XXVII. The Girl Whose Ashes I Carry

I think this might be the first mission I cannot complete.

I don’t admit that lightly. In all the years I’ve walked between worlds, all the years spent following threads of fate and blood and energy, there has always been a path forward. A pattern. A way through the labyrinth. But with her, across every world I’ve stepped into, the pattern ends the same. Fractured. Ruined. Dead.

Three years. That seems to be the expiration date from ground zero. By the time I arrive, she’s already breaking. Lately, I’ve been arriving just in time to watch her die. Sometimes by her own hand. Sometimes by someone else’s. Sometimes by the slow erosion of living. I used to think coincidence drove that timeline. I don’t anymore.

One significant event, one major trauma, splintered her into countless tragedies. Thousands upon thousands of paths that all lead to the same abyss. I’ve begun to admire, in a sick way, the precision of the malevolence behind it. It takes a special kind of cruelty to break someone so completely that every version of them across the multiverse carries the same rot.

All worlds lead back to Tristan. I see his fingerprints on every version of her. The anxiety. The submissiveness. The fear. The addiction.

And with every world I land in, with every broken version of her I find, the flame inside me grows. Anger. I didn’t notice it at first. I was too tired, too numb, too focused on the mission. But it’s there now, steady as a heartbeat. I’ve watched her die too many times. Watched her suffer too many ways. I’m beginning to wonder if the version I’m looking for—the one strong enough, whole enough, alive enough—ever existed at all.

I should be getting closer by now. Instead, each jump feels like another step away.

The man named Ezra trails me like a ghost. A man with no Enlightened abilities, no Brand, no connection to power, and yet he endures. I’ve given him every impossible task I could think of just to see him fail, but he hasn’t yet. Tenacity. Grit. Survival. I don’t know if he’s the luckiest man I’ve ever met or if fate itself is dragging him forward.

He’s useful, especially now that the Okkari have picked up my trail. Their scouts cling to me like parasites. Ezra sets perimeters, lays traps, hunts shadows that most men would run from. Sometimes I look at him and wonder if he even sleeps. Obsession makes people efficient.

I’ve thought about reaching out to the Sha’harai for backup. I haven’t reported to them in months. Not since my updates started sounding too much like eulogies. They’ll think I’m compromised. That I care. That I’ve gotten too close. And they’d pull me from the mission.

So I keep my distance. From them. From her. From everything.

These journal entries…they’ve become a crutch. I tell myself I write them for the mission, to organize data, to track patterns. But that’s a lie. They serve no purpose except to remind me of her. All her faces. All her deaths. All her suffering. The ones who begged for mercy. The ones who surrendered to the dark. The ones whose bodies I found too late.

Tomorrow, I’ll burn these pages. Every last one. When I read them now, I find that I'm justifying why I return to them: that I’m reviewing them for the mission, cross‑checking occurrences, searching for important data that I might have missed the last one hundred times I've read them. But none of those excuses are the truth.

The truth is that someone should remember her. And I’ve been carrying that responsibility alone.

These pages have weighed on me more than the jumps, more than the years, more than the dead versions of her I’ve stepped over. A slow, dragging anchor tied to all the forms her suffering has taken. I kept them because I couldn’t stand the thought of letting her vanish in every world without a witness.

Burning them will feel like attending her funeral. All of them. The ones who overdosed. The ones who begged for love. The ones who hurt themselves because they couldn't cope with the pain. The ones who slipped quietly beneath the surface long before I found them.

I’ve never stayed for any of their funerals. I was never meant to. After all, that's not part of my job description.

But tomorrow, I will pay my respects. And then I’ll walk away from the ashes and carry what remains into whatever world comes next.

All the pieces. All the fractures. All the shards of darkness she’s become.

And the search continues.

M.