We are fundamental. She had the pattern. She was the pattern. She was built from it, and unlike the artifact world, she had not had the vital language ripped out.

Whispering a prayer to hope, she reached into the waiting mechanism. I am part of this world. Take what you need.

For an instant nothing happened. It didn’t understand her. But then the Builder’s machine took hold of her and pulled. Terror flooded her and the gears spun, unraveling her, but she held her ground, her peace. Bitterlich was still out there, Jean-Claude and Rebecca and Marie and everyone else who had ever lived and loved.

Let them live.

There were artists with dreams yet unkindled, empiricists with discoveries yet unmade, there were children yet unborn.

Let them be!

Isabelle’s thoughts grew hazy as the machine stretched her out like thread and wove bits of her into the holes in the world. The part Hasdrubal had torn out had not been complicated in the same way the first crystal of a snowflake was not complicated, but was just the beginning of an endless algorithm. From simplicity repeated with variation a great complexity emerged.

All around her the world healed, the substance filled in. The blackened bits scabbed over like a living thing and flaked away. Relief welled up within her and joy so warm and soft that she hardly noticed when she stopped noticing things.

CHAPTER

Thirty-Two

The first thing she remembered was the ticking, a never-ending stream of clicks like a clock that never got to chime.

She opened her awareness. The world floated before her in all its wonder and glory.

It lived.

To her immense surprise, so did she, and with every passing tick she remembered more of who she was. She was Isabelle. She was inside the mechanism at the heart of the Vault of Ages. The machine wove her back together again like a tapestry that had been taken down to individual threads and then somehow put back together again. There were snarls in the design, though, and snags. Had those been there before? She couldn’t remember.

There was a sudden sensation of separation, like a thread being snipped, and then suddenly she was herself again, or at least she was her spark self, the part of her that lived outside her flesh when she was using her sorcery. She pushed her perceptions up against the edge of the reliquary and peered out into the room. It was still full of bubble worlds being born and popping. Those were, she reasoned, potential worlds, other realities that could have been or might have been after the Breaking of the World.

There were a dozen different variations of Legend, but they all agreed on this basic point: the world had been broken and the saints had tried to repair it.