[ she's quiet again as she considers that, still staring at viktor's hands and the twisted piece of metal. ]

Do you think it's possible? We dreamt of a future where Thorne crumbled and it didn't look like this. But time is a fluid construct and there are fixed points in a function, things you can't fix or change.

[ war seems inevitable at this point. river keeps getting flashes of it, the moment the bombs fell - blue lightning and shattered glass, screaming and crying and a desperate scramble for safety while all the king's horses and all the king's men burned to a crisp outside the castle walls.

for a moment, she gets lost in it. normally subtle enough to go unnoticed, the veins in her hands start glowing faintly, blue lines of starlight that resemble the form she held in the emergent reality. it shimmers as her heart races toward fear and upset, and when river raises her head again, she is very much a scared teenaged girl looking to viktor as an authority figure, someone that may be able to do anything at all to influence their situation. ]

What if it's too late to stop anything? There's no putting it back together again. Maybe it was always going to happen and we're the variables.