“Again.”

The word did not echo.

It rewrote the air.

The multi-life battlefield folded inward like a book whose pages had been seized by a single, impartial hand. Clearings that had existed as separate possibilities collapsed into one another. Soft endings and hard endings, gentle Graysons and murderous ones, loyal Delilahs and poisoners—all of them were dragged into a single, denser present. The ground under Zelda’s knees became simultaneously the original forest floor, the shattered white-glass plain, the ruined throne room, and a place that had no name yet because it had never been allowed to exist until the process itself invited the third movement.

The seven-syllable bloodline name burned...