Chapter Text
Garrick was burnt out. Not just in the magical sense, though he'd been running against the edge long enough that Chradh had stopped chiding him for it, but just plain exhausted. He'd been running for weeks trying to keep everything under control with Violet.
Because Violet was all Tyrrandor had left. No Xaden, no Bodhi. No living Riorson bloodline at all unless there was something Violet hadn't mentioned. Garrick wasn't sure he believed the old folktales but it certainly felt like it could be the end of everything they'd worked for.
So he did the most desperate thing he could imagine doing.
He went to the library.
When Imogen found him there hours later, her laughter woke him from a sound sleep.
"Hiding in the last place anyone would look for you, Tavis?" she asked, punching him in the shoulder.
"No! No," he answered, still startled, and something in his tone was desperate enough that she stopped laughing. Instead she sat down across from him and looked at the book he had laid out.
"What is this? I've never seen runes like this," she whispered, her eyes tracing the complex forms and combinations of symbols. She turned it toward her to get a better look, flipping through the pages. "Are these Colonel Mairi's notes?"
"Yeah, I thought there might be something we could use, you know? There's a lot of unfinished projects, ideas I don't think she ever got to test."
"Anything useful?"
Garrick sighed, taking the book back from her. "At this point there's only one thing I can think of that would help." He flipped back to the page he'd marked before he fell asleep, then handed it to her. He focused on her face, watching her read and gauging her reaction.
He wasn't exactly surprised when Imogen's eyebrows climbed almost to her hairline. "Shit, this isn't even a rune, it's a whole fucking array of—holy fuck, does that say wielding time?"
Garrick just nodded, watching confusion and hope and anger war on Imogen's face.
"Why didn't she use it if she had something like that?"
"It's not finished," Garrick told her. "And besides, she had Liam and Sloane and I bet she wouldn't be willing to put them in danger of not existing or killing herself trying to make it work."
"Maybe." Imogen studied the pages of runes laid out in artful lines and circles. "Fuck, this has almost as many runes as the wardstone."
"Right? It might be more; some of them are bindrunes. I'm pretty sure trying to imbue it would kill me." He snorted. "At least I wouldn't have to worry about it, because I'd be in the past."
Imogen just rolled her eyes at that. "Don't even joke about dying, Tavis, you're not allowed. There's too much work to do." She kept looking at the array, tracing the lines of the runes with her fingertip. "How far back do you think it'd take someone? This looks like the fate rune, but it's crossed, what would that do?"
"I think it would take you back to the moment your fate either changed or became set, but either way, it'd be a key moment in your life."
"So probably Calldyr?" Imogen shivered.
"If it was, it'd still mean a chance to redo everything since then." He didn't specify what everything was, but he was pretty sure she would be thinking the same things. Draithus. Xaden and Bodhi. Liam. Quinn. But it was Xaden that he saw in his head again and again, Xaden the night after the Battle of Basgiath, his eyes ringed in red, confessing what he'd done like he expected Garrick to be his executioner.
She cut him off from that line of thought. "If we're lucky, it could be when our parents decided to secede from Navarre." The period between the secession and the Battle of Aretia was short but could buy them a lot, especially if he was careful what he tried to do. What he tried to tell his dad. They went back and forth for a while, discussing the runes in the array. Every time Garrick started talking about what he could change at this time or at that time, a new way to save Xaden or make things better for him, Imogen cut him off or redirected him.
"I'm not sure I trust it," Imogen said finally, putting an end to it. "There's no way to test it, and it'll kill you if you try? No."
"But I could save Xaden—"
"If it was possible to save him you already would have," Imogen snapped. "You did everything he asked from you and more and—"
"And it wasn't enough—"
"Maybe there isn't enough!" She stood up as she cut him off, like the chair couldn't contain her anger. "Maybe he just fucked all of us over and—" Imogen stopped, her nails digging into her palms, her anger too much to be allowed out of her mouth.
Garrick couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Imogen this furious. Yes, she was always angry, but not like this, not red-faced with her hands in fists at her side. He should have let it go; he knew the right answer was to let it go.
He said it anyway.
"You would do it for Quinn, wouldn't you?"
Imogen screamed, and it wasn't a word, just a snap of anger and noise that hit Garrick in the gut harder than she'd ever punched him. Then she stomped out of the library.
He stayed where he was, staring at the array and seeing nothing, until the magelights turned themselves off for the night. Then he went to bed, and he got up in the morning, and he kept going through the motions of fighting, of carrying messages, of moving supplies. After a few days Imogen stopped ignoring him, but they never spoke about it again.
That didn't mean he wasn't thinking about it, though. The idea worried at him any time he sat still too long: during long flights, when he was trying to sleep, any time he was stuck in a meeting or waiting on a response to bring back with him. The runes might as well have been tattooed on the back of his eyelids.
Autumn was threatening to rush straight into winter before he knew it. He'd started walking Riorson House at night when he couldn't sleep, trying to keep himself from obsessing over the fucking array. He'd memorized so many fucking runes trying to find an answer that Trissa had given up on making suggestions, and there was still nothing that felt like a solid answer. He needed distractions instead.
When he was younger—he laughed at himself, for thinking like he was an old man having just passed his 24th birthday. When he was a cadet, he would have distracted himself from thought spirals like this with whatever he could find. Women, usually. Churram. Alcohol. All three on a really interesting night.
He hadn't slept with anyone since Draithus, though. He didn't admit to himself what had shifted, but he no longer found the idea of fucking any random woman into oblivion appealing, regardless of what Imogen said or didn't say.
Wandering the House after midnight was going to be less appealing as winter came on, though. For one thing, the stone floors were fucking cold under his bare feet, but he hated wearing socks to bed.
He froze in the doorway to the kitchen. The moonlight from the window made Imogen's pink hair practically glow as she sat on the counter, tearing a bread roll apart and eating it slowly. She looked tired, and yes, they all looked tired, but seeing Imogen specifically looking so tired, the deep shadows of the moonlight making the dark marks under her eyes more dramatic, hurt him.
She looked up at him, and Garrick was sure her eyes saw straight through him.
"Genny?" he asked, his voice almost choked by the heart in his throat.
Imogen groaned and jumped down from the counter. "Come on, idiot. I had an idea." She pushed past him, and Garrick was so surprised that it took him a minute to turn and follow her. It was several minutes of following her up stairs and down halls before he saw the library ahead.
Colonel Mairi's notes were still on the table where he'd left the thin book. Someone had dusted around it, and his own loose papers were stacked neatly underneath it. The staff who worked in the House were as determined as anyone else to keep going until the last, and it made him all the more determined to fix it.
Pushing the loose ends of her hair back behind her ear, Imogen flipped the notebook open. She grabbed the inked pen he'd left there and started laying down lines right on top of Colonel Mairi's own notes.
"What are you doing?" Garrick asked, leaning in. Violet would kill us if she saw, he started to say, and then he almost laughed at the absurdity of that thought..
"If I fill in the last part like this, and split the power-drawing runes… that should allow two people to imbue the array. It'll probably kill us both if it fails, but there should be enough power to fully imbue and trigger it, if it's going to work."
Garrick stared in wonder at Imogen. "You're fucking brilliant, do you know that?"
"Yeah, well. I'm not letting you kill yourself over Xaden without me. Somebody needs to keep an eye on you." She shrugged and started pulling strands of magic into the air, knotting them together and then burning the runes one at a time into the surface of the library table. Garrick used a flick of air to pick up the notebook and hold it so both of them could see it, knocking everything else to the floor in the process, and then started pulling on Chradh's power as well. Garrick could feel him watching now, melancholy seeping through their bond, but the dragon didn't say anything.
Once they'd burned the last rune into the tabletop, Garrick took a deep breath and stepped back. Sweat was dripping down his face, and he no longer felt the autumn chill, even with his feet bare. Imogen looked energized, probably the best he'd seen her look since Quinn died.
She glanced up at him, her eyes as determined as she'd been when he saw her at her Threshing. "Ready?"
"Thank you," he said instead of answering her. "No matter what happens, Imogen, I l—"
Imogen slammed her hands down on the tabletop, the last of Glane's power blasting into the array. Garrick matched the gesture, his words forgotten, and then everything went white.