This place represented their failure. The saints had made this place to try to reclaim the Primus Mundi. She imagined their frantic efforts as the world they knew literally disintegrated around them. They’d tried to fix the problem.

First step: stabilize the patient. They’d done that. The world still existed, or at least a world: her world.

Second step: perform the necessary operation to return the patient to health. That was where they’d failed, not because the patient was dying, but because they could not accept that it would never go back to the way it had been. For them, a return to the Primus Mundi was the only acceptable outcome, and so they had, in effect, left the patient on the operating table for several thousand years.

Third step: close up the wounds. Finish the operation. Let the healing begin. The saints couldn’t accept the world as it was, but Isabelle could. She loved the world with its boundless skies and soaring cratons, its unexpected beauty and even the ragged edges of its horrors.

Isabelle took hold of the reliquary’s machinery once again.

“Be done,” she whispered. The machinery whirred and a galvanic tingle rolled through her awareness. The bubble worlds evaporated, and no new ones appeared. The thrum of the Vault died away. The world settled. She explored the reliquary and found it lifeless, the same with the deep mechanism of the Vault. At last the world lived on its own.

With no more simulacrum to attach to, the ring fell and clattered on the floor.

Isabelle looked outside the reliquary for her body. Primus stood at the edge of the room in front of a passageway that hadn’t been there before. Hasdrubal’s corpse lay at his feet. A long corridor led away to a platform at the far end.

Primus stepped into the corridor, and Isabelle’s soul shrank in horror. He meant to take her body and leave her here, entombed forever in this ring. He would leave and grasp for power again and wreck the lives of everyone she loved.

No! Isabelle hammered on the surface of the ring, but she couldn’t leap out, couldn’t reach her body. He was too far away. Please!

Primus stopped two steps down the corridor. There was no way he could have heard her, but he looked back. His gaze rested on the ring and he grimaced.

Please.

Slowly he squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and walked to the machine. He plucked the ring from the ground.

Isabelle leapt back into her body even before he slipped her finger into the ring.

Primus waited for her in the forefront of her mind. Welcome aboard, Capitaine.

You came back, she said. Why?

I have stolen too many lives from my children, he said. And they let me know it. He directed her attention to the breach, where all the rest of her ancestors stood and cheered.