0:01
The countdown echoed like thunder.
Kael's heart thundered louder.
The temple around him—warped and fractured—vibrated with impossible energy. Time wasn't flowing anymore. It was convulsing. Each passing moment didn't tick forward—it screamed.
The corrupted version of himself—Shadow-Kael—stood just meters away, holding Aeris suspended in midair with invisible threads of timeline energy. Her body was limp, head tilted, pale lips parted. A faint blue light flickered inside her chest, dim and dying like the last star in a collapsed galaxy.
The blade hovered above her—glowing with raw chronoweave, pulsing with every heartbeat Kael took.
"You made the same mistake I did," Shadow-Kael murmured, voice cold, weathered with regret. "You thought love was enough to rewrite fate. But fate doesn't love you back."
Kael's jaw clenched. "If you are truly me, then you remember this feeling. This moment. And you know I won't let it happen again."
Shadow-Kael smiled. It wasn't kind.
"No," he whispered. "You'll try. And in trying, you'll become me."
0:00
The blade descended.
Kael moved like lightning.
He lunged—not toward his corrupted self, but toward Aeris.
She's the priority.
Time didn't respond to his will the same way anymore. In this fractured realm, it bent differently—less like a river, more like shattered glass. Every movement he made split the space around him. Copies of himself flickered in the air: one reaching too late, one stopping mid-sprint, one already crumbling into ash.
Only one version made it close enough to intercept the falling blade.
Kael screamed as he threw his body between the edge and her.
A burst of searing white tore through the temple.
The timeline blade struck—
But not flesh.
Kael had redirected the chronoweave into his palm. The weapon sliced into him, embedding itself into his nerve endings, flooding him with raw memory.
His knees buckled. The visions came fast and hard.
Aeris laughing on the rooftop with him in Book 2.
The kiss they shared in the time loop during Book 3.
The scream she let out when Null tore through the Rift in Book 5.
Then—a future.
Aeris… holding a child. Standing at the edge of the Rift. Alone.
Kael collapsed, blood pouring from his fingers—golden, not red.
Timeline blood.
Shadow-Kael stared at him in silence. "You'd bleed out the past to save her, wouldn't you?"
Kael groaned, teeth clenched. "I already did."
He pushed himself upright, even as time warped and splintered around his knees. "You said I had to kill you to save her."
Shadow-Kael extended his arms. "Then do it."
But Kael didn't raise his weapon.
He raised his hand.
The blade embedded in his palm pulsed—and resonated.
Not to destroy.
But to connect.
Kael channeled all the pain, the losses, the seconds he'd carved away—into a single thought.
Aeris. Come back.
And then…
She opened her eyes.
Scene Shift: Aeris
Light surged into her vision.
Pain bloomed in every nerve.
She wasn't floating anymore—she was being pulled. Through space, through memory, through versions of herself scattered across a thousand futures.
She heard a voice.
Kael's.
Calling her not with words, but with belief.
She gasped.
And the fracture snapped.
She landed—hard—on the broken temple floor, coughing, trembling.
Kael collapsed beside her, bleeding from the hand, panting.
She touched his face. "Kael…?"
He nodded slowly.
"You… brought me back."
He smiled weakly. "I told you. I never leave."
Their fingers intertwined.
For a breathless second, it felt like it was over.
But then—
The temple shuddered.
The corrupted version of Kael had vanished.
No sound. No fading. Just gone.
Kael stiffened.
"That's not good."
A shadow slithered down from the ceiling.
A dozen more from behind the pillars.
Figures, faceless and silent, formed from collapsing time loops and broken futures, emerged one by one—clones of Kael and Aeris, half-formed, glitching, their eyes glowing with violet fire.
Each one spoke in unison:
"The Rift has opened. The Final Architect is awake."
A rip opened in the sky above the temple—a black spiral pulling reality inward.
From within, a shape began to emerge.
Not Null.
Not the Architect.
Something older.
Something watching from the beginning of the first tick.
Kael turned to Aeris.
"Ready to break fate one last time?"
She grinned, eyes burning gold.
"Together."