"That’s it," said Petros, slowly lowering the staff. Kairu stood frozen beside him, breathing heavily, eyes wide, unable to believe what had just happened.

  "What… what have you done?" he asked in horror.

  "He will do no more evil," said the professor, stepping closer to the body sprawled among the rocks, bending down to look into the dead man’s face.

  "Petros! He… That was you!"

  "Exactly. A version of me that should not have existed."

  "But… why?" Kairu whispered. "Petros, we came here to stop Saelin!"

  "Saelin?" Petros straightened, looking at him in surprise. "What has Saelin to do with it? That was me. All this time, it was only me. But now everything will be fine. I saved this world from myself. If two versions of me had continued to exist here, we would have faced catastrophe again."

  Kairu still stared at him with a mixture of confusion and horror. The professor smiled and said:

  "Let’s get out of here. Soon Maclevirr’s men will be here, and I certainly don’t want to meet them now. We’ll hide somewhere far away, and there we’ll talk. I owe you a few explanations…"

  The mountain shuddered again, so violently that both barely kept their footing. A massive column of smoke and flame burst from the crater above, black clouds rolling out to cover the sky. And in that instant, the opposite side of the heavens flared bright, and through the low underground rumble came a sound already familiar to them—the roar of engines. A huge white iron bird flew straight toward them. Its searchlights swept over the tops of charred pines, as if desperately seeking its nest.

  "But first we must erase the traces," said Petros.

  He raised his hands, and a bright blue sphere formed between his palms. The air vibrated with magic, and in the next instant, a blue flash ripped through the predawn gloom and struck the airship. Kairu heard a muffled clap of thunder, saw lightning dance across the bird’s wings, and then it slowly tilted to the side.

  The beams of its searchlights blinded him again. The roar grew louder. Frozen in place, Kairu stared, enchanted, at the giant machine, glittering with its cold beams like a slowly falling star, plunging into the black clouds of smoke hanging over the crater.

  It crossed the sky, leaving a white trail behind, and disappeared into the ashen cloud. For a moment, the roar of its engines faded. Then came a deafening explosion, and the column of smoke glowed bright scarlet for several seconds. The mountain jolted once more. Kairu saw a fountain of massive stone blocks spray outwards. A breach opened in the wall of the crater, and from it burst a river of fire, pouring down along the only path open to it.

  Sweeping away everything in its path, gaining speed, it rushed straight toward the city of Ardrai.

  ***

  Whether because of the mountain trembling, or simply because his knees were shaking so badly, but Kairu stumbled several times almost on flat ground as they climbed higher. They clutched at the bare rocks with torn hands, moving farther from the cave’s exit, until at last they reached a shallow hollow ringed with boulders and tongues of hardened lava. Petros crawled ahead of him, breathing heavily. Kairu fixed his eyes on the lanky figure and felt entirely new emotions stirring within him.

  "Enough," Petros said at last, glancing around and carefully lowering himself onto the stones. He wiped the sweat from his brow and waited until Kairu came closer and collapsed beside him. For several seconds, they sat in silence, Kairu looking about. Above them, the rocky slope rose, strewn with massive boulders. Off in the distance, the forest was burning, though the sounds of battle no longer reached them. Over the mountain’s summit flickered fiery bursts; smoke choked the sky, the air stank of burning, and soot settled upon their faces.

  "I came back because of Ashley," Petros suddenly said quietly.

  "We loved each other. Not long, maybe a year, but it was the happiest year of my life. And then she died. And it was my fault… In those days, those months when I fought my grief, when I searched for reasons to go on living and was already ready to give up, I learned of the existence of a time machine. And then I decided to dedicate my life to finding it.

  "This expedition—I set out with Konrad and Axel, but nothing came of it. Someone sabotaged the mission. In Ardrai, I was arrested and thrown into prison—not so much for deceiving the Academy to get funding, but for my revolutionary ideas. I must say, during the time I spent in prison, my views only hardened: I came to utterly hate the king and the system the monarchs of Aktida had built over the centuries. After my release, I was banned from working in the Academy, so I went to Petista, met Axel, and we started over. We created the order of the Cassians. We organized underground cells in all the major cities of Aktida.

  "When Emerlun took the throne, we quickly realized this was our chance. A young and weak king, with that rat Maclevirr running everything… I don’t think I ever hated any official more than him. We had many followers; new people constantly joined the order, sympathizing with us and ready to act… but still we weren’t certain we had enough strength to make a decisive move. And then I remembered Darius, remembered that it could potentially serve as a source of energy great enough to create anything… as much weaponry as we desired, that’s what I was thinking then.

  "And then, at a Cassian gathering in Petista, a lad appeared—Yuffilis Lainter. When we got to know him better, we realized he was utterly reckless, willing to do anything for the idea he believed in. He became our irreplaceable agent. He broke into rooms locked with seven locks to steal secret documents. He kidnapped, tortured, and killed, all to learn the next moves of the king or Maclevirr. And it was he who told us about you, Kairu. About the fact that you could see the future.

  "I knew then this was our chance. Axel and I came here again and seized Octarus. Yuffilis brought you from the Southern Province, and together we pulled the Lake of Aktida from the shrine of Aktos. Even then, the thought crossed my mind: I have a Seer, and a time machine… I could return to the past and save Ashley… But you and Yuffilis dissuaded me. The stakes were too high; the Cassians needed me.

  "We used the Lake of Aktida to arm the rebel army. We waited, and then we struck… Emerlun was captured by the Cassians and killed. Civil war erupted in Aktida. Jake Farian took advantage of the chaos and attacked from the north, the Nocturns struck from the south… Instead of uniting under a new government, the country split—those who sympathized with us and were ready to build a new world, and those who longed for the king and hated us. We refused to retreat, and we drew more and more power from the Lake of Aktida, while the war grew fiercer.

  "It was madness. No one accepted losses, no one would back down, everyone believed that just a little longer and victory would be ours, and then surely we would reach the bright future. Lainter became the leader of the republic we proclaimed. His face was printed on our first coins, and oh, how happy we were, releasing those coins into circulation!.. But that happiness was short-lived: we suffered defeat at the front. Many in the order’s leadership betrayed us, believing we hadn’t given them enough power. Yuffilis was killed… The Cassian government was driven from Mainor, fighting raged in the streets, the city was in flames, and some religious fanatics declared themselves the new rulers of Aktida…

  "You were my best warrior, my closest advisor, Kairu. And we two remained. We knew we had few choices—only death or exile. But worse than death was seeing the fruits of our labor destroyed.

  "And that was when I resolved. I asked you to open a crossroads of times for me. I wasn’t ready to accept the future I myself had created. You chose to stay. I chose to return and try again from the beginning. And I went back to the very year Ashley died. You, Kairu, stayed on the other side and closed the passage behind me. That was three years ago.

  "I hid. The hardest part was saving Ashley, and in such a way that neither she nor I would ever know what had saved her… But I succeeded. Oh, how happy I was to see her at a distance from my hiding place! And then I decided that, perhaps, since Ashley had lived, the life of the young me would follow different tracks, and perhaps I wouldn’t make the same mistakes as in that other branch of reality.

  "But I couldn’t have guessed how differently young Petros would act if Ashley survived. Only half a year passed after she didn’t die—thanks to my efforts—and they quarreled. Ashley soon married Roger Nielder. And young Petros hurled himself into the search for the time machine with the same fervor I had thirty years before. I watched him closely, but from afar. And soon I noticed that in the fabric of history there were now serious divergences.

  "New people appeared around young Petros—Saelin, Vergilius, Nubel. He invited Ashley into the expedition. That, too, was a mistake from the very start… I didn’t know at what moment I would have to intervene. And I was too late. I could never have imagined that in this reality, Petros would know far more about Darius and Octarus than I once did. When I realized where this was all leading, what my double’s hunt for the time machine had become—I knew I couldn’t entrust the world’s future to this man. Even if I am twice his age now, I’ve seen what his ambition leads to—both now, and in the previous version of the future… I understood my only chance to set things right was to rid the world of myself."

  He fell silent.

  "Petros…" Kairu murmured. "Listen. I’m from the future. From the very future you’ve just created. Thirty years will pass, and you will make a pact with Saelin. Nubel will find the Lake of Aktida. Saelin will kill him and take the diamond for himself to summon an attack by Talaska’s pirates on Aktida. Saelin will go mad, Aktida will be drenched in blood again—and once more, because of you. You’ve changed nothing."

  Kairu felt his throat tighten with tears. Petros gave a faint smile.

  "Then tell me everything I must know," he said encouragingly.

  ***

  Behind the trees, the glow of fires rose into the sky, carrying with it the roar and crash of collapsing houses, palaces, and towers. Yet all of it seemed impossibly distant, irrelevant, stripped of meaning, nothing more than fragments of a nightmare soon to end. Kairu did not look in that direction, tried to ignore the smoke climbing into the sky, now paling in the approach of dawn. The short June night was drawing to an end.

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  Two figures emerged onto the clearing from the trees. Kairu leaped up, stunned… How much they looked alike! Rita’s face was streaked with dirt, her eyes red and wet, but she was smiling as Kairu had never seen her smile before. Axel walked beside her, a confused smirk flickering across his face.

  "Well, here we all are," Petros said.

  For a few moments, they stood in silence, staring at each other. It was as if they had all briefly forgotten that only a couple of miles away, thousands were dying, that the mountain’s slope was ablaze, that something crucial had ended that night—something that would shape history for decades, perhaps centuries—and that they were a part of it. Despite everything he had just seen and heard, Kairu suddenly felt a strange, unearthly calm. As if everything was happening exactly as it was meant to.

  "I completed my task," Rita declared in a strained voice. "What now?"

  Kairu drew the time machine from inside his tunic.

  "We came here to kill Saelin," he said. "To stop all of this from happening. And we still can… Petros, Saelin will betray you there, in the future. You’ll die before this story ends. But right now… right now we have a chance. In the future, we spent years—and the lives of our friends—gathering the three elements: Darius, Octarus, and the Seer, me. Now we already have everything. We can end this story in one stroke. We know what must be done. We can go to the Island, to the First Temple, and return the time machine to where it belongs."

  Petros smiled.

  "Give it to me," he asked. Slowly, Kairu handed him Octarus. Petros turned the device in his hands, that distracted smile still flickering on his face. He twisted something. A faint click sounded, and the diamond slipped free, resting in his palm. Petros held the Lake of Aktida out to Axel.

  "You are the only one I can trust with this," he said. "And the only one who knows how it was hidden, and how it was guarded."

  Axel nodded.

  "I’ll take care of it, Petros."

  "Do so, I beg you. And afterward—try to forget it, for now. We’ll meet again, I promise. The Seer foretold it. And I—I’ll return Octarus to its place. I’ll give the brooch to Konrad. He will keep it safe until the time comes."

  "Petros," Kairu said quietly. "You’re making a mistake. Listen to me…"

  "No, you listen," the professor interrupted. "The time to return to the First Temple has not yet come. We’ll still need the Lake of Aktida. Without it, we’ll never manage. I heard your story, and I think we are on the right path."

  "What?" Kairu asked, shaken. "What are you talking about, Petros? I’ve been trying to tell you that the new future you’ve created is no better than the one you tried to change!"

  "Then I’ll take all your words into account in correcting our mistakes. But one thing I know for sure: we must try. Without Darius, we have no chance. If we return the time machine to the island now, we’ll lose the chance to carry out the revolution."

  Kairu shook his head helplessly. He felt hope draining from him.

  "Petros," he said hoarsely. "You can’t imagine the sacrifices that will come. I don’t know what you saw before you came here… but I was there, damn it! I fought in the fields of Nalvin and Mainor, I buried my father, my friends died in my arms… Axel, you’ll vanish into the mountains and never return, leaving Rita alone, a helpless little girl, and we’ll never know what became of you! Amalia will be murdered in Mainor at Garamant’s command! That’s the future you’ve just created—and it will come, if you… if we do nothing!"

  Petros shook his head.

  "Kairu, Kairu," he said softly, calmly. "We understand. We’ve always known the risks ahead. Don’t worry. We’ll do it right."

  "What? What will you do?" Kairu demanded, angrily brushing away the tears that had welled despite himself. "Will we return now to our time and find the war never happened? That our parents and friends are alive?"

  "I cannot promise that, Kairu. The future is too unpredictable, and we’ve already altered it drastically tonight. All I can promise is not to repeat the mistakes you’ve warned me of… A war with a mad Saelin may not be better than a civil war, or the tyranny of Emerlun, Maclevirr, and the like… but it may not be worse. We’ve reached the point where we cannot avoid blood and sacrifice, no matter what we try. But you saw the future today. You know it will come. And that means everything we do from this moment forward will be right. Do you understand?"

  Kairu shook his head. He refused to believe; his eyes were blurred with tears.

  "And what then?" he shouted stubbornly. "Did we come here for nothing?"

  "I don’t think so," Petros smiled. "You’ve already made one very important Interference."

  ***

  The air was scorching. Smoke drifting close to the ground gradually swallowed the bushes, firs, and pines around them, making it hard to breathe. Hector hunched down, squinting, his face wrapped in rags to filter the ash, stumbling downward, crashing into trees as he tried to keep his bearings. All he could do was hope the steep, perilous descent would eventually end.

  He had no idea how much time had passed before, utterly exhausted and faint, he reached a place where the road leveled and the forest thinned. The fires burned far off to his right, smoke still thick, but here it came only in scattered wisps. Hector realized that soon all that would remain was the stench—the stench of death running wild over the fields. Far ahead, blurred in the haze, a strip of orange stretched across the eastern sky: a new day, one Ardrai would not live to see.

  Hector staggered onto the highway, a gray dusty snake winding southeast, and sank down into the roadside grass, wiping sweat with grimy elbows, gasping for air. His throat was parched, his tongue swollen, and he realized he had neither slept all night nor eaten since the day before. A sudden, unbearable pity overwhelmed him—for himself, for his father, who, he was now certain, had either perished this night or abandoned him. Hector buried his face in his knees and sobbed. He was in despair. He had no idea what to do now.

  "Hey!"

  He barely lifted his head. A band of druids, as filthy and wounded as he, was crossing the road, carrying their dead and maimed into the forest. One broke away from the group, came over, and handed him a flask of water, which Hector drank from greedily.

  "The city is dead," the druid said. "Do you have somewhere to go?"

  Hector slowly shook his head.

  "Want to come with us?"

  "You… you won’t eat me?" the boy croaked faintly.

  The druid laughed.

  "We’re no cannibals. And mercy isn’t foreign to us, no matter how much people try to prove otherwise to each other. We’ve lived side by side on this land for thousands of years, damn it, and we must help one another. Especially…" He lifted his head, squinting at the pillar of smoke towering into the sky, "…especially when facing a common disaster."

  Hector sniffled, then slowly rose. The druid gave him an encouraging smile and took his hand. The gray light of morning faded behind them, and the boy followed the band into the darkness.

  ***

  "Go back," Petros said. "Everything you could do in this time, you’ve done. And… we’ll see each other again in twenty-eight years. Kairu, Rita… I’m glad I’ll have the chance to walk part of the road with you once more. I hope this time I won’t let you down."

  He smiled, stroked his thick silver beard. He waved, nodded to Axel, and strode away. Kairu and Rita followed him with their eyes until he disappeared among the trees. Rita turned to her father.

  "Axel…" she began, but the lump in her throat stopped her words. She simply threw herself at his neck and hugged him with all her strength, as hard as she could, still unable to believe in the miracle happening now. Axel smiled awkwardly, confused, as he stroked her back.

  "Rita…" he murmured. "Rita… A good name. A beautiful name… and you are beautiful, my girl. You’ve done well. If you are here, it means… it means you succeeded. And you will keep succeeding."

  Rita sobbed, trembling all over, burying her face in his shoulder. Axel smiled over her back at Kairu.

  "Take care of her. Protect her when I’m not around. All right, enough. I’ll teach you to be strong, won’t I? Amalia and I, we’ll raise you well. Well enough that you’ll get through whatever life throws at you."

  Rita slowly released him, stepped back.

  "Promise me you’ll be strong," Axel said seriously. "And never give up. Remember: death can overtake any of us at any moment. But worse than death is despair. I can’t always be at your side. But you must promise that you won’t despair… and that you’ll remember me."

  "I promise, Daddy," Rita whispered faintly. She swayed, as if drunk, and Kairu had to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. Axel smiled once more, looked into her eyes one last time. She knew she would remember this moment forever, and remember her father like this—twenty years younger than when she had last seen him.

  "Good luck to you both," Axel said, turned, and hurried down the slope in the opposite direction from where Petros had gone. Rita followed him with a clouded gaze.

  "I love you, Daddy!" she suddenly cried out with the last of her strength, her voice trembling.

  Axel turned, waved.

  "I love you too!" he shouted back. "And I always will—remember that!"

  With those words, he vanished into the thicket.

  Rita slowly sank to the ground. Her legs would no longer hold her. She was still trembling, but her eyes were dry. She felt she had wept out every tear her body could hold in this one night. Kairu sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders, and drew her close.

  "Do you think we really did everything we could?" she suddenly asked quietly, tiredly.

  He hesitated before answering.

  "I think so. It’s time to go back."

  "It’s so strange. You’d think, if you had a time machine, you’d have endless chances. But time runs so quickly. It feels like we only arrived yesterday, and thought we could change everything. But in reality, everything had already happened, almost without us. We managed so little… And if we want to go back and do more, we’d have to do what Petros did… so we don’t spawn endless copies of ourselves in different realities…"

  "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "It turned out far harder than I imagined. And the more I think about it… One person matters so little when he tries to push the hands of history in another direction. Which means, whatever we do, events will still move toward the Inevitability."

  "And that means, in the new future, we’ll still be born," she whispered. "And we’ll meet each other. That too is part of Inevitability."

  "Yes. But it’s the beautiful part."

  And Kairu found the strength to smile at her. She looked at him seriously, but in her tired, shadowed eyes sparks returned. It was that expression he had grown used to, and which—he no longer feared to admit to himself — he loved, loved more than anything in the world, and wanted to see always. To the end of his life.

  "We have plenty of time ahead of us," Rita said softly. "Thirty years before the world needs us again. Or maybe we should forget it all and stay here? There’s no war here. No Saelin’s hounds, no assassins chasing us. Not even ourselves. We’re not yet born. So maybe… really? Buy a little house somewhere in Derelz. Tell the world to go to hell and use these thirty years for ourselves? Because who knows what will await us when we return? But here, at least, we can be sure of tomorrow."

  "I’d love to, Rita," he gave a bitter smile, "but you must understand… I can’t drop everything now. This story has caught me, dragging me on, pulling me until I reach its very end. So… let what will happen, happen. Better to rid ourselves of this burden once and for all. And then…"

  She pressed against him so tightly, as if afraid he might vanish like her father, whom she had seen for only a few minutes and lost again, leaving her with no ground under her feet. Only once before had she held him so—in the Evergreen Gardens of Mainor… it felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Kairu’s heart trembled.

  "We’ll have our house in Derelz, and everything else. And then we’ll rest. I promise you. We’ll rest in the new world we created today."

  "I think so too," she whispered. "Well… then let’s go. Let’s go quickly. It’s time to go back. Time, at last, to find out what we managed to change."

  ***

  The sun was rising, a barely visible white disc, its light struggling through the heavy veil of gray ash. The ruins of Ardrai lay below, still shrouded in smoke. Kairu and Rita turned one last time to look at the ashes and lava field that only days ago had been a city full of life, now surviving only in their memories. Then they stepped into the whirl of dancing sparks and came out the other side—in January of 1455.

  It was evening. The ruins stretched before them, the same as thirty years ago, but now snow-covered, white, cold. But far below, a light was burning.

  They slowly descended the slope, shivering with cold, and wandered forward through the dead streets toward the outpost. Silence hung, broken only by the crunch of snow under their boots. At last, the half-ruined fortress loomed before them, and it was clear that the glow they had seen from above came from the warm firelight in the narrow windows. They opened the door and went down into the cellar. From the table near the fireplace, two men rose to meet them.

  "Well, here they are," said Natall Ganstair with a grin. Though now, it seemed, they should have called him Hector Saelin. "Took you long enough. We’ve been waiting."

  "Welcome back," added Professor Petros with a warm smile.