Darkness.
But not absence.A warm, breathing dark—full of hums and whispers. Rotham floated, untethered, the Seed clutched in his hand. It pulsed steadily, like a beacon buried in his palm.
And then—light.
Not from outside, but from within his eyes.
He opened them.
He was standing on a beach.
Not one he recognized—but it felt like somewhere he'd been. Pale sand, black sky, twin moons hovering low above a golden ocean that whispered backward. Time didn't flow here. It reflected.
Selin's voice returned—fragmented, glitching.
"Rotham… you're not in the galaxy anymore. You're inside… the Seed."
He turned.
All around him, frozen in crystal-clear silence, stood figures.
Not people. Moments.
He walked through a memory of himself as a child, staring up at Earth's stars. A younger version of Selin tinkering with an old communicator. His father, the last moment before the solar wars took him.
These weren't memories as he remembered them.
They were the first versions of them—unfiltered, unscarred, true.
The Seed was showing him what had been—before the cycles, before the rewrites.
"Why are you showing me this?" Rotham whispered.
The sky pulsed. A storm rolled in—a sky of eyes and echoes, thundering with voices not his own:
"Because to remake the future, you must remember the truth."
One final figure stepped forward.
Herself a mirror—taller, hooded, cloaked in shimmer like the Architect.
"I am the Librarian," she said.
"You carry the Seed. That makes you the Archivist."
Rotham frowned. "Archivist of what?"
She raised a hand—and the sea parted.
Beneath it, thousands of frozen versions of himself—dead, lost, forgotten—held in a crystalline ocean of failed timelines.
"Of everything that never was. And everything that could still be."
"And now you must choose your first rewrite wisely."
The Librarian stepped back.
And the sky fractured.
Rotham clutched the Seed.
A gateway opened.
He took a breath—and stepped through.