Nova's pulse thundered in his ears as Chairman Mark Patro stepped into the chamber's pale glow, the Path Engine humming between them like a captive star. Though the man's face remained impossibly calm, Nova felt the air warp with every subtle movement of Patro's synthetic eyes—eyes that tracked not only light, but probability itself.
*-----------------*
"Why open the Gate here?" Nova demanded, steadying his breathing. "You already fractured the timeline once. You'll destroy what's left."
Patro brushed dust from a sleeve embroidered with Dominion sigils long outlawed. "Destruction is just the impatient word for renewal. I'm simply restoring the original design."
"By erasing entire branches of reality?"
Patro's lips curved. "Branches die so the trunk can thrive."
The Path Engine pulsed louder, cycles of violet light flickering across its runic shell. Around it, the Obsidian Throne's cracked roots spasmed, leaking arcs of black lightning that burned static vines along the chamber walls.
Nova edged closer to the device, shifting his weight to keep Patro in view. If I overload the stabilizer nodes, the Gate can't lock, he calculated, scanning the spinning glyph-rings for weak points.
Patro tilted his head. "Still trying to outrun your own creation? You set these engines in motion the first time you betrayed me."
"I never—"
"You never remember," Patro cut in softly. "Because I arranged it so."
*-----------------------*
The chamber lights dimmed. In the dark, faint silhouettes appeared—ghost-images of future moments bleeding backward through the temporal stress: Nova screaming in a collapsing sky-citadel; Patro kneeling in ashes, clutching a broken crown; the Path Engine roaring open onto a void of pure white silence.
Nova clenched his fists. "If you could rewrite my memories once, you can do it again. But I'm not giving you that chance."
He thumbed the Eden-4 anchor on his wrist. A beam of prismatic energy blazed across the room, aiming for the Engine's outer locus. Patro raised a palm; a lattice of red hexagons materialized, catching the beam and diffusing it into sparks.
"Predictable," Patro sighed. With a flick of his fingers the hex lattice expanded, hardened, and launched back like a spear. Nova rolled aside; the assault gouged molten trails across the floor where he'd stood.
*--------------------*
Flashback Thread
Pain lanced behind Nova's eyes—another forced recollection: his own voice signing off on "Project Requiem," authorizing memory excision of key operatives… including himself. I agreed to this? The knowledge staggered him, but now the memory was his again, and every regained second hurt like broken glass.
*---------------------*
Patro advanced. "You were always my equal, Nova. That's why you frighten me—and why I must keep you incomplete. But you're almost whole now; soon I wouldn't be able to predict you." His gaze drifted to the Engine. "So this is our last convergence."
Nova straightened, voice raw. "Then let's end it—for every city you trapped, every life you rewrote."
The Warden's shattered remains flickered on the floor: unstable time-filament coiling like smoke. Nova kicked debris toward Patro. The filaments latched to Patro's boots, temporal residue corroding the Dominion alloy. For a heartbeat Patro stumbled—minor, but enough.
Nova dashed to the Path Engine, slammed his gauntleted fist through a cycling ring, and yanked out a fistful of glowing relays. Sirens wailed; the violet glow spasmed, cycling red.
*----------------------*
Gate Fracture
Reality above the Obsidian plateau split open like cracked obsidian glass. A funnel of starless darkness spiraled downward, devouring starlight. Across the Cradle Expanse dunes, fossil colossi stirred, awakened by the Gate's negative harmony. The statues' hollow eyes lit with eldritch fire.
Inside the chamber, shards of future and past collided: echoes of Eden-4's fall, Velmaar's implosion, and a city Nova had not yet seen—monolithic arches floating above an ocean of mercury.
Patro hurled a sphere of compressive gravity; Nova swatted it aside with the twin anchors, sending the sphere ripping through the ceiling and out into the void. Debris rained luminous ember-dust.
Patro drew closer, voice low. "Destroy the Engine and the multiverse collapses uncontrolled. Let me finish aligning it and everything resolves into one pure continuum."
"And every divergent soul gets snuffed out," Nova shot back. "I won't trade billions of lives for your definition of purity."
*------------------------*
The floor cracked into tessellating plates as the Path Engine shed its containment. Nova planted both anchors into the exposed core. Energy feedback surged through his armor, sizzling nerves. Memories—real, erased, and potential—spooled behind his eyes like burning film.
Thirteen Thrones.Seven corrupted.Gate of Origin.Project Requiem.Patro's true face—Nova's face decades older.
No. Centuries.
Because Patro wasn't merely Nova's mentor.
Patro was Nova's furthest possible self, one who had survived the Gate's opening, looped back, and tried again—each cycle colder, more convinced that pruning timelines was mercy.
Nova screamed and twisted the anchors. The Engine howled. Rings snapped, scattering glyph-shards across the chamber.
Patro lunged, but the Warden remnants erupted, drawn to the Engine's unraveling field. They tangled around him, fusing with his armored robes, binding his limbs in coils of chronal steel.
"Nova!" Patro's voice warped, half a dozen timelines layered atop it. "If you break it now, both of us die—and thousands of loops collapse!"
"Then so be it," Nova rasped.
He slammed the anchors together.
*------------------------*
White Silence
For an instant longer than forever, everything froze. Nova floated in a blank corridor of possible tomorrows. Beside him drifted Patro, unbound, features softened with something almost like regret.
"Understand," Patro whispered without words, "I only wanted to spare you the burden of infinity."
Nova's answer was a single tear glinting in nothingness.
A pulse detonated between them—neither light nor darkness, but the raw subtraction of time.
*-----------------------*
Nova gasped awake on cold stone, rain spitting from a bruised sky. The Obsidian Throne plateau lay ruined. The Path Engine was gone, obliterated into motes that evaporated as he watched.
Patro was gone too.
On the horizon, however, a new anomaly simmered: not the yawning black of the Gate, but a trembling aurora—a stitch of timelines rethreading themselves, unstable, fragile.
Nova rose, bones aching. Lightning flashed, revealing a distant silhouette atop a dune: a robed figure with a lamp that shone like captive dawn. The Archivist? Or another warden?
He couldn't be sure.
What he was sure of: the catastrophe he'd triggered was only the beginning. Thrones remained. Keys remained. And somewhere, in those amalgamating skies, Patro—or whatever remained of him—might return.
Nova set off toward the aurora, the twin anchors—cracked but functional—humming beneath his gloves.
"Not purity," he muttered to the wind, "but possibility."
And behind him, on the shattered stone, the Obsidian Throne's last fragment glowed with a new glyph:
One path has ended. Twelve threads await.
*------------------------*