The Price of Creation

EVEN THE GODS CAN'T OUTRUN WHAT WAS ALWAYS COMING

Theo Ellis is seventeen, a week from graduation, and starting to suspect that the life he's been living isn't entirely his.

It begins small: a language he has never spoken that comes out of his mouth anyway. A pressure behind his eyes that feels less like a headache and more like something trying to surface. Memories of deaths he has never lived, vivid enough to leave scars. He has been explaining it away. Sleep deprivation. Stress. The kind of thing that goes away on its own.

It does not go away.

What follows pulls him across divine courts, paradox realms, and underworlds the modern age has mostly forgotten, into the center of a war older than the universe itself. Factions that have been circling each other for eons have finally found what they were looking for. The Preservers want him contained. The Weavers want him weaponized. Everyone agrees on one thing: Theo Ellis is not supposed to exist.

Through all of it, two people stay close. Ava, who understands his unraveling in ways she has no business knowing. And Kai, his best friend and anchor, whose role in everything is larger and stranger than either of them knows.

Fate was severed from reality long before Theo was born. The gods believed that was the end of it.

They were wrong.