Gasping, I lay on my back as my chest heaved, and the others stood with shocked silence when they saw me, confusion, hopefulness, terror on their faces. Soren rushed to my side, and I almost winced before realizing this wasn’t the Soren from my other life. This Soren’s hair was tinged with blue and his skin had a grayish hue, his eyes were lilac, and both of them were intact in his face.

“Janneke,” he breathed a breath of relief. “Are you okay?”

Unable to speak, I nodded and closed my eyes. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. The other futures that were as real as my own.

From her throne on the roots, Hel tsked at me. “So close,” she said. “You were so close to gaining your shade. Your blood may be of the Permafrost, but your heart is foolish and human, child. All you had to do was kill him, that was all.”

I growled at the beastly goddess. “I could never kill Soren, in this life, in the next life, in another life! You know that! You set me up to fail because you want Ragnarök to happen!”

From his cage in the roots, Lydian laughed like a hyena. “Oh. She has you there, goddess mine.”

“I don’t understand,” Soren said. “What is she talking about?”

He aimed the question at Diaval, but it was Rosamund who answered, his eyes looking strangely vacant. “She forced Janneke into a bunch of alternate universes in which she had to escape to come back to us, to prove that she was willing to do whatever it took. But each of those universes were as real as this one, and her final task to prove herself—kill you—she couldn’t do. She tried but merely gouged out your eye.”

Soren absentmindedly rubbed a hand over his eye, and I shuddered when I realized it was the one I stabbed in my ordeal. “How do you know—? Right,” Soren corrected himself. “Seer now, I forgot. Say, if you’re a seer, can’t you guide us? We don’t need Lydian, then.”

Lydian laughed. “Is Rosamund a liminal creature? He’s another hunk of meat on your plane of existence to be consumed by those who destroy the failures.” He shook his head. “I had better faith in you all, I did, I did. But turns out, it was for nothing. Not when you pick the heart over the head.”

“I’m disappointed,” Hel said, “but not surprised. Frigga could not bring back even a beloved god to the world above, the likes of you could not do so for a lowly shade. And you have crossed the deathly waters into my domain, making your fates linked to mine. If you try to leave—not that you even could—I would know in a second. But,” she said delicately, “I won’t leave it up to chance anyways.”