Kael hit the ground hard—but there was no ground.
There was only darkness that breathed, pulsing in slow waves like lungs expanding and contracting around him. It wasn't absence. It was presence—a sentient void, as if the space between realities had always been watching and now, it was awake.
A flickering light sparked in the distance.A voice.
"Kael?"
He turned. Aeris floated several feet away, suspended in a gravityless, soundless rift. Her silver energy flickered like broken starlight across her skin. Her breath misted—though there was no air.
They were inside the Echo.
Not a place, not even a timeline. An after-effect.Where all erased possibilities came to rest.
"Aeris!" he pushed off a shard of floating marble—part of the ruined Hall—and drifted toward her. Their hands met in the nothingness, tethering each other.
She looked shaken. But beneath the surface of her fear… was recognition.
"You've been here before," Kael said, voice muffled, distorted by the void.
Aeris nodded slowly. "Not fully. In dreams. In… fragments."
They turned together, watching as new shapes formed in the haze—cities that never existed, people who were alive and dead at once, timelines that flickered in and out like dying stars.
It was a graveyard of what-ifs.
A shadow rippled through the void ahead.
Kael reached for his sword—only to realize it was gone. Erased in the collapse.
From the mist, a massive figure emerged. Twelve feet tall, cloaked in writhing strands of temporal energy, its face hidden beneath a cracked porcelain mask etched with shifting clock hands.
It didn't walk. It remembered itself into being, each movement erasing the space it passed through.
Aeris stepped forward, her voice trembling.
"...The Curator."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "You know it?"
Aeris nodded. "The thing that watches the Echo. It doesn't protect it. It catalogs it. Every forgotten event. Every rewritten soul. Every erased ending."
The Curator's voice was like collapsing towers.
"Kael of the Rift… Aeris, the Twin Flame of the Broken Hour… You should not be here."
Kael stood firm. "We didn't choose this."
"Your presence is interference. You ripple."
The void behind the Curator shifted—showing flashes of Kael's past:
His mother, dying in his arms.
Aeris, stabbing him in a forgotten timeline.
A version of himself with white eyes and black veins, ruling over burning skies.
Kael's body recoiled. "What is this?"
"These are truths never chosen. Futures aborted. Timelines rejected. You are becoming an anomaly beyond even the Paradox Guild's comprehension."
The Curator extended one long finger.
"And she," he said, pointing to Aeris, "has already begun to fracture."
Kael turned sharply to Aeris.
Her expression had frozen.
Her eyes flickered—momentarily black.
And then she screamed.
But the scream wasn't hers.
It was layered, wrong, like it had passed through too many mirrors and forgotten what it once meant. Her body convulsed, limbs trembling as echoes surged around her—versions of herself flickering into being and vanishing within seconds.
One wore armor soaked in blood.One wept, clutching a dead child.One floated limbless, whispering secrets to the stars.
Kael lunged forward, pulling her into his arms, anchoring her as her body flickered between forms—until she collapsed into him, shaking violently.
"I can't hold them back anymore…" she sobbed. "They're waking up inside me."
Kael held her tighter, whispering, "You're you. Just you."
But even as he said it, he felt it.
A second heartbeat.
Inside her.
One not hers.
The Curator stepped aside without a word, and the path forward cleared—a narrow bridge of crystal memory extending across an abyss of erased time.
Kael lifted Aeris into his arms.
"We're not done," he said. "We're going to fix this."
The Curator gave no answer, but the void itself trembled.
Because somewhere ahead, something was waiting.Not just the twisted version of Aeris.Not just the fractured Kael from the past.
But the Echo's origin.
And it had remembered them long before they remembered it.