembles around me at her words.
I gasp, the weight of them sinking deep, burrowing into my bones.
“You alone have the power to see beyond the night sky if you so choose. If you will it, it is yours. That is my gift to you.”
I shake my head, tears burning behind my eyes.
“I don’t know what that means,” I whisper.
Electra’s lips curve into a knowing smile. “Gather the gods. Bring them home.”
And then—
She vanishes and I am alone. Alone in this suspended world, trapped in a moment that does not move forward.
I grit my teeth, anger and exhaustion and grief warring in my chest.
"If you will it, it is yours? If you will it, it is yours. If you will it—"
I clench my fists, rage trembling in my bones.
Fine.
Fine.
I turn, my gaze sweeping over Cora’s still form, over Marina’s frozen expression of pain, over Arista’s body flung against shattered glass.
I look at them—my family—and I make my choice.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I hold onto them, my great aunt and my grandmother, my links in the chain.
And then—
I will it.
“REWIND.”
The world shatters.
And then time rewrites itself.
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