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You look over the sea of black, and you merely breathe through the ache in your lungs. Another death. Another world succumbed to Dissolution. Another failure.
You would have cried, you think. Months ago — years ago? Decades? Time has long since lost its meaning, its definition. It is defined in loops, in echoes of echoes of echoes of itself.
You sit within the black sea beneath your feet. It eats away at you, just slightly, but the pain is too gentle to be anything but slightly numbing. Your hands are cold. Your feet are cold, too. (You don't recall what loop it was, when those holes became present. When your eyesight failed, when the mechanical eyes crawled within your skull, when you had to cover your eyes with cloth to keep the light from blinding too much, too fast, too overwhelming.)
There is little left here, in this shell of what was once Mythag University. In what is sometimes Mythag University. There is little left here, and yet, and yet, and yet — you remain. You, you, you, sitting here and devoured by Dissolution and yet too stubborn (too foolish) to quite give up.
There are infinite worlds in which Sylvester dies. Infinite worlds in which he lives, too, but you — oh, you are not granted the mercy of living in any of those worlds. No, no, you are a foolish woman who had once thought that surely this task would take only a few loops — a few years — and your task would be done.
(Within your ribcage, filling your lungs like viscous choking blood, the knowledge of past death, death, death sits heavy. You can feel the faint presence of Tawil, tied to this world only through Their link with you. It burns like a brand upon your leg, within your throat, in the socket of your skull where that sightless eye still sits.)
Your thoughts circle and cycle the same as time does. The Dissolution continues to eat at you, like the gentlest of slow deaths.
You exhale, and if the resulting noise trembles, there's no one here to hear it. (You remain, despite it all. Only you. All those times, all those memories, slipping through your fingers, a rapier that's not sharp enough, limbs that aren't strong enough, hands that can never hold onto him no matter how tightly you want to clench your fingers into that skin and hope you can have him for just a bit longer—)
After you've slept. After you've slept, you tell yourself, you'll try again. Step back through time, paste on your old face, and try to do more than just go through the motions. Try to truly believe that you'll be able to save Sylvester this time. (Whether you start at that day in Yakutsk, or the day of the Key-Bestowing Ceremony, does it matter? As long as you can see Sylvester, alive and vibrant the way he looks in your time-softened memories, as long as you can hold him close at least once and memorize the sound of his heartbeat further — that will be enough to keep you going, for just a little longer. For just one more loop. That will be enough.)
(Quiet, unsaid, confessed to no one for there's no one to hear, a truth that even Tawil Themself would hesitate to speak — you miss him. The first Sylvester. The one you had dug out of the rubble, all those years and years and loops ago. The first Sylvester you'd known, before his death and everything falling apart. The first Sylvester that you'd failed to save. You miss him.)