Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(24)

“Why?” Julius asked. “I mean, that seems a little late.”

“Because the future is never set until it becomes past,” the Black Reach said firmly. “So long as there is even the slightest chance remaining that they will take another path, I cannot move against them. That is why I send every seer a vision of their death at my hands. I want them to know what is coming in the hope that they will choose differently and be spared.”

“But they never do, do they?” Bob said. “Because anything a seer decides to cross you over is something they’re willing to die for. That’s not a decision you go back on.”

“I’ve seen the future you’re willing to die for,” the oldest seer growled. “That’s why I’m here. It’s bad enough that you brought the death of our old plane into this one, but I allowed it because consorting with a Nameless End is not the same as using one. This, however, I cannot permit. I will not allow any seer to repeat the mistake that destroyed our world!”

That certainly sounded dreadful, but Julius’s original question still hadn’t been answered. “But what is he planning to do?” he pressed, frustrated. “You go on and on about how it’s the worst thing ever, but no one has actually explained what Bob’s supposed future-crime is.”

“Thank you, Julius,” Bob said, glaring up at the Black Reach. “At least someone has the decency to actually ask about my plans before condemning me.”

“I don’t ask because I already know them,” the seer snapped. “No one has time for your grandstanding.”

“But this deserves grandstanding,” Bob argued. “It’s the second cleverest idea I’ve ever had.”

The Black Reach growled deep in his throat, but Bob had already focused all of his attention on his youngest brother. “I saw this coming before anyone else,” he said, pointing at the Leviathan in the sky. “This scene was my very first vision. It took me a while to understand what I was looking at, but I was blessed with a very clever and well-traveled older sister, and together, we figured it out. A Nameless End was coming. Normally, that would be that. After all, how does one defeat an all-powerful being from beyond our understanding? Answer: with another all-powerful being! And I knew how to find one.”

“Because it destroyed our old home,” the Black Reach growled.

“It’s called learning from the mistakes of the previous generation,” Bob said haughtily, but Julius was shaking his head.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” he said, voice shaking. “But this sounds insane. You’re talking about making a deal with the force that destroyed our old home!”

“Technically, we destroyed it ourselves,” his brother said. “She didn’t make us sell out all of our futures. We did that. Leviathan’s current actions aside, Nameless Ends aren’t usually aggressive. They don’t plot to destroy planes. They’re scavengers, not hunters.”

“As a scavenger, I take offense at that,” Raven cawed. “They are the ends of worlds!”

“They are forces of nature,” Bob snapped. “No more good or evil than the rest of us. What they do have is power on a planar level, and that was what I needed.”

He lifted his head to the sky again. “I’ve spent my entire life looking as far as I could into the future, but no matter how many millions of potentials I examined, they all ended here.” He swept his hand over the broken Skyways, the ruined house, the Leviathan in the sky, and the Black Reach standing like a dark memorial in front of it all. “For centuries, this moment has been my event horizon. The hard line where all the branching streams of my future ended.” He ground his teeth. “I couldn’t stand it. I was determined to find a solution, but how do you keep going past something that ends everything by its definition? That was the question I had to answer, and like any good seer, I found it in the future itself.”

“But you just said all futures ended,” Julius said, confused.

“They did,” Bob replied with a smile. “For me. But contrary to popular belief, I am not the center of the world. Time continues after my passing, and though I couldn’t see it, I knew that somewhere in the infinite stream of the future beyond my death, there had to be a timeline where we survived the Leviathan.”

Julius’s breath caught. “Did you find it?”

“In a manner,” Bob said. “My original goal was to find a way to stop the Leviathan from coming into our world at all, but by the time I had my first vision, he was already on his way. Believe it or not, this timeline is the one where we had the most time to prepare, and you wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jump through to get even these sixty years. I was practically helping Algonquin at times to keep her delusion going for as long as possible.”

“But you did find a way out,” Julius said hopefully. “A way we survive.”

“I did,” Bob said, his smile fading. “Though whether you’ll like it is another matter.”

The way he said that made Julius’s stomach clench. “What are you going to do?”

“What he should not,” the Black Reach snarled, lifting his hand, but before he could do whatever he was about to do, Julius put up his own.

“Please,” he begged. “Bob’s my brother, and I owe him my life. If he’s going to die for this, I at least want to know why.” He glanced over at the others, who were still hanging back. Well, Marci looked like she was trying to get to him, but Chelsie had a firm grip on her arm. Amelia was still bound by her own magic, but the Qilin, Fredrick, and the others were all behind her, watching the Black Reach with wary eyes. “We all deserve to know. All of us have been Bob’s pawns without knowing why. If he’s going to explain himself, we deserve to hear it.”