A/N: Thank you to those who read, and to those who review. Your comments and readership make my day!

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When I saw Bree for the first time since my dip in the leyline, I could feel how she didn't belong to this world. I could feel the…dissonance she created just by being.

She's a piece that doesn't belong, and the whole world knows it. I know it. I can feel it.

I wonder if I used to feel that way. Was that why Brath came over to me all those years ago? And if that was the reason, why didn't more dragons and whatnot come over to sniff me? I mean, it's not very subtle.

At all.

For all intents and purposes, she could have been glowing with a giant neon sign over her pointing and saying, "Otherworlder."

She didn't, of course, but it felt like she should have.

More than that, though, as I stared at her, with that amiable smile plastered to her face, something else dawned on me.

Bree wasn't forsaken.

When I'd met her I'd had—admittedly—little interaction with the forsaken, the major time being when I stumbled across the group helping V. I've very rarely interacted with them, and it had never occurred to me that Bree might be…pretending.

She wasn't a rotting corpse, though. Her skin was gaunt and withered, her eyes were empty, but she…

She was alive.

"Amy, I was beginning to think you wouldn't turn back up!" She said, her voice rasping with a surprising amount of cheer around it. "Come on. Brath's been scouting the Caverns, and we think we have a way in to the timeline we need to get to."

I didn't move toward her. My hand was still outstretched from when I'd been ready to try to cast a spell. "Why?"

It was all I could think to say. My mind was, for the first time, actually overwhelmed by what this magic sense was pushing through my head.

Bree tilted her head, a bit too sharply for a human's. What was she? "Hmm?"

I had so many 'why's bouncing around in my head. Why me? Why are you trying to save my world? What's in it for you?

So many questions.

Instead, I heard myself saying, "Why are we sneaking in? Wouldn't it be better to speak with the bronze flight?"

Bree swung her arms slowly and then crossed them. "Well, we'll be meeting someone inside, but we really don't want to draw too much attention to this. I mean, think. If we're fixing time, this time will be unwritten. All we need is one bronze drake to not like that, and we'll have trouble."

"If this time is meant to be rewritten, Nozdormu won't let any of his subordinates stop us. If it's not meant to be, then we…"

Shouldn't do it.

It felt so cold to say that I couldn't.

To think that my entire world was meant to end. How could that be the way things were meant to play out?

But still…

"You've spoken with the Nothing, haven't you?" Bree asked, straightening up a little and rocking from her toes to her heels and back. "You must have. You wouldn't be thinking about letting an entire world die unless they'd done something."

"What the hell are you even talking about?"

Bree didn't respond at first, lips twisting to one side as she appraised me. "The Nothing. Creatures that can find you in dreams and the in between. Some here call it the void." She took a few slow steps toward me, arms still crossed as she shrugged her shoulders. "Look, there's two ways this can happen. My way—which, I think you'd favor, really—or theirs. Keep in mind their way was killing you off before you even made it to Azeroth."

I stared at her, unmoving. I don't think I even dared blink.

I'd been ready for all sorts of craziness and tall tales and…treachery.

But not for her to tell me I died.

"It wasn't fair, so I came in and fixed it. Sort of." She paused, slouching a little. "See, you humans see time as really, really rigid. You think it moves in one direction, marching forward. The truth is, that's just how you move through it. A lot of us don't." She tilted her head, watching for my reaction. "The stories say you're pretty good with accepting 'weird' stuff, but… I haven't really seen that with humans. Not to stereotype or anything." She considered something. "Though…with you taking a nap in the magic plane, your propensity for the complicated might have expanded somewhat."

I took a few steps toward her. "You've been using me to some end. In the beginning, I was too stupid to figure it out, but not anymore. You're the reason I got caught in the magic plane."

"Guilty."

I hadn't expected her to just admit to that, so again, I was a bit taken aback. I mean… if she was willing to hide this stuff, wouldn't it make more sense that she would fight harder to keep it a secret?

She seemed to read my mind. "You're stubborn Amy, and I need you. Before, I didn't think you could handle the truth, but now… now you're more than you were. You're all magic-y. And if spending a few minutes explaining things gets you back on my side, I can spare them."

Shaking my head, I pointed at her, again saying that single word that kept echoing through my head with a million different follow ups. "Why? Why toss me in the magic plane?"

"Because you would've faded if I hadn't." Bree glanced around us and then walked over to the wall that went around the entire goblin town and leaned against it. "Okay, so. You see time as some, like I said, rigid thing. A decision here," she poked at the air, and a single bronze light lit up between us, "leads to all kinds of things. It branches out and shapes reality in ways we expect and ways we could never even imagine. And most of time, we don't see all repercussions." The light moved up before splitting. Those two lines split again and again and again, until it looked like some weird tree hanging in the air, stretching out in all kinds of directions, like a 3D projection.

Bree brought her hand up again, finger tapping against the initial line. "Humans seem to think—and I could be wrong about you all, I guess—that when you change the past, it all goes away and something new is made." She slashed her finger through the first line, and as it fell the rest of it just disappeared and then a new tree rebuilt itself. "But that's not really how time comes undone. There's so much of it."

The tree reformed into its original shape. She cut through that first line again. It was as though something was devouring the little lines that had branched up and out. Some paths went out quickly, others lingered, some fell away and crashed into other paths like leaves or branches falling in a storm.

"Rewriting time causes a lot of chaos, and that's because it doesn't just go away. It falls apart in pieces. The Nothing went back to the first point where they could physically get to you, when you were traveling from your world to Azeroth, and they killed you. The second they did that, your time began to unwind from there, but again it's not instantaneous."

"You're telling me I'm dead," I whispered.

"Yes? No? You're looking at things chronologically?" She bit her lip, looking a little disappointed in me. I was surprised by how much that stung, but didn't say anything. "If nothing else had been done, the rewrite would have eventually overwritten your entire timeline, and you would have ceased to be. Time would accept that you died when you did, and it would have eventually forgotten that you'd ever done all that you'd done. You know, I think it'd help if you thought of time as sentient, because it sort of is."

She shrugged it off like we were talking about accidentally tapping someone's car in a parking lot. "However, this is where it gets a little tricky, so if you're already confused, let me know?"

I hesitated. "Time breaks down slowly, and if something happens in the past there's a limited window to correct it?"

"Uh, yeah. That's pretty much what I was saying. You're actually getting a little ahead, which is good," Bree nodded, that earlier excitement back. Her moods seemed to change quicker than I'd remembered. "So. You change the past, and things start being unmade. You can't really put a time frame on that because it's time. But. If you let all of it be unmade, then time forgets it was ever like that. Think of… if you learn yoga and then stop with it really abruptly. A year down the line, you might try a pose and realize you can still do it. If you pick at it, it comes back. But if you never touch it again, or just wait like thirty years, then it's gone. There might be some really faint echo, or the knowledge that it was there once, but you can't get it back."

I held up a hand. "Is that why Brath started hearing voices again? Because parts of time had been rewritten."

"Oh, no. No, no, no. Interesting jump, but no." Bree rolled her eyes. "That was the Nothing's first attempt to fix things. It didn't work. Killing you was their second attempt."

"Why make Brath crazy? Why come after me?"

"Amy, either you can trust me that I know what I'm doing, and we can go, or you can let me explain everything. It doesn't take that long."

"You will get to those points?"

"I promise." She held her hand up like a scout's honor salute. As she lowered it, she pointed to me. "So. Your timeline was falling apart. I came in, and I caught you before time could completely fall away. I brought you back to right about when you ceased to be. So, time was thinking you'd died and that you shouldn't exist anymore, but you did. Because of me. So it got a little confused, and that's bought us some time to piece things back together."

She pushed away from the wall and began pacing slowly. "See, I thought if I put you in place, you'd just go through based on generic memories and do what you were supposed to do. Humans are supposed to be creatures of habit, after all." Her shoulders slumped. "But things turned out differently. Sort of. It was enough that the Nothing was happy, but…it was just proving them right."

"And they need to be wrong?"

"The do!" She nodded fervently. "And you'll agree with me, when I get there."

"Can you hurry this up?"

"You have forever, Amy. Do a few extra minutes really matter that much?"

At that, I shifted, eyeing her. She couldn't literally mean…

"Not to blame you, since you didn't really have your memories anymore, but the extra time I bought us by bringing you back was sort of wasted while you sat in Stormwind, doing nothing."

I twitched. By nothing, she was referring to me lamenting my dead world.

She seemed to realize she'd hit a nerve and apologized quickly. "I just…it wasn't happening like it was supposed to. So I came and got you. I didn't really have a good pick of people who knew you by the time I came back, hence…this one." She shrugged, motioning to her form. "You probably figured out that I'm not really like this. I…I can explain that too, eventually. It's not really that important right now."

"I figured you weren't human."

"I'm not anything you've ever heard of." Bree shrugged. "But, by looking familiar and getting you to remember, we've kept that timeline alive a little longer. But you were still fading. You might not have noticed it, Brath might not have, but you were. I needed to change you enough that you would…stay."

"So you dunked me in enough magic to…what?"

"To disconnect you from time." Bree stopped her pacing. "Time can't erase you if you're not a part of it anymore."

"That…" I took a few steps toward her. "If that's true, then wouldn't there be pieces of all worlds and all timelines that never go away."

"Yeah," Bree conceded. "Where I'm from, there's a rumor that that's where the Nothing come from. They're remnants from dead worlds, hence their crazy powers, like rewriting time. We don't know if that's actually true, though. We do know that that sort of stuff—the remnants—sometimes manifests in current timelines. People see them as ghosts, inexplicable lights, sightings of creatures that can't or shouldn't exist, or feelings of having done stuff before."

"Déjà vu is fragments of dead timelines?"

"Oh, you have a word for it! That's so cute!" Bree considered it. "Convenient, too." She nodded. "Déjà vu is dead timelines, yeah."

"So even if we fix this, there's a possibility that this will be rewritten again?"

"Not if we set up some guards. Well, you won't. You're human."

I held up a hand. "Alright. So my timeline is falling apart. Why do you want to save it?"

At that, Bree fell silent.

She watched me for a really long time, unblinking—I suppose not having eyes helped with that.

Finally, she took in a slow breath. "If I can show that your world can be saved, and things will turn out okay, then that means the Nothing were wrong to condemn your whole world." She hesitated and then added, "And if they're wrong about your world, then they could be wrong about mine. They haven't acted on my world yet, but they're going to. They govern everything that exists. They cut off the bad pieces to protect the whole. A few worlds falling isn't as bad as every world falling."

"The Nothing condemn entire worlds."

"They are dead worlds, you know, according to legends. They remember how bad it was. So they sacrifice to keep it from being so horrible again." Bree grew so still. "But I think they're so used to sacrifice that they can't see that it's not always necessary. Sometimes there can be a happy ending."

She was… so much like me. She was crossing worlds, fighting insurmountable odds, just to save her world.

I thought back to Earth. "So…without Azeroth's help, Earth falls?"

"Eventually. You guys put up one hell of a fight, from what I hear, but in the end magic trumps nukes. And the Eredar have a lot of magic."

"So the reason you needed me to fix things is because my timeline was the point that was severed to make my world fall."

"It's…" Bree scrunched her brow together, looking me over. "It's complicated."

"Did I not just follow your explanation of timelines and being rewritten and falling apart?"

"Yeah, but…" Bree crossed her arms again, drumming her fingers against her arm. "You're not gonna like the answer. It's so neutral as an explanation of time."

Rolling my eyes, I mirrored her stance. "I'm pretty sure I've proven that I can handle most anything."

At that, Bree tilted her head back and forth, hair swishing against one shoulder and then the other. "You are very… Just. Listen, okay?" When I couldn't help but roll my eyes again, she sighed. "Your world wasn't what needed to end. It was more collateral damage."

"Collateral damage? Are you kidding me?" I snapped.

She held her hands up. "This is why I didn't want to tell you. Facts are one thing, but emotions are a nightmare…"

Even as she said that, I thought back to her explanations. Killing me had been the second attempt. The first one had been…

Bree winced as my gaze snapped back toward her and then she bowed her head, chewing slowly on her lip. "Your world wasn't the problem. Brath was."