Sera looked at the two men who were the beginning and the end of her world. In her husband's face, she saw a plea for the peace of a known grave. In her son's, she saw the desperate fire of a boy who would rather fight a thousand hopeless battles than surrender. She stood in the silence between them, between the tomb and the struggle, and chose neither.
"You are both right,"
she said, her voice imbued with a strange, new authority that made them both fall silent. It was no longer the voice of a haunted woman, but of a judge delivering a final verdict.
"The journey is a nightmare, Ira. You were right to want it to end." She turned her gaze to Lio. "And this house is a cage, Lio. You were right to want to destroy it."
She took a step away from them, toward the center of the dusty, death filled room. "But you cannot escape a story by choosing the same two endings. The only way to win," she said, her voice ringing with a terrible, absolute power, "is to burn the book."
Before Lio or Ira could react, she closed her eyes. She held up the small, red mitten she had been clutching, holding it before her not as a memento, but as a key. She did not chant or make a sound. She simply… reached. With her mind, with her will, with a deep and ancient part of her soul that understood the mechanics of this broken world.
The air in the room began to shimmer, to warp around her as if in the presence of an immense heat. The walls grew thin and translucent. Lio could see the other houses in the Garden of Repeats through them, flickering like ghosts. His mother was peeling back the layers of their reality.
A line of perfect, impossible blackness split the air in front of her. It was a tear not in the house, but in the very fabric of the world. It began to glow from within, a brilliant, searing white light filled with swirling colors and screaming fragments of images and sounds. It was the raw, chaotic energy of memory itself. It was the Vein.
The tear widened into a gaping, luminous maw, and a force, not of wind but of pure, silent negation, began to pull at the room. The dust on the floor was the first to go, lifting up and dissolving into motes of light that flowed into the scar. Then the furniture. The old dining table did not break; it unraveled, its solid wood dissolving into a stream of memories—of family dinners, of arguments, of maps spread across its surface—and flowed into the light.
The dead bodies at the table were next. Lio watched in horror and awe as his own corpse, and those of his parents, dissolved. They did not decay; they were unwritten, their physical forms breaking down into the stories and moments that had made them, all of it pouring into the Vein like a river into the sea.
Ira stared, his face a mask of terror and wonder, as the ultimate evidence of his failure was not just removed, but utterly erased from existence.
Then, the erasure touched them. Lio looked down and saw his own hands beginning to glow, to shed shimmering particles of light that were drawn toward the Vein. He felt his memories start to fray, the edges of his life becoming soft and indistinct. He looked at his father. Ira was also dissolving, but a look of profound, peaceful relief was on his face. The pain, the guilt, the madness—it was all being unmade. He was being granted the final, quiet peace he craved.
Lio's gaze flew to his mother. She stood at the heart of the storm, her face serene, her arms outstretched. The light was consuming her fastest of all. She was the anchor, the conduit, holding open the scar of the world and offering her own existence as the final price. She was sacrificing her own story to erase theirs.
Her voice echoed in his mind, clear and filled with a fierce, unwavering love. To break the loop, Lio, the story has to end. All of it.
The house was gone. The Garden of Repeats was gone. The world was dissolving into a brilliant, all consuming whiteness. Lio felt himself coming apart, his thoughts, his fears, his love for his family all unraveling into pure, raw memory, ready to be reabsorbed by the Vein. He reached a translucent hand toward his mother's radiant, fading form, a final, futile gesture of a son trying to hold on to the woman who was unmaking a universe to set him free.