The Temple

I knew his face before he stepped through the doorway.

I'd seen it in firelight and starlight and the gray nothing of death. I'd watched those amber eyes go cold seventeen different ways. I'd memorized the exact angle of his blade in each future, knew which death would hurt most, which would be quickest, which would leave me enough breath to whisper his name as I fell.

General Darius Thane.

He stood in the temple entrance now, solid and real and finally here, and I felt time collapse into a single point. All those futures converging. All those deaths drawing close.

"You're the seer." His voice matched too. Low, clipped, military-precise. In fourteen futures he said those words exactly that way.

"Yes."

"You'll come with me."

Not a question. Not even a threat. Just fact. He was a man who dealt in facts, orders and obedience and the clean geometry of war. Prophecy was foreign territory. I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his hand rested on his sword hilt without drawing. He didn't believe I was dangerous.

He was wrong about that. But not in the way he thought.

"Seventeen futures where you kill me," I said. "One where you don't."

He didn't move. Most people did when I spoke like that, the weight of multiple timelines pressing through my words. But Darius Thane had been trained to show nothing. His face gave nothing away.

"I don't believe in prophecy."

"That's never stopped it from believing in you."

I rose from the altar where I'd been sitting. The temple was cold, had been cold for the seven years I'd hidden here. Cracked marble and faded murals and the ghosts of a hundred seers before me, their voices silent in the stone. They'd all died too. We always did.

He tracked me the way a hawk tracks movement. Assessing threat, calculating distance, measuring what he could do with it. I'd seen this assessment in every future, the moment he decided I was harmless.

I wasn't. But not in ways he understood.

"The king sent you."

"Yes."

"He wants me dead."

A pause. Interesting. In most futures, he didn't hesitate here. "He wants you brought to the capital."

"Which is death with extra steps." I smiled, and his eyes narrowed slightly at the expression. I'd practiced that smile in the mirror of still water, watching myself reflect back someone braver than I felt. "The king doesn't want to use my gift. He wants to end it. Like he ended all the others."

"I don't know the king's intentions..."

"You do." I stepped closer, and he tracked me the way he'd track an enemy general, wary, focused, reading me for deception. "You know what happened to my sisters. The Purge. A hundred years of seer-hunting. And you know I'm the last."

"That's why you're valuable alive."

"Valuable." The word tasted like ash. "Is that what he told you? That I'd be used, not destroyed? That the kingdom needs prophecy, just controlled?"

Silence. Which was answer enough.

"He's lying, General. He's been lying for a hundred years. And you've been believing him because the alternative means questioning everything you serve."

His fingers curled around the sword hilt. Still not drawing, but closer now. "You speak treason."

"I speak futures. Let me tell you one."

I could feel the visions pressing at the edges of my mind, wanting release. So many of them. So many ways this could go. But I reached for the one I needed, the most common, the most likely, the one where his blade found my throat by moonrise.

"In this future, you drag me from this temple. You bind my hands because I struggle, and the rope cuts my wrists. We travel four days to the capital, and I tell you things along the way, small things, fragments I've seen. You don't believe them at first. Then my predictions come true."

A muscle in his cheek twitched. Almost imperceptibly. But I was trained to read almost.

"By the second day, you're afraid. By the third, you're curious. By the fourth, you're starting to wonder if everything you believed is wrong. But it's too late. We reach the gates. The king's men take me, and I look back at you one last time..."

My throat closed around the words. Even knowing the future, living it in my head over and over, this part still hurt.

"You look at me like you want to stop them. Like you're realizing. But you don't move. You let them take me, and that night, when they put the blade through my heart, you hear my scream from across the castle."

"Stop."

"You don't sleep for a week. You tell yourself it was duty. Necessity. That I was dangerous, that prophecy is manipulation and I would have lied my way into the king's council and destroyed the kingdom. You tell yourself these things, and you almost believe them."

"I said stop."

"But in your quiet moments, in the spaces between orders and battles and all the noise you fill your life with, you remember the way I looked at you. And you wonder."

His mouth pressed into a hard line, biting back words that wanted escape.

"That's one future," he said finally. "You said there are seventeen."

"Seventeen where you kill me. Directly or indirectly. Some are faster than the one I described. Some are worse." I met his eyes, and I let him see it, the exhaustion of dying so many times. "In one, you realize the truth and try to save me, but you're too late. In another, you turn against the king, but his assassins find me first. In a third, you get me to safety, but I die of fever because we ran too hard and my body gave out."

"And the other thirteen?"

"Variations. Betrayals. Bad timing. Once, an arrow from a hunting party mistakes me for a deer." I laughed, and it sounded hollow even to me. "The universe is very creative about killing seers."

He was quiet for a long moment. The temple's silence wrapped around us, ancient and patient. I'd spent seven years in this quiet, learning its textures. Now it was the backdrop to my death, or my salvation.

"You said seventeen futures. You also said one where I don't kill you."

"Yes."

"Tell me about that one."

This was the moment. The fulcrum point. In twelve of the seventeen killing futures, he never asked this question. He took my earlier words as manipulation and bundled me toward my death without looking back.

But he asked.

The timeline shifted. I felt it like a shiver through my bones, possibilities branching, reconfiguring. The worst futures dimming slightly. The one bright path growing just a fraction brighter.

"In the one future where I live," I said slowly, "you defy the king. You lose everything you've built, your rank, your honor, your place in the world. You become a traitor and a fugitive and a man with a price on his head."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you learn the truth. About the king. About the Purge. About what prophecy really is and why he fears it." I stepped closer still, close enough to count the gold flecks in those amber irises, to see the scar at his temple that I'd memorized from a hundred visions. "And because you choose me."

"Choose you?"

"Over duty. Over safety. Over everything you've been trained to believe." I raised my hand, slowly, and touched his chest. Through the leather armor, I could feel his heartbeat, steady, controlled, like everything about him. "You choose to be the man I see in that future instead of the man you've always been told to be."

He caught my wrist. Not roughly, but with the certainty of someone accustomed to restraining.

"You don't know me."

"I know you better than anyone alive." The truth of it ached. Seven years of watching him across timelines, seeing fragments of his life scattered through my visions. His sister's laugh. His horse's name. The way he prayed when he thought no one could see. "I know the scar on your ribs is from your father, not combat. I know you joined the army at fifteen to escape him and found a crueler master in the king. I know you tell yourself loyalty is virtue, but some nights you wonder if you've been loyal to the wrong things."

His grip on my wrist didn't loosen. But I saw it, the crack in his certainty. The flicker of recognition when I named wounds he'd never shown anyone.

"You're in my head."

"I'm in your futures. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yes." I pulled my wrist free, he let me, which was its own small victory. "In your head would mean I know your thoughts. In your futures means I've watched you make choices, a thousand different versions, across a thousand different paths. I don't know what you're thinking right now. But I know what you'll think in an hour, a day, a week, depending on what you choose."

He studied me the way he might study an unfamiliar terrain. Good. Most people treated me like a threat or a tool. Curiosity was better.

"The king will send others if I don't return with you."

"Yes."

"They won't hesitate like I am."

"No."

"So what exactly is your plan, seer? Wait here until someone less patient comes along?"

I smiled again, and this time it was real, or as real as my smiles ever got. "My plan was to wait for you."

"Why me?"

"Because you're in the one future where I live." I backed away, giving him space, letting the moment breathe. "Seventeen men could drag me to my death. You're the only one who's ever saved me."

The cold air held nothing but my offer. He stared at me, and I stared back, and between us stretched the weight of every possible tomorrow.

"You're asking me to believe in prophecy."

"No. I'm asking you to believe in choice." I gestured to the temple around us, the crumbling marble, the faded murals of seers long dead. "Everyone in this room died because someone chose to kill them. Kings chose fear over wisdom. Soldiers chose orders over conscience. And the world chose silence over truth."

"And you think I'll choose differently?"

"I think you can." I moved to the altar where a small pack waited, prepared for seven years, because I'd seen this moment coming since the day I arrived. "The question is whether you will."

I lifted the pack, slung it over my shoulder, and walked toward the door where he still stood. His hand was back on his sword hilt. His eyes tracked me with that predator focus.

I stopped just beside him. Close enough to catch the scent of road dust and oiled steel.

"In seventeen futures, you draw that blade before I reach the door. In one, you step aside."

I waited.

Neither of us breathed.

Then, slowly, carefully, General Darius Thane shifted his weight and moved out of my path.

I walked past him into the dying light of dusk, the first free steps I'd taken in seven years. Behind me, I heard him follow. Not to capture. Not yet.

To see what I would do next.

We stood on the temple steps, the forest spreading before us in shadow and fading gold. The capital lay four days east. Freedom lay in every other direction.

He spoke first. "Where are we going?"

"That depends on you."

"That tells me nothing."

"No." I shifted toward him, this man who held my death in his hands, who might, might, become my salvation instead. "It's a choice."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then:

"Which man do you want me to be, seer?"

And I knew, I knew in my bones, in my visions, in the bright thread of the single surviving future, that this was the question that changed everything.

I let myself hope. Just a little. Just enough.

"The one who saves me."

The forest held its breath. Somewhere, an owl called into the gathering dark.

And General Darius Thane, for the first time in his life, chose to ask a question instead of following an order:

"How?"