Light swallowed everything.

Not the warm, forgiving kind—but the sharp, surgical brightness that stripped things bare. Kael felt his skin dissolve into thought, his heartbeat echoing through timelines like ripples in glass.

Then, just as suddenly, he fell.

He hit the ground with a grunt, dust puffing up around him. When his vision steadied, he was standing on a plain that looked… almost right. Blue sky. Wind through grass. Except the grass shimmered like water, and every shadow lagged a half-second behind the light that cast it.

"Okay," he muttered, brushing himself off. "Definitely not the same side of reality."

The fissure behind him had sealed shut—no way back. The Chrono Blade hummed faintly at his hip, its edge flickering between metal and light. Kael exhaled through his nose.

"Alright, show me what you've got, memory-world."

He started walking.

The landscape twisted with each step. Hills inverted. The sky blinked. For a moment, he saw himself walking beside himself—two Kaels, both frowning. One vanished when he blinked.

Eventually, he reached what looked like a city—or its ghost. Towers of translucent stone rose in the distance, warped by heat haze. Roads wound into infinity, repeating like reflections in opposing mirrors.

He knew this place.

It was the capital of the First Cycle—the world he'd destroyed to build the Axis. Except it wasn't ruins. It was pristine, frozen mid-moment. People filled the streets, unmoving, locked in golden light.

Kael's chest tightened. "Oh, no. Not this again."

He stepped closer to one of the figures—a little girl holding a wooden toy sword. Her face was serene, smiling. But when he reached out, the air around her rippled, and she turned her head toward him. Slowly. Mechanically.

"Kael Vorrion," she said in a voice not her own. "You came back."

Every statue around them exhaled at once.

Kael stumbled back as the crowd of frozen people began to move—jerky, puppetlike, eyes glowing faintly. They turned toward him in unison.

"Ah, great," he muttered, drawing the Blade. "Haunted nostalgia. My favorite."

The first lunged. Kael sidestepped, sliced cleanly, watched it dissolve into fragments of light. Another came, and another. Soon he was spinning through them, Blade singing, each strike breaking apart another echo of what once was.

It should've been satisfying. It wasn't. Each one vanished with a whisper that sounded like his own name.

When the last figure fell, the city sighed and fell still again. The golden air dimmed. Kael sheathed the Blade, breath ragged.

Then a voice spoke from above. Calm. Familiar.

> "You always start with violence."

Kael froze. Slowly, he turned.

On the steps of the central plaza stood Horizon—cloak torn, mechanical eye gleaming faintly. But there was something wrong with him. His frame flickered, his face younger, older, shifting like he couldn't decide who he'd been.

"Horizon?" Kael breathed.

The automaton smiled faintly. "Depends which version you're talking to."

Kael stared. "You're alive?"

"Define alive." Horizon looked around the empty city. "This place is a memory built from your guilt. I'm what's left of the mind that built it."

Kael's throat tightened. "So you're not you."

"Not entirely. But close enough to make you uncomfortable." Horizon stepped down from the stairs, each footfall echoing slightly out of sync with time. "You shouldn't have come here."

"Yeah, well, the door looked inviting."

"This world isn't meant for you anymore, Kael. It's where the erased things gather. The longer you stay, the more it remembers what it lost."

Kael folded his arms. "Then tell me what the crack is. Why it opened. What it wants."

Horizon tilted his head. "You already know."

Kael's jaw clenched. "No games."

"This isn't a game." Horizon gestured around them. "Every reality you've rewritten bleeds into this one. Every version of you that tried to fix what you broke left a scar. Now those scars are aligning. The world is tired of pretending it's whole."

Kael swallowed hard. "So what happens when it stops pretending?"

"The same thing that happens to every story when the author walks away." Horizon's eyes flickered. "It ends."

Kael looked at the still figures, at the shining sky fracturing above them. "There's got to be a way to stop it."

"There is," Horizon said. "But you won't like it."

Kael gave a dry laugh. "You've met me. When have I ever liked anything?"

Horizon stepped closer. "Then listen. You can't patch this anymore. You can't wield time like a weapon and expect it to heal. You have to let the Chrono Blade break."

Kael went still.

"Break it?"

"Yes."

"That's suicide."

"It's mercy."

Kael shook his head. "No. I can fix this. I just need—"

"Kael." Horizon's voice cut through the air like steel. "You already tried. Hundreds of times. You reset everything, over and over, and each time it got worse. The Blade keeps the loops alive. Destroy it, and time can finally die naturally."

Kael's pulse roared in his ears. "And what happens to us?"

"You fade with it."

Silence.

Kael turned away, staring up at the fissure glowing faintly above the city. "You're asking me to erase everything. Everyone."

"I'm asking you to let the universe breathe again."

Kael's fists tightened. "You sound like my past self."

Horizon's half-smile didn't reach his eyes. "He got that from you."

For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Kael looked down at the Blade. Its edge shimmered, reflecting not light, but moments—Eira laughing, Jorah swearing, the team standing in sunlight that no longer existed.

He whispered, "If I break this, do they disappear too?"

"They become what they were meant to be," Horizon said gently. "Memories that end."

Kael closed his eyes. He'd spent lifetimes running from endings. Maybe this was the price for that defiance.

When he opened them again, determination burned there. "Then tell me how."

Horizon nodded once. "You'll know when you reach the core. Follow the echoes. The world will show you the way—it always does when it's dying."

He began to fade, static crawling across his outline.

"Horizon!" Kael called.

The automaton's voice drifted, already distant. "Don't make me regret believing in you again, Kael Vorrion."

And then he was gone.

Kael stood alone in the empty city, wind sweeping through streets that had no sound. Above, the fissure pulsed brighter, widening like an eye opening.

He looked at the Blade one more time. It pulsed with his heartbeat.

"Break you, huh?" he muttered. "Yeah, that sounds like something I'd invent to ruin my day."

He started walking again—toward the center of the city, where the light grew stronger and the air felt heavier. Every step stirred new images at the corners of his sight—Eira calling his name, Jorah laughing, Horizon's voice reciting old jokes about entropy.

They weren't memories anymore. They were farewells.

The streets ended at a massive plaza. In the center stood a mirror the size of a mountain, cracked but unbroken, reflecting nothing at all.

Kael approached, his reflection flickering in and out.

When he reached the base, he touched the glass.

It rippled once.

And the reflection that stared back wasn't him.

It was Eira—standing outside the fissure, shouting for him. Jorah beside her, waving his arms in panic. The world behind them was fracturing; the sky tearing in lines of gold and black.

Kael pressed his palm harder. "Don't come after me," he whispered.

But Eira's image moved, her mouth forming his name again and again.

Something cracked deep in the mirror.

Kael stepped back as a web of fractures spread across its surface. The Blade vibrated violently, resonating with the sound.

"Guess this is it," he said softly.

He raised the weapon, its glow now brilliant enough to turn the plaza into daylight.

"One last paradox."

He drove the Chrono Blade into the mirror.

The world screamed.

Light poured out in torrents, swallowing the city, the sky, even Kael himself. For a heartbeat, he felt everything—every version of himself, every loop, every world undone. And somewhere in that chaos, a faint voice whispered—not Horizon's, not Eira's, but his own.

> "Let it end so it can begin."

Then, silence.

Nothing.

And somewhere, far away, in a world that might have been new, a clock began to tick again.

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