“I wish I had never met you,” Katie spat. Their faces were so close that Eleanor could see every fleck of gray in her eyes. Around them, the formless gray flowed in meaningless patterns. “I spent centuries destroying every part of me that had ever loved or hoped or dreamed of something different, and then you went and plucked her out of the past. She’s still in here. Her story, and mine. So I have to remember. All that sickening optimism. How she adored you. How you failed her. I stopped hurting a long time ago, Eleanor, but now it hurts all over again.” Her voice was ragged as torn paper, and with each sentence her fingers tightened more around Eleanor’s throat.

Katie’s teeth were bared, her face drained of blood. Hatred blazed in her eyes.

No, not hatred.

Pain.

Spots appeared in Eleanor’s vision, blotting out Katie’s misery-twisted face. Eleanor wanted to tell her she understood. She knew why Katie had turned herself cold and cruel and uncaring. Cold and clear as glass.

She was afraid to shatter.

Eleanor tried to speak, but she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t make a sound. She was getting weak as she struggled to breathe, and Katie hadn’t let go. Sometimes you have to shatter, she wanted to tell Katie. But even a shattered heart can heal.

She couldn’t say it. But she could show her.

Her hand fell into the bag at her side, and the book seemed to leap into it. Eleanor closed her hand around Katie’s wrist. Wander had said she would know who this story was meant for when the time came. And now she did.

Wander’s story flowed into Katie. Not unwriting her, but adding to her story, fitting into the gaps. The words spiraled up her arm, so fast that Eleanor only knew what they said because she’d read them already.

The princess cut herself off from the world, for fear that it would hurt her. And so when her parents vanished, when she was left alone, she did not weep. When famine came across the land and everyone suffered, she did not despair. When the rains came again and the valleys and fields rang with celebration and feasts, she did not smile. She was as cold and clear as her glass heart.

Katie stood frozen as the words sank into her. Eleanor didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. Not yet. Into Katie flowed the lovers’ first meeting. The slow awakening of the princess’s heart.

The battle. The poison. The knight, dying. The princess, weeping.

Shattering.

Healing.

She didn’t stop, not until the final words snaked around Katie’s wrist and vanished.