Alexander's gaze was fixed on the scarlet stain that was leaking into the oak table. Only the blood-wine color tainted the spilled coffee, and the black petal was gone, dissolving as if it had never been. A chilly finger moved along his back. He was not a man who was prone to poetic fantasy or hallucinations. He worked as a structural engineer. He supported quantifiable stress and load-bearing walls. Not in ghostly petals.However, the evidence in front of him was a Rorschach blot of wrongness.There was a sharp spike behind his right eye, and his head throbbed. A flash, absurd: exit lights that are red. The scent of fear and rust. Screaming a name that wasn't his was a woman's voice. "Phantom!"When he blinked, it vanished. Chatter from the café surged back in. It was just a migraine. The new contract proposal is causing stress. Tatiana, the strange, attractive woman, had knocked him off balance. That was all.A shadow fell across the table just as he was about to ask the barista for

Tatiana's throat was blocked by a wordless scream. The nurse's jubilant, gimlet eyes, the baby whose innocent clasp seemed to bear the power of a curse, and the horrifying word inscribed in blood on Alexander's flesh were all magnified.Alexander's hand jerked back. Mira's mystical hold was broken by the movement. The infant gave a small, frightened squeak before falling back asleep, her hand now a typical little fist. The link was broken.However, the mark persisted.Daddy.The flow of blood ceased. The letters were clearly visible, etched into his flesh like a receipt from a nightmare, even though it started to turn from a fresh scarlet to a scabrous brown."What is this?" Alexander's voice was a graveled whisper, devoid of any pretense and charm. He gazed at his hand as though it were someone else's. Although the pain had been intense and short-lived, he was shaken by the philosophical wrongness. "What did you do?"Tatiana wasn't being asked. Lucy was the one he was asking.Lucy si

The kiss served as both a funeral and a blessing. Alexander’s lips met hers, powdered with the fine, grey ash still falling through the café air like poisoned snow. It tasted of extinction, of charred wood, of crumbled stone, of the phantom ring that had shattered in his grasp moments before. It was the taste of a future foreclosed. It was instinctive for Alexander. A frantic, grounding gesture in a universe that had begun to spiral off its axis. The only thing that remained constant was the stunning, scared woman in front of him. The ash, the voice, the mark on his hand, they were terrible puzzles, but she was real. Beneath his, her mouth was a haven of warmth and vitality. He kissed her to hush the shrieking wrongness, to claim a piece of this craziness for himself. To build a memory that was his own, not one forced by spectral warnings or bleeding scars. For Tatiana, it was an avalanche. The instant his lips contacted hers, the flavor of ash on her tongue shifted. It wasn’t sim

The world held its breath. The murmur of the river subsided to a whisper. The wind stopped blowing. The only sounds in the middle of the current were the impossibly silent island and the soft swaying of the rowboat.Mira was a picture of tranquility as she slept.Alexander uttered a sound, a strangled, unintelligible thing wrenched from deep in his chest. It was the sound of a guy seeing a miracle that felt more like a trap. Every logical circuit in his smart head shorted out. This violates conservation of mass, hydrodynamics, basic sense. But there she was. His daughter. On an island formed from a promise's ashes.“How?” he gasped, the word scarcely audible.Tatiana was at a loss for words. She was torn between wonder and a cold, knowing fear. The universe's reaction to her commitment was this. It had given her the “no empire,” but it had also delivered this. An indication that their typical life would never be typical. That magic, or madness, was embedded into their very bones.“We

The fruit hung from the white tree’s single, slender branch like a condemned man from a gallows, but its sentence was one of unbearable potential. It was not an apple, nor a peach, nor any fruit from nature’s catalog. It was a heart, rendered in botanical form.It was the size of a clenched fist, its skin a translucent, membranous gold, like the delicate sheath over a newborn’s fontanel. Through this skin, a complex, pulsing system was visible: dark crimson veins branched from a central, shadowy core, throbbing in a slow, deliberate rhythm that echoed across the silent island. Thump… thump… thump… It didn't sound. It vibrated, a sub-audible bass note that Tatiana felt in the roots of her teeth, in the marrow of her bones holding Mira.It was the Heartbeat of the Loop. The core engine of the cycle they were trapped in. To eat it, she understood with a cold, crystalline certainty, was not to gain power or knowledge. It was to consume the mechanism itself. To take the endless, recursive