Morwenna stared up at her great-grandson, suspended in that hemorrhaging amber sky forty meters above her.
She felt a hollow, sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach, the precise, cold dread that comes when one recognizes a situation that possesses no possible beneficial outcome.
There was no path here that ended in healing; there was only the choice between different flavors of catastrophe.
"To me," she said, her voice cracking like thin ice under the pressure of the temporal howling. "To Elaris... To the household."
"The household," Theo repeated.
The way he said it made the word sound foreign, like a relic from a dead civilization. His voice held the hollow inflection of someone who had watched a sacred concept be stripped of its meaning and replaced with something transactional and cruel.
"The household is currently being directed by the person I just tried to kill."
