The air was thick with smoke long before I reached the square. The scent of burning pitch and despair carried over the heather like a curse. I knew what I would find even before the crowd's murmurs sharpened into cries, the kind that tremble between awe and terror.
Geillis Duncan was already bound to the stake.
Her red hair gleamed like molten copper against the dark wood, and her eyes, unflinching, fever-bright, found mine across the sea of faces though no one else could see me. The villagers shouted their prayers and condemnations in one breath, as if they could purge their own sins through her fire.
I stood in the shadows near the old kirk wall, heart hammering. I had seen death before. But this was different, this was fate burning alive.
Geillis's lips curved into a small, knowing smile, the sort that only those who have made peace with madness can wear. Her voice, sharp as a blade, rose over the crowd.
"You fools! You burn what you cannot understand!"
The murmurs turned to outrage. Stones struck the ground near her feet. A child began to cry.
I took a step forward, the instinct to stop it clawing through me, but time itself seemed to tighten its hold. The veil shimmered, whispering against my skin like a warning. One step closer, and I might undo everything I had sworn to protect.
"Do not," murmured a voice beside me.
It was Murtagh, unseen by others, but his eyes flicked briefly toward the crowd as if he sensed me there. He did not know who or what I was, only that something unnatural walked beside fate that day.
"Her choice is made," he said softly. "You ken that."
I swallowed hard. My palms burned with the pull of power, the temptation to intervene, to bend the threads.
But Geillis looked straight at me, even through the distance, her voice lowering into something almost gentle.
"You came. Just as I knew you would, shadow."
No one else could hear. The flames had not yet been lit, yet the air between us shimmered, humming with the resonance of two souls torn from the same rift in time.
"Why, Geillis?" I whispered.
"Because here, I can rule what I could never save," she said. "Knowledge is power, and in this world, they still fear it."
Her gaze drifted upward to the sky, to the turning smoke of torches, and her tone softened to a confession.
"You protect the healer, don't you? The English woman who fell through?"
"Claire," I breathed.
"She is the hinge," Geillis said. "And so are you. One to heal. One to guard. Both bound to the stones."
The guards stepped forward, torches raised. The fire caught slow, like the breath before a storm.
I wanted to scream. To tear through the invisible barrier that held me apart. But even now, even here, the weave of time trembled under my grief. I could see it, fine golden threads unraveling at the edges of the world.
"Stay hidden, Elara," Geillis called as the first flame kissed her dress. "You'll need the shadow more than I ever did."
The crowd roared. The sky turned the color of ash.
And still, she smiled.
Not in madness, but in triumph.
For in her final moments, I saw what she had done: a charm, carved into the stake's base, a sigil pulsing faintly beneath the flames. It was no plea for mercy. It was a tether, a wound in the timeline. She wanted to stay. To leave behind a piece of herself in this century.
I moved forward, every instinct at war.
If I broke the barrier now, I could unravel what she had woven, but I could also tear the fabric of the world apart.
Claire. Jamie. The war to come.
The future I had already seen in shards.
The veil rippled, whispering in my ear like a lover's breath. Choose.
And so I did.
I whispered a word that no tongue had spoken since the old stones first sang. The air rippled, a shimmer of light between Geillis's burning body and the earth below. The sigil flickered, then dimmed, fading into silence.
The tether was cut.
The timeline shuddered, then held.
When the fire consumed her, she was already gone.
I sank to my knees, my strength draining like the tide. Around me, the villagers prayed and wept, none aware that a battle had been waged not with swords or fire, but with choice.
Later, when the crowd dispersed and only ashes remained, I stepped forward. The earth still smoked, and in the soot, something gleamed faintly, a stone, warm and pulsing in my palm. It was not of this world. A relic of her spell.
"You should not have done that," came Murtagh's quiet voice again, carried on the wind.
"I had to," I whispered. "She wanted to root herself here, to twist what's meant to be."
He looked toward the horizon, the first light of dawn bleeding through the clouds. "And what of you, lass? What are ye twisting by staying?"
I could not answer.
Because the truth was, I no longer knew if I was preserving time or slowly breaking it with every breath.
As I turned away from the ashes, I felt it, a faint echo in the stones beyond the hills. The heartbeat of destiny stirring again. Claire and Jamie's threads tightening.
But beneath it, something darker pulsed, the echo of Geillis's laughter, faint and eternal.
Not gone. Only waiting.
And as I walked back into the mist, the wind carried a single whisper across the moor.
"You can't unmake what was never meant to end."
The pyre had burned the witch.
But it had also lit the first spark of a reckoning yet to come.