The fourth memory did not arrive gently.

It arrived like a blade driven through the exact center of Zelda’s chest, and the multi-life battlefield felt the impact.

She stood in the open with the cracked silver knife raised, the new name burning along the fractured edge, and she gave the name the moment that was still forming: the precise, unadorned heartbeat in which she had looked at the older version of herself—the one who had won by closing every door and setting the principle down like an object that had outlived its use—and had chosen, again, to keep the child, the lover, and the loyalist even though the cost was...