They left the chamber of the Voices in silence.
The corridor they entered now shimmered with fractured reflections—not of their forms, but of moments. In the glass-like walls, Aouli glimpsed images flickering like old film: a woman releasing a bird into the sky; a child drawing constellations into dust with their fingers; skyscrapers crumbling into oceans blackened with oil. These were not memories he had lived, and yet he felt them like bruises beneath his skin.
Elysia walked beside him, her glow dimmed to a quiet pulse. She said nothing until they reached a platform that floated solitary and still in the vastness, tethered to nothing, bordered only by silence.
From its edge, the multiverse spread in all directions. Countless realities shimmered in the dark, glowing like lanterns adrift in an infinite sea. Some flared bright and steady. Others flickered, weak and trembling. A few had already gone dark, leaving behind only a faint afterglow.
Aouli stood at the edge and looked down.
There, far below, the place that had birthed him could barely be perceived. Not even a world anymore—just a scar in the fabric. A place where once, life had teemed. Now: silence. Absence.
"Why did it have to end?" he asked softly, eyes still fixed on the wound. "Earth… Gaia… why wasn't it enough to try?"
Elysia stood beside him, her voice a whisper against the void. "It did try. Again and again. But intention, Aouli, is not action. And Earth's children… most of them forgot the cost of forgetting."
Aouli's glow flickered.
"They knew," she continued. "Some did. They cried out, fought, tried to change course. But their cries were drowned by machinery. Their wisdom buried under consumption. And even as the forests burned, and the ice melted, and the skies turned black—they turned away."
He clenched his luminous hands. "But we felt. We cared. I remember them. We weren't monsters."
"No," she agreed. "But you were many. And too few chose sacrifice. Too few chose patience. The Earth was generous. But even Gaia had limits."
Aouli turned from the edge, the grief welling in him like a tide. "Then why make me? Why give birth to something in the moment of death?"
Elysia's gaze remained fixed outward.
"Because death is not absence," she said. "It is transformation. Gaia did not birth you to rewrite the past. She birthed you to carry her memory forward—into the places where her lessons might still matter."
"But I don't know what to do," Aouli whispered. "I'm not wise. I'm not strong. I'm just… I don't even know if I'm human."
Elysia turned to him, finally, and placed a hand against his chest. It passed through, gently, like a breeze stirring light.
"You're not. And you are. You are Earth's grief. Earth's hope. You are a choice made at the edge of collapse. You are potential."
Aouli closed his eyes. He remembered oceans. He remembered thunder. He remembered soil between fingers and sun-warmed skin and laughter that echoed through canyons.
He remembered Earth not just as a place—but as someone.
"I miss her," he said, his voice cracking like frost underfoot.
Elysia nodded. "You always will. That is what makes you dangerous. And that is what makes you necessary."
The silence stretched between them again—but this time, it did not feel empty.
It felt like mourning.
And mourning, Aouli realized, could also be love that refused to leave.