Clearsight would never forget the look on Darkstalker’s face as he realized what she’d done. It was only there for a moment — the utter shock, the disbelief, the bewilderment and betrayal — and then his eyes closed and he collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud.

She knelt beside him, resting her talons lightly on his neck. His chest rose and fell steadily. He was still alive, still breathing, but he would never wake up again, not as long as the bracelet was on him.

Darkstalker had made himself immortal and invulnerable to any kind of attack, but a simple sleeping spell had taken him down. Fathom had done his part well.

Clearsight dragged Darkstalker far back into the cave, letting her tears fall but not stopping to give in to her grief. The cave ended in a small chamber, solid granite on all sides. She rolled him against the back wall and checked the bracelet to make sure it was securely fastened around Darkstalker’s arm.

Then she filled in the cave with boulders from the hillside, piling them up to hide the sleeping dragon inside. He could never be found, never be set free, or else Pyrrhia would be in danger all over again.

When that was done, she found another mountain where she could watch and wait for the earthquake to come. Once Agate Mountain had collapsed, burying Darkstalker deep in the earth, she’d know it was safe to leave him there.

The sun spread across her wings as she sat on the ridge, breathing in the light of the new dawn.

It worked.

I did this.

All those futures I saw, all the plans I made to take us along the right paths … that’s all gone now. We never got married. We never took the throne or stopped the war. We never had our dragonets.

She closed her eyes, trying not to think about that. How could she mourn dragons who’d never existed in the first place? They were no more real than anything else about the timelines she’d shattered.

But she could still see their faces in her mind, and she knew she would always miss them.

What am I going to do now?

She took a deep breath and let the new futures roll out before her.

There was nothing for her back in the tribe. The other NightWings would never trust her again after seeing her on that stage with Darkstalker, even if she told them what she’d done to him — and she couldn’t tell anyone that. No one could ever know where he was or how easy it would be to wake him up.

Rejoining the tribe led to some more dangerous paths, too — the ones where she felt so alone, and missed him so much, that the temptation to return and release him became too great. Even knowing the Very Bad Things that would follow, she could see how she might fall.

I could stay with him. I could lie down in the path of the avalanche and wait to die.

Right now she was sad enough to think for a moment that maybe that was the best choice.

But she was also a seer. She could feel her overpowering grief right now, and at the same time she could look into the future and see a time when she would not be this sad.

There were futures where she was happy.

There were futures where she didn’t have to be afraid all the time about everything going horribly wrong.

As hard as it was for her to believe right now, there were even futures with another love and other dragonets.

She raised her wings and lifted her head to the blue-and-gold-streaked sky.

She was sad and alone … but she was also free. Her life had been tangled up with Darkstalker’s for so long — forever, from the moment she had her first vision of him — that she’d never before seen any glimpse of what it might look like without him.

Clearsight remembered a long-ago dream that came from a scroll she used to love to read. It told stories of the lost continent and the secret tribes of dragons that lived there.

In that dream, she was an explorer. She went out and found new worlds, places no NightWing had ever been or even imagined.

Now she could see it — that dream could be real. Visions of a strange land were already unrolling behind her eyes, of unusual trees and odd animals and unfamiliar dragons that didn’t match any tribes she knew. She knew where to go. She knew how to get there.

The future was in her talons now, and she could do anything she wanted to do.