We are delighted to share an excerpt from Sasha Alsberg’s Fracturing Fate, which is the stunning conclusion to the Breaking Time duology!
Read on to discover the synopsis and the first chapter ahead of its release on August 15th!
History tore them apart. Can they survive their future?
While consumed in a devastating battle with the demigod Llaw, Klara is mysteriously catapulted five hundred years into the past, suddenly alone and distraught that she and her fated love Callum killed the demigod at the expense of Callum’s own life.
As the last Pillar of Time, an anchor point in the timeline of the world, Klara must navigate dangerous magic, confusing visions, and powerful adversaries to determine the fate of the world and avenge the life of her love.
But with all the treacherous enemies—magical and human alike—chasing Klara in 1500s Scotland, she has no idea what, and whom , she actually left behind on the battlefield in 2022. In a battle across history and the present, life and death, Klara must fight to choose her own fate.
CHAPTER ONE
Klara
1568
Light searing her eyes with excruciating brilliance. Fine woolen bunched in her fist. Plummeting through time and space, tumbling head over heels, her stomach twisting violently—
Then slowing, drifting.
Klara’s feet settled on the ground as if she was the queen in Dad’s old chess set, placed in its square in a game-ending move. Checkmate.
She blinked rapidly, peering through the mist that swirled around her, crouching in the fighting stance Callum had taught her. This trick still felt like a cheat, or maybe a curse— Klara was no closer than the first time to knowing where she might end up.
The answers are always there. A whisper in the rushing winds brushed past Klara’s ear; her mother’s voice. Loreena Spalding always said that every antique in her precious collection offered clues to where it came from—an etched design popular in the sixteenth century, a particular alloy in use in the eighteenth. To Klara’s scientific mind, Loreena’s words were a reminder to distill facts from impressions.
So: One, the air was cold. Two, it carried a sharp whiff of lye soap and a faint, greasy note of coal smoke. Three, beneath the soles of her sneakers were smoothed, cobbled stones. Four, above her in the night sky, Corona Borealis—the “Silver Wheel”—was in its summer home north of the celestial equator, tucked between the constellations Boötes and Hercules. Five, her right hand was still wrapped around the familiar gold and iron grip of her sword, and six—“Gah!”—her other hand clenched nothing. She’d lost her grip on Llaw’s cloak.
Klara’s heart lurched, but the truth was that it didn’t really matter where the demigod had gone, since he was dead. Llaw would haunt his precious Otherworld now—and only if the gods were feeling merciful.
“You?”
The mist fell away—not like the early-morning fog in Hudson River Park that burned off by the time Klara finished her run, but in a scattering of glinting dust. The incredulous voice belonged to a young man with a weapon in his hand, shadowed in the dim glow of a street lamp, and for a brief, breathless second Klara allowed herself to hope.
“Callum?”
Then he stepped into the light, dirk dangling from his hand, and Klara’s hope was torn from her chest. His face was just as handsome, but in place of Callum’s unruly dark curls and piercing, unusual gaze were fiery hair, a scattering of freckles and fine, sculpted lips. This was the boy from her vision in the tomb of Maeshowe.
“Thomas! But how—” Klara paused, wondering if she could trust her eyes. “Do you know who I am?”
It was his turn to look uncertain. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I thought I did, but—I must have mistook you for someone else.”
His thick Scottish brogue was so like Callum’s, but there the resemblance ended. Klara’s eyes fell to his dirk, the blade dark with blood, and remembered the drawing in his notebook, how Thomas had perfectly captured her likeness. “Thomas—it is me. Klara Spalding. The…last Pillar?”
His face turned white. “Crivvens—you’re alive!”
“Me? Of course. But Llaw killed you.” Nothing was making sense. Thomas was supposed to be lying in a pool of his own blood, still as the stones beneath him. “Callum saw you…”
The sword’s pommel pulsed in Klara’s hand, emeralds glinting, and she remembered it being nearly ripped from her grasp. Remembered Llaw’s tormented dark eyes widening as he seized the blade and plunged it into his own chest…remembered grabbing for his cloak as he began to spin.
“Callum?” Thomas repeated sharply. “What do you know of him?”
How to explain? Too much had happened in the week since Klara had nearly run over a stranger lying broken and unconscious in the middle of the road. “It’s a long story,” she sighed. “But when I met him, he was trying to avenge your death.”
Thomas gave her a hard look, taking in her T-shirt and jeans. “You are not from here. Why would Callum…”
“Same reason I’m here now.” She really didn’t feel like talking about it. “A demigod who’s careless about who he brings along when traveling through time. He’s dead,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“Llaw.” Thomas’s voice was grim. “I know.”
Now it was Klara’s turn to stare. “He was the one who—?”
“He almost killed me. But he was careless. After he stabbed me, I fell to the ground, hit my head on a cobblestone.” Thomas tugged at the rough wool of his coat. “Knocked me out, but, head wounds always bleed, and it turns out he merely nicked my ribs. When I came to, I could still see him, standing in front of a portal. So I killed him. As you say, he is gone.”
“No.” Klara shook her head, trying to make sense of what Thomas was telling her. Though the truth was just as strange. “I saw him take his own life. He…fell upon my blade.”
Thomas was staring at her sword, at the gem-encrusted hilt. Klara gripped it a little more tightly. It was one of Grams’s most precious possessions, brought out only once before the day she gave it to Klara.
“Where?” Thomas demanded. “And when?”
There was a strange light in his eyes, and Klara remembered what Callum had said about the weeks before Thomas’s death, how strange his behavior had become. Disappearing for days at a time, staring without seeing, muttering of evil creatures and death.
“The Ring of Brodgar,” she said flatly. “In the year 2022.”
Thomas’s mouth worked, whether in shock or calculation Klara couldn’t tell. And then his face softened, his eyes losing their metallic glint and fading to a soft blue as he bowed from the waist. He sheathed his dirk and wiped his hands on his pants.
“So you are a Pillar,” he said formally, “like me.”
And with these words, the facts shifted in Klara’s mind like the rearrangement of atoms in an intermolecular reaction. Same parts, different shape. Right now, this wasn’t about losing Callum, or the place she’d left behind. It couldn’t be.
“We are the last ones,” she affirmed. “Llaw is dead, by your hand or his own—” she wouldn’t debate the question now, though she knew what she had seen “—and so it’s over. But what about his powers?” Klara looked at her hands as though the answer might lie there, but nothing felt different.
“I acted on pure instinct when he attacked me,” Thomas said slowly. “Llaw arranged to meet me here tonight. I’ve been following him—but he was always a step ahead. When he sent for me, I realized he knew I was after him all along.”
So Callum had been right about Llaw getting too close to the truth. Klara fitted this new piece into the mosaic. “He’s a demigod, with a goddess mother—I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that he figured it out.”
“A demigod,” Thomas repeated bitterly. “With a mortal father. Who should not have the power to travel in time. Or of Sight, or of passing between worlds, or anything else. It is a sinister magic he stole.”
Something clicked into place in Klara’s mind. Pillars were only meant to house Arianrhod’s powers, not use them. Neither she nor Thomas should have been able to travel through time either—not without that same goddess’s intervention and guidance. That meant—
“Arianrhod came to you, too.” She didn’t mean it to come out like an accusation. “She wanted us both to kill Llaw.”
Thomas assessed her, then nodded. “Telling neither of us about the other.”
Klara knew she had no right to feel duped. She’d been told that the gods’ actions weren’t always what they seemed—Cernunnos, the god of the forest, had taught her that in his own circuitous way. The gods rarely moved along a straight path when a tangled one would do.
“It’s just like a goddess to give her powers to random humans without anyone’s consent,” she said bitterly.
Thomas gave a rueful smile. “Aye, the gods have never made much sense to me, either.
“And…here we are.”
Klara took in the cobbled street in Kelpie’s Close, the shuttered doors and darkened alleys, the bleary eyes of the sleepless and the guilty behind faded curtains.
“So, to recap,” she said wearily, “you killed him tonight, in the year of our lord 1568.” The old way of speaking came to Klara’s lips unbidden, an echo of Callum. “At the same moment he took my blade and—”
“We killed him at the same time?” Thomas was in a pose of deep concentration, one hand pinching his chin in thought. “He left me for dead and went to your time to kill you. The last Pillar. But that would mean he could straddle two times at once, which seems impossible.” He looked up suddenly, examining her face.
The final piece slid into place.
“Could it have been my doing?” Why did it feel like a confession? Thomas’s brows rose in surprise, a smile beginning on his lips, but Klara knew it wasn’t good news. “I had to save Callum.” An unwelcome memory of the beast flashed in her mind, sinking its yellowed, broken teeth into Callum’s side. His blood spilling into the earth. The memory twisted Klara’s heart.
“I tried to turn back time,” she explained raggedly. “To save him. Only a few minutes—”
“He wasn’t in two times, ye mean? You mean you brought him here, to me, by accident?”
She and Thomas stared at each other, Klara immobilized by the enormity of what she’d done—and of what had been averted. “The death of each Pillar infused Llaw with new power… By stabbing him at that moment…could I have…like, released all that power, and hyperjumped too far?”
Thomas leaned back, assessing her hypothesis. “Maybe. It seems we each have a story to tell. Or rather…” Thomas gazed at Klara’s sword. “Half a story. But this is not the place. It isn’t safe for a lady.”
The “lady” thing was going to have to stop, but Klara was too exhausted to bristle. She pulled her jacket more tightly around her, tucked the sword into the bag slung across her body, and followed Thomas out of the alley toward the heart of Rosemere.
It was as unfamiliar as a new city.
The buildings looked new but, in the same glance, old as time. The stones shone brighter, but the surroundings dimmed their raw edge. It was less built-up as it was in her time…which seemed odd, since Rosemere was classified as a World Heritage Site back in the early 1970s. Now it looked as unfamiliar as a distant city to which she’d never been.
Quaint houses. Plumes of smoke billowing from chimneys. And streets that if you took a single misstep, you’d be met by it head-on.
This landscape was anything but familiar.
But for some reason, it still felt like home.
Excerpted from Fracturing Fate by Sasha Alsberg. Copyright © 2023 by Sasha Alsberg. Published by Inkyard Press.
