They didn't get far before Rhea crumpled.
His legs buckled mid-step, consciousness fracturing like glass under pressure. Kira caught him before he could hit the ground, dragging him into the shadow of a dead server tower while the failed gods whispered all around them in the dark.
"Rhea!" she shook him, panic threading her voice, but his eyes had rolled back, showing only whites. "Don't you fucking die on me—"
He's not dying, Aphra said, speaking through Rhea's mouth, his vocal cords puppeteered by the goddess. She's pulling him under, dragging him into the space between life and death. I can't follow.
"Then pull him back!"
I'm trying! Desperation cracked through every word. But she's stronger here. The Graveyard belongs to her. All the death—it feeds her.
Kira pressed her fingers against Rhea's neck, feeling the pulse slow to a faint whisper. "How long can he hold on like this?"
Minutes. Maybe less.
"Then do something!"
I can't. For the first time, Aphra's voice was stripped of all certainty. Death is the one thing desire can't seduce.
Rhea woke somewhere impossible.
A gray expanse stretched in every direction, horizonless. The sky was the color of cold ash—no sun, no stars, just a sourceless light that made everything visible yet nothing clear. He stood in the middle of nowhere, and everywhere he turned, he felt Nyx's presence like gravity pulling him in.
"Welcome," her voice whispered from all around him at once. "To the place where every timeline converges. Where all the versions of you that ever died come to rest."
She appeared before him, more solid here than in the Graveyard. Her beauty hurt, not because it shone too bright, but because it was too final. Like staring at your own epitaph and finding it flawless.
"I promised a vision," Nyx said. "Ready to see?"
"See what?"
"Your corpse." She waved a hand, and reality rippled.
The gray land morphed into a sterile medical facility, white walls, machines he didn't recognize, the antiseptic smell of places where bodies are dissected. On the table lay his own body, restrained by neural cuffs and nets that bound flesh tight.
But this wasn't him now. This was months from now. Maybe a year.
Alive but empty. Eyes open but staring into nothing. Chest rising mechanically. Brain waves flickering on monitors in patterns almost—but not quite—normal.
"What is that?" he whispered.
"You," Nyx said, stepping closer to the vision with clinical interest. "After Aphra's finished consuming your mind. The corporations finally caught you, extracted her. But by then… there was nothing left to save. Just breathing meat and a brain firing empty signals."
Rhea stepped forward, unwilling but compelled. His face was gaunt and scarred, marked with sigils he didn't recognize, Aphra's marks, burned into his flesh over months of integration.
"This is one possible future," Nyx continued. "Not the only one. But the most likely. The direction every timeline bends toward." She ghosted her fingers over the corpse's forehead. "You live eighteen more months here. Fighting, running, breaking apart. Aphra tries to save you, she honestly does. But her nature is to consume, and she can't stop. In the end, you beg the corporations to cut her out, even knowing that means death. But they refuse. They want to study you while you're still functioning."
"Stop." His voice cracked. "I don't want to see."
"Yes, you do." Nyx turned to him. "You need to understand what you're fighting for. What it means to refuse me." She waved her hand, and the scene shifted.
Now he saw himself in a resistance bunker, screaming. Kira holding him down as medical staff performed an emergency extraction. Blood everywhere. His body convulsing as they cut into his skull, trying to yank Aphra's fragment free before it killed him outright.
"This is timeline seven," Nyx said calmly. "You survive, barely. But the damage leaves you catatonic. You spend your last two years in a vegetative state, with Kira visiting every day, talking to a body that can't answer."
The vision flickered again and again, each showing a different death, a different end, all terrible in their own way.
Rhea dying in a firefight, Aphra screaming inside until the implant finally shuts down.
Rhea aging fast, his body burning out from constant god-integration, looking sixty at thirty.
Rhea choosing Nyx's offer, dying peacefully in Kira's arms as Aphra fades into nothingness.
"Thirty-seven timelines," Nyx said. "Thirty-seven ways you die. I've seen them all. Know what they share?"
He couldn't speak.
"At the moment of death, you feel relief." She stepped close, cold radiating off her. "Relief that the fight is over. That you don't have to carry her anymore. That finally, at last, you can rest."
"That's not—" His voice failed him.
"It's true." She cupped his face gently, terribly. "You're tired, Rhea. You're already searching for the exit. The only question is how much longer you fight before you accept what's coming."
"Rhea!" Aphra screamed from afar, desperate. Don't listen! She's lying!
"Not lies." Nyx's thumbs brushed his cheekbones. "Possibilities. Probabilities. The crushing weight of futures pressing down on a present that can't hold them." She leaned close. "Let me give you the good death, beautiful boy. One that doesn't scream or beg. One kiss, and it all stops."
"I don't want to die."
"Yes, you do." Her breath was ice on his lips. "You just won't admit it. You don't want to disappoint those still fighting for you. But deep down, where Aphra can't reach—you're done."
She kissed him.
This time it wasn't gentle. It was claiming—Nyx pulling him into oblivion with a force that was terrible and irresistible. Rhea felt himself unravel all at once, everything that made him him fading into peaceful nothingness.
And damn it, it felt good.
Better than Aphra's burning hunger. Better than the endless tension of survival. Just release. Permission to stop fighting.
NO! Aphra's scream ripped through the space, furious and wild. He's MINE!
She surged through the vision, fighting Nyx's hold with gold light exploding against gray. Desire incarnate refusing to let death have what was hers.
Aphra tore Rhea back violently, consciousness snapping like a rubber band. Pain flooded him as life slammed back in.
Nyx watched with something like sadness. "You can't save him, Aphra. You can only delay the end."
"Then I'll delay it forever." Aphra wrapped herself around his mind, desperate. "He's mine. Not yours. Not yet. Not ever."
"We'll see." Nyx began to fade into shadow, but before vanishing, she reached out once more—fingers ghosting across Rhea's chest, leaving a mark.
"A gift," she whispered. "So you remember. So you know I'm waiting."
Rhea jolted awake, screaming.
Kira was there, holding him down while he convulsed. "Easy! You're back—"
But he couldn't stop screaming. Couldn't shake Nyx's kiss, couldn't stop seeing all those deaths, couldn't stop knowing some part of him wanted to stay in that gray nowhere forever.
You're okay, Aphra sobbed in his mind. You're okay.
"I wanted to stay," Rhea gasped. "God help me, I wanted to stay with her."
Kira's face went pale. "No. No, you don't mean that—"
"I do." He looked at her, seeing death reflected back. "Kira, I'm so tired. So damn tired."
She slapped him hard, crack echoed in the empty space.
"You don't get to give up," she said, voice shaking. "Not after everything. Not after I—" She stopped, jaw tight. "You don't get to choose death while I'm fighting to keep you alive."
Rhea's hand found the spot Nyx touched, his chest, over his heart. His fingers traced a raised, hot sigil, black as the void and intricate as circuitry, pulsing with cold light. Nyx's mark, claiming him even if he refused.
"What the hell is that?" Kira whispered.
Her mark, Aphra said quietly. Branded him. Promised to claim him when he dies, whenever that may be.
Rhea traced the sigil, trembling. Cold and permanent, a countdown etched in flesh.
"How do we get it off?"
"We don't," Aphra said with finality. Death's marks aren't removable. They're contracts. The only way to break them is never to die.
"Then he lives forever."
"Or dies soon enough that it doesn't matter."
They sat in silence, the Graveyard closing in. Failed gods whispered around them. And on Rhea's chest, Nyx's sigil pulsed like a second heartbeat, ticking down to an ending he'd already seen thirty-seven ways.
All of them inevitable.
All waiting.