The room trembled as the last of the castle's west wall dissolved into the past.
The Duke and Duchess stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their children, Cedric gripping a soup ladle like a sword, Lucien frantically scribbling temporal equations, Dante's sentient hair coiled defensively around Theo's flickering ghost armor.
Selphina and Seraphina flanked them, cutlasses drawn.
"You couldn't just be normal for one century, could you?" Seraphina muttered to her younger brother, the Duke.
He adjusted his finally restored mustache.
"Where's the fun in that?"
Evangeline, sitting on the Duchess's hip, giggled as her golden mark thumped, the only light in the darkening hall.
Dante's locks whipped as the Duchess tied the golden thread spun from Evangeline's glowing mark around a single strand.
"THIS IS FAMILY FAVORITISM," the hair protested.
"You're part of the family," Lucien pointed out, his left eyebrow currently existing in 1723.
Cedric lifted a time-locked cream soup.
"Do it for the baby."
A pause.
"...FINE. BUT I BETTER GET A NICE PORTRAIT AFTER THIS."
The moment the thread pulled, the hair unwove itself across history, becoming the stitch that held time together.
Theo's phantom knights solidified.
"Huh. I can smell again. That's... unsettling."
The Laughing Empress wasn't just a doll.
She was the doll, the first toy ever given to the Duchess as a child, discarded when she outgrew her. Her porcelain face cracked into a too-wide smile as she floated above them, scissors glowing.
"Little sister," she hummed. "You promised to play forever."
The Duchess paled. "...I was four."
Selphina spat.
"Should've set it on fire when we had the chance."
The scissors opened
and Evangeline growled.
Before anyone could react, the toddler pounced from her mother's arms, tiny hands outstretched.
"MINE!"
The word shattered time's paralysis.
The Empress screamed as Evangeline's fingers closed around the scissors, not to wield them, but to hug them.
The blades dulled instantly, their edges rounding into harmless curves.
The Clockwork Prophet gasped.
"She didn't destroy them. She creates them into something new."
The Duchess's breath caught. "Of course. The one thing the Empress couldn't unmake..."
"Family," the Duke finished, voice thick.
The doll dangled in Evangeline's grip, its malice draining away.
Dante's hair regrew mostly the same, though now it insists on family portraits.
Theo enjoys his newfound ability to taste soup again.
"Still not worth dying for," he muttered.
Cedric opened a temporally shielded soup kitchen.
Lucien regained his eyebrows, though one now predicts the weather.
Selphina and Seraphina returned to the seas, but not before teaching Evangeline seven new ways to swear.
The Clockwork Prophet tends a lavender twig in the repaired clocktower.
As for Evangeline?
Her mark still changes daily, but now, when she presses it to the family portrait, the figures wave back.