Elias stood in silence, breathing.
The sensation was so absurdly mundane that it startled him more than anything else. After what felt like centuries of mutilation, of screams wrung from his throat until even sound abandoned him, he was just… breathing. The cold night air filled his lungs in quiet rhythm, unbroken by hooks tearing through flesh or by machines grinding bone into dust.
He touched his chest. It rose and fell. Smooth. Whole. No gashes. No wires sewn into muscle. No dripping sinew where his ribs should have been. Just… a body. His body.
For a moment, he thought it had to be another layer of torment—one more sadistic illusion where they give him peace just long enough to rip it away. But the world didn't feel like the hell of before. The silence here was not the silence of despair. It was the silence of night.
The stars stretched over him. A sky. Familiar, earthly. He knew those constellations.
The world had reset.
His throat tightened as the realization hit. It wasn't Hell. It wasn't the otherworldly chamber of gods or surgeons. It was Earth. His Earth. But not the same one. The timeline had bent—restarted—but in reverse, like a loop folding back on itself. A wormhole curling time until it spat everything out at the beginning again.
Only, something was wrong.
He was here. He could feel it. His weight pressed against the soil. The faint bite of the wind tugged at his hair. He was alive, undeniably alive. But—
"Sienna…"
Her thought would not escape from his mind.
He sat down heavily on the ground, fingers clawing into the dirt as his thoughts spiraled. The logic twisted like a knot he couldn't untangle.
If this was the beginning again—the "happy" timeline—then why was he here? Why was Elias allowed back into a world scrubbed clean, but Sienna wasn't?
It didn't make sense. None of it did.
It was me, he thought, jaw clenching. It was always me. My body, my soul. Shattered into three… that fracture ripped time itself apart. That split gave birth to the different timelines. I caused the ruin. Not her. Never her.
So why wasn't she here?
He punched the dirt, the sting grounding him for a moment. "If the world is healed, then why not her? Why do I get to stay when she's erased?"
The thought circled endlessly. His mind, already fragile from torment, pulled tighter and tighter around the paradox. It was almost laughable, the punishment hadn't ended, not really. They had simply shifted it. From pain of the body to pain of the soul.
Only one of us can exist to keep the world intact? His chest burned with the weight of the thought. So it's me or her? Always?
The logic made sense in the cruelest way. If his broken self had created branching timelines, maybe the only way to stabilize it was to remove one constant. Him or her. A sacrifice. And fate—or whatever cosmic hand had drawn this new order—had chosen him.
But why?
Sienna had never deserved to bear the cost. If anyone should have been erased, it was him. He was the fracture point, the mistake, the failure. Her existence had only ever mattered because he loved her, and now that love had nowhere to go.
He buried his face in his hands, his breath ragged.
The memory of the throne-being flickered in his mind—the way it had spoken with that hollow patience, with that terrible certainty. You will ascend to where you must be.
Was this what ascension meant? To outlive everyone? To stand in a world that had been "fixed" by erasing the only person he fought for?
He laughed then, bitter and hollow. "Ascension," he spat. "What a fucking joke."
The sound of his own voice was swallowed by the wind. He tilted his head back and stared at the stars, fury and despair mixing until his chest trembled with it.
"What good is a healed world without her?!"
His voice cracked. His throat hurt, but not like before. This was the hurt of grief clawing at him from the inside out. He pressed a hand against his chest, as though he could hold the pieces of himself together by force.
The world gave him nothing in return.
Just the quiet of night. Just the endless, indifferent stars.
Minutes—or maybe hours—passed before he finally pushed himself to his feet. His knees trembled. His body was exhausted, his mind frayed to threads, but he couldn't stay here. If there was even a fragment of a chance to find her, he had to move.
Even if logic said she shouldn't exist anymore. Even if the reset erased her from history itself.
"Then I'll go higher," he whispered. His voice steadied with the resolve building inside. "If Earth doesn't have her, then I'll search the universe. I'll tear open every sky if I have to."
The words were madness, but madness was all he had left.
He spread his arms, letting the wind brush against him. Flying wasn't effort—it was instinct now. It felt like breathing. Like walking. It wasn't something he did with thought, but with the strange feeling that had become second nature to him.
His feet left the ground. Slowly, smoothly, the Earth pulled away beneath him.
The night opened like a vast sea, stars scattered across its surface.
He didn't know where to begin. He didn't know how to bridge the paradox of his existence and Sienna's absence. But he knew this: standing still would kill him faster than any blade.
So he flew.
And as he soared upward into the cold, Elias made a choice. Not a plan, not a strategy. Just a choice.
The North Pole.
No reason beyond the fact that he had always wanted to see it. A childish wish, buried under chaos. It was foolish, meaningless. But maybe that was exactly why it mattered.
The universe could wait one night. Tonight, he wanted to stand beneath the auroras.
Elias's body rose higher, cutting through the night, his silhouette swallowed by the stars.
His chest was still heavy, his mind fractured and raw. But there was something strange about the way the air wrapped around him, lifting him, carrying him north.
It wasn't hope. Hope had been stolen from him long ago.
It was defiance.
And in that defiance, a single whisper of her name carried him forward.
"Sienna…"
The wind howled louder as Elias climbed higher. The air thinned, the atmosphere itself seeming to reject his intrusion, but his body didn't falter. No frostbite gnawed at his skin, no breath caught in his lungs. He was beyond the limits of the human body now.
The northern horizon shimmered faintly. A green veil of light, soft and ethereal, spilling across the sky like paint brushed by unseen hands. The aurora.
For the first time in what felt like forever, Elias almost forgot the torment. Almost.
His eyes widened as the ribbons of light stretched across the heavens, shifting and bending, twisting into living shapes. The colors weren't just green—they bled into purples, deep blues, faint crimson threads. It was as if the stars themselves had cracked open and poured their lifeblood into the night.
The beauty hurt.
It wasn't just wonder—it was memory. He remembered Sienna's laugh when they'd once talked about seeing the aurora someday. She had joked that she would dance under the lights, arms spread, pretending to be one with the cosmos. He had promised he'd hold her so she wouldn't trip over the ice.
And now, she wasn't here.
"Wait, when did we talk about this tho.... Ahh my dementia."
The thought hollowed the moment, turning the beauty into a blade.
Still… he didn't look away.
He descended toward the snowfields, the barren white stretching endlessly beneath him. The land was silent, lifeless except for the wind's bite. When his feet touched down, the snow compressed with a soft crunch.
For a moment, Elias simply stood there, watching the auroras ripple across the black canvas of sky. The green glow bathed him in pale light, making him look ghostly, half-alive.
And maybe that was the truth. Maybe he was no more than a ghost haunting a world that wasn't meant to hold him.
But ghosts could still move.
"Alright," he muttered, his voice muffled by the endless snow. "If I'm stuck here without her… then I won't waste this."
The world was too fragile for him to lash out. If his fractured soul had once shattered reality, then carelessness now might do worse. He couldn't let grief make him reckless. He had to understand what he was.
That meant training.
He closed his eyes and reached inward.
Flying had come naturally—instinctive. But what was it? Was he defying gravity, bending space, or simply refusing the rules altogether?
His body hummed with something, not heat, not electricity, but a pulse. A rhythm that wasn't blood but still coursed through his veins.
He extended his hand toward the empty air. At first, nothing happened. Then—
A shimmer. Like heat distortion on summer asphalt.
The snow at his feet began to vibrate, grains lifting upward in faint swirls. His palm trembled as he felt resistance, as though the air itself was a curtain being pulled taut.
Yes… there it is.
But the instant he pushed harder, the curtain snapped back violently. The snow exploded outward, blasting him off balance. Elias slammed into the ice, rolling until his back struck a jagged ridge.
The impact didn't break bones. His body absorbed it like stone striking stone, but the shock rattled him all the same.
He coughed, sitting up. Steam rose faintly from the snow where his blast had struck.
"So… I'm not pulling power from the world," he whispered. "It's all me."
That was dangerous. Terrifying. Liberating.
Hours bled away as he experimented.
He learned that flying wasn't so much "pushing off the ground" as it was bending his own gravity—making himself lighter, rewriting his weight at will.
He discovered he could generate pulses of force, like shockwaves, but control was fragile. Too much willpower, and it exploded outward violently. Too little, and it sputtered out before leaving his skin.
At one point, he tried shaping the energy. He pictured a blade, sleek and sharp. For a second, the shimmer condensed into his hand, translucent, vibrating. But when he swung it, the construct shattered like glass, dissolving into fragments of light.
The auroras rippled overhead, as though mocking his clumsy attempts.
Elias gritted his teeth, sweat rolling despite the freezing winds. His exhaustion wasn't physical—his body was tireless—but mental. Each attempt gnawed at his focus. Each failure reminded him how far from mastery he was.
And yet… he didn't stop.
At one point, he collapsed onto the snow, staring up at the curtains of light above. His chest rose and fell with ragged breaths. His hands trembled faintly.
He thought of Sienna again.
If she were here, she'd probably laugh at how serious he looked. She'd tease him for brooding under the auroras instead of simply enjoying them. Then she'd tell him to keep trying, because she believed in him more than he ever believed in himself.
The silence where her voice should have been crushed him.
His eyes stung. He pressed his palms into his face, muttering to himself like a madman. "I'll find you. I swear. Even if I have to carve through time itself."
His voice cracked, but the words steadied him. They reminded him why he had to keep moving. Why he couldn't give in to despair.
By the time the auroras began to fade with the coming dawn, Elias had learned one undeniable truth.
His power wasn't magic. It wasn't divine. It wasn't a gift.
It was defiance.
Every fragment of energy he conjured, every pulse, every flight through the air—it all came from his refusal to obey the laws of this world. Gravity, inertia, matter, time—all of them were chains. And he was something that had slipped through the cracks.
Not free. Not yet. But unbound enough to fight back.
He stood in the pale light of dawn, snow crunching under his boots. His breath fogged faintly, though he knew he didn't need it.
The horizon glowed with soft orange. The auroras faded, leaving him alone with silence and frost.
He flexed his hand. The faint shimmer rippled across his skin before vanishing again.
No mastery yet. No perfection. But the beginning of understanding.
And with understanding came a new thought. A dangerous one.
If he was truly defiance incarnate… then maybe he could defy more than just gravity or force. Maybe he could defy the very erasure that had stolen Sienna from him.
The idea ignited something in his chest. It wasn't hope—he had buried hope already. It was closer to obsession.