I.
She always came here when her attempts to prevent Martin failed. She turned back time decades before Martin became a monster, long before he or Fiona ever arrived to this place. Perhaps so far back, their parents hadn't even met. She wasn't sure, it was just before and distant. Whenever it was, she would come to the barrens and sit.
The dunes here, like almost everything else, were different from those at home. Even on windless days, they shifted like great sand snakes. Perhaps the explorers hadn't come this way yet, but every time she was here it was quiet. No living things seemed present, just wind, sand, and sun. Sometimes, on particularly bad days, she was tempted to wind the clock back to the start. Live out her life in a Fillory long before any other human had arrived. She'd destroy the clock and never look back.
Yet a memory always won out against that thought. Maybe if that day had been different, the day she'd returned to Fillory alone, she would have destroyed the clock ages ago. Instead, she returned to see the large Ram god, injured in the woods. The ram who always seemed to loom over her was now on the ground. It shocked her, seeing him like that, but it wasn't what kept her from destroying the clock.
That day, she saw something utterly foreign in his eyes: powerlessness. Of all things to make her grow up, a magical Ram God seemed the oddest. Yet it was that oddity that had made her love this place to begin with. So she kept the clock, only allowing herself a day here and there. Yes she could move through time, but she couldn't stop her body growing taller or the hard lines setting around her mouth. There was a limit, even to dwarf magic.
She tried not to wonder if her lifespan would be long enough to stop Martin.
II.
Jane kept two journals. One was a list of each timeline. She used to number them, helping keep them separate in her mind. For instance, in both timeline 2 and 5 it was Rupert who found Martin after he disappeared into Fillory. In both cases Rupert died, just in different ways. Eventually, she stopped numbering them, her failure count growing too high. She merely named them by what was changed. If she didn't think about the long line of failures, she could focus on tweaking the next timeline. It was tedious work, much more like a science experiment than most magic had seemed to her long ago.
Yet she wasn't in a lab and she wasn't working with mice. She changed Martin's first day in Fillory: twelve different ways, he still became a monster. The worst was when she tried stopping his final escape into the woods. He fled two months later, after killing almost all of his siblings.
It would have been easier, if it were actual science. She'd like to just leave a failed experiment in a lab. It was entirely different when she'd had to cradle her older sister's dead body, eyes wide open in shock. Every time she tried to walk away, she saw Ember, holding her gaze. Of all of the Chatwins, she was the one who found the button. Or perhaps the button found her. There were rules that no one could explain, not even her.
So she kept a second and far more private notebook. Despite rationally knowing better, she feared losing this one far more than her notes on experiments. This was the only place she could air her emotions and doubts from this constant twisting and turning of time. It was the only place she could leave her grief from too many failed timelines. It was the only way she kept her nightmares at bay.
Perhaps it wasn't so illogical. No matter what she changed, Martin loved making the shadows come to life.
III.
When she realized she could use the clock on Earth, her anxiety skyrocketed. A whole new set of variables could be tweaked, potentially holding the secret to defeating her brother. Yet, it also felt dangerous, more powerful. The rules of Fillory had always been malleable, whimsical. A time changing clock on Earth, well, it felt like breaking a stained glass window with her fist.
The clock wasn't quite as powerful on Earth for some reason. She tried to stop Plover from touching Martin. Wasn't that horror the root of it all? But every time she tried to turn it back, the clock always put her too late. It put her in the wrong place, worse, in the middle of the act, watching from outside the house in Cornwall. How many times had she seen brother's thin pale body, shivering, in Plover's library as the light goes out? She can't count them anymore.
She tried other attempts, making Plover move not to Cornwall but to Brighton. She tried getting her parents to send the children to a distant relative up in Yorkshire. In each case, her timing was always off. She was certain she understood the circumstances, it worked making other changes. Yet, she couldn't stop the events leading to those nights in a study that twisted Martin forever.
Why couldn't she stop it? Perhaps it was a fail-safe mechanism, to stop a contradiction that made her present impossible. It was the only rational explanation but it meant a terrible truth.
The only reason they were ever allowed in Fillory was for Martin. An escape from a nightmare no one had noticed. Though she now knew, she couldn't stop it. No one could stop it now.
Was it worth this?
IV.
It was all too easy changing things. At the beginning, she agonized over it. It seemed like so much power and it was. It became easier when she'd gone forward in time, seeing the world Martin made of Fillory. The ground was a wet toxic swamp land. A few dead trees remained, but the air was thick with a terrible yellow fog.
She tried to find her bearings, but all of Fillory had turned into this mud pit. The only recognizable sight was one tower of Whitespire, the light painfully bright. That room hummed with the magic, all of it so bright it barely could be contained. She could barely hold her horror in: The magic of Fillory was stuck in a small room, like a dying star.
Compared to that nightmare, her work seemed far less damaging. After all, how do you compare the thousands of a land now and stretching hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, into the future to one or two magicians?
It was an argument that got easier and easier, each time. She told herself it wasn't desperation, no, just settling into a necessary resolution.
V.
She wasn't surprised at Quentin's words. Cowardice was something she levied against herself on the darkest nights, when another timeline ended bloodily. On those nights, the question of her fighting Martin directly haunted her. All these failures made her wonder.
Yet, it was too easy to imagine Martin not only a powerful monster but also able to travel through time. What havoc would he leave behind him? In one timeline he'd burnt down the entire Southern Orchard just to enjoy watching it turn into ash. He'd purposefully blocked any creature from escaping. Thank God no one else could remember their screams. It still woke her up some nights.
Quentin wasn't the only one who'd said that to her. In one timeline, Fogg spat blood in her face as he was dying outside Whitespire. She didn't put that as part of that timeline's result. They'd already failed. It still came up in some of her dreams. Every time the blood stuck to her face, growing, until her entire body was one long bloody corpse. There wasn't enough water in the world to get it out.
She couldn't blame them for what they said. In those moments, they couldn't see the larger logic. Her best way to fight Martin was to alter the timeline, even if it took another 1,000 tries. Wasn't she tasked with the hardest part of it all? They didn't remember the thousands of ways he'd destroyed them. Only she did.
After each ending she had to start all over again, hoping this time she'd get it right.
VI.
She wasn't sure why'd she returned to the sand dunes. They'd won. Martin was dead. Yet she was still out here, watching small ships float above the waves, glowing like fireflies. She felt almost naked without the watch. When panic came over at not feeling it in her pocket she had to remember Quentin in the monastery, his eyes hungry. Finally, it was over. She should be happy, but all she felt was a numb grief. There was no one here to understand what she'd done, what she'd gained and lost.
Then, like a flash flood the emotions hit her hard. She stumbled to the ground, heavy sobs shaking her. How stupid was she not to understand this earlier? Of course the accusations had haunted her. They were true. Yes, Martin had had to die. However, she'd never been able to kill him, even at his worst. She couldn't lift a finger.
He'd been her brother after all.