Magic may not be used to alter the events of time.

All of these I knew, along with the ancient forgotten law that had given me the power of the stag in the first place. Yes, I knew the laws, lived by them like any other creature in the Permafrost. I was created in the Permafrost. Changed.

“No, you don’t,” Lydian said. He continued before I could protest. “Did you ever wonder why the line for the Erlking is not inherited by blood, rather than battle? It’s because the blood of the original Erlking mixed with the sacrifice of the stag sealed the realms together and kept the world serpent from waking from his slumber by shoving its tail in its mouth. If their blood was to mix again, then the serpent would awaken and begin gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, starting Ragnarök.”

Something uneasy was brewing in my gut at what he was saying, though I couldn’t truly understand it yet or make any sense of it.

“For that reason, the Erlking’s direct bloodline was all but eliminated. But as often occurs, females tend to be overlooked when it comes to bloodlines, and of the few who escaped, none ever participated in the stag hunt, having the knowledge passed down from mother to child.” He’d stopped pacing by now, though his hands still wrung together hard enough for his nails to dig into his skin and create welts. “It was a secret, you see. But I know everything. All secrets. All thoughts. All breaths and beats and steps, each pulse of blood, each twitch of muscle.”

Lydian broke off into laughter. “But of course, I couldn’t say anything. Damn svartelf, I had him to blame for that. What’s the use of seeing if you can’t tell? And when she came, she was the last of them. And I saw her, and I knew she would have a child and that child would find another child, and those two witless children would end the world. So, I killed her, but her spawn still lived. So, I took you because I knew who you were even if I didn’t know how you were going to do it, and you refused to answer any of my questions. Because I had to ask. You were my one blind spot, the one thing I couldn’t see because how do you see someone dead and alive, moving and still, liminal? Now that I travel the space, oh, I can see them, but then, no, nothing. But I had to ask, ask or break you, break you or kill you, until you ruined it by shoving a piece of iron into my skin. And well, we all knew what happened after that.