The world was too quiet.
Not in the comforting way of a stilled forest or an untouched temple—but the kind of silence that made your skin itch, your breath catch, your instincts scream. A silence that knew things. Watched.
Kael stood at the edge of a cliff that had no bottom. Beneath him stretched a chasm made of ink and stars—dead timelines twisted into an ocean of shimmering regret. His boots disintegrated every time they touched the stone, only to reform, pixel by pixel. The laws of reality here were...suggestions.
"This place wasn't meant to exist," Dray murmured behind him.
They had found each other again, barely. After the events of the Citadel Sanctum and their separation by Null, it had taken time—years in some timelines, seconds in others. Now they were back, changed.
Aeris stood to Kael's left. Her wings had fully regenerated, but they weren't the same. They pulsed with colorless flame, reacting to her emotions like a heartbeat outside the body. Her silence was sharper than any weapon.
None of them spoke of Veyra.
Not yet.
Before them stretched the Hollow Path—a bridge woven from lost memories, only visible when one remembered pain. The only way to reach Ecliptis, the city of false tomorrows. The place where Null had begun.
As they stepped onto the bridge, the air shimmered. Whispered voices bled from the stones beneath their feet. Kael heard his own, younger, crying over a grave. Dray heard his father's dying breath, asking for forgiveness. Aeris… heard silence. The silence of a mother who never came home.
They moved forward.
One step, then another.
And the past fought back.
From the sides of the bridge, shadow-figures emerged. Not monsters. Not illusions.
Versions of themselves.
Kael gasped as a younger version of him stepped from the dark—one who had embraced vengeance, eyes wild, mouth curled into a snarl. He bore the Voidblade willingly. His armor was scorched black, and his hands dripped with the blood of choices Kael had never made.
"Coward," the shade spat. "You could've ended it all. You chose mercy."
Dray faced a version of himself cloaked in tyrant's robes, crowned in flame. The alternate Dray's kingdom had not fallen—it had submitted. Through fear.
"I saved them all," his shadow said. "At the price of their freedom. And they loved me for it."
Aeris stood frozen before a mirror version—her wings torn away, her body shadowed with corruption. Her other self smiled.
"Love weakens you," the echo whispered. "What has Kael ever brought you but loss?"
But none of them flinched.
This was Part III—the part after they'd been broken and reforged.
Kael turned from his double. "You're not me."
He pressed forward. The void beneath the bridge screamed.
A soft pulse thrummed in the air ahead—an unnatural heartbeat. Then they saw it.
At the far end of the Hollow Path, standing just beyond the veil of black fire, stood a figure.
Not Null.
Worse.
A child.
Eyes glowing with unreadable power, hair floating like it was underwater. She wore a cloak stitched with stars, and in her hand… was Veyra's shattered blade.
Aeris drew in a breath. "Who is she?"
The child smiled.
"I am the First Memory," she said sweetly. "I remember the very beginning."
She held up her free hand, and behind her rose an army—not of soldiers, but timeline echoes. Faces they'd lost. Friends they'd buried. Even a version of Veyra... still pure. Still good.
"You're not ready," the child said, tilting her head. "Not for what's next."
And with a blink, the Hollow Path fractured.
Kael fell.
Aeris screamed.
Dray vanished.
And in the space where they had stood, the child of forgotten beginnings whispered:
"Let's see what you're really made of."