The air was too still for a world reborn.
Ash drifted like feathers from a forgotten war, catching on the windless silence that lay heavy over the ruins of the Chrono-Void. The skies were no longer fractured with lightning storms or bleeding strands of time—but the calm wasn't peace. It was the breath before a scream.
Kael stood at the precipice of the sealed gateway, its obsidian surface now silent, smooth as a tombstone. The gate no longer pulsed with power, but something in his chest whispered that it still listened. Watched.
Behind him, Aeris knelt, running her fingers through the blackened soil that had once been a corridor through shattered realities. She looked over her shoulder, her eyes dimmed with sleepless nights and visions that wouldn't fade. Her voice cracked softly through the quiet.
"Something's wrong. It didn't end here."
Kael turned, his jaw clenched tight. The wind caught in his coat, dragging the edge like a ghost tugging at memory. He walked toward her, footsteps crunching over crystalline dust—remnants of timelines shredded in the final battle. "I know," he said. "I can feel it too."
A spark flickered in the distance.
Dray appeared, cloaked in dark armor stitched with arc-light threads. His expression was harder now, colder. The time rift had changed him—the man who once laughed in the face of death now stared through it, as though already living on the other side.
He tossed something at Kael. A metal shard—twisted and scorched.
"This wasn't here before," Dray said. "I pulled it from the ruins of Vekros. It's etched with the sigil of The Shroud."
Aeris's head snapped up. "The Shroud? That myth? I thought they were wiped out with the Architect's fall."
Kael ran his thumb over the etched lines—ancient, precise. It pulsed faintly with violet light. "No myth survives this long unless it has teeth."
The wind shifted.
And with it came a whisper.
It coiled around their ears like silk and venom, indistinct but unmistakably female. Aeris staggered back, hand reaching instinctively for her blade. Dray turned his eyes to the sky.
From the dying clouds above, a figure emerged—not falling, not flying. Floating.
She was veiled in layers of black silk that fluttered without wind. Her skin shimmered like obsidian glass. Eyes the color of a fading star locked onto Kael, and her voice slipped through the air like a song half-remembered.
"You silenced the Architect. But you never asked who built the Architect."
Aeris rose, spine straightening. "Who are you?"
The woman's lips curved into a smile—beautiful, dangerous, ancient.
"I am Veyra. And I am the ash before tomorrow."
Lightning cracked behind her. But there was no thunder. Only silence and the sharp scent of unraveling time.
Kael stepped forward. "If you're another puppet of time, you'll fall like the last one."
"No," she said. "I'm not a puppet. I am the stage."
The ground beneath them split, not with force—but with memory.
Aeris gasped as the earth rippled with moments she'd never lived: herself cradling a child with Kael's eyes; herself dying in Dray's arms; herself turning into a queen of nothing, her throne made of bones.
Dray stumbled as he saw himself slaughtering Kael—laughing. Then weeping.
Kael's breath caught as he witnessed a version of himself holding Aeris in a burning cathedral, telling her she had to die to save the worlds.
Veyra lowered to the ground, arms outstretched.
"I offer you truth," she said. "A gift. A curse. You've sealed one fate. But time, dear Kael... time never ends. It folds. It remembers."
With a flick of her wrist, the sigil on the shard Kael held ignited.
The world turned inside out.
When it righted, Veyra was gone. Only the scent of scorched roses remained. And in the distance, rising from the horizon like a fortress built from regret, stood something they had never seen before—a citadel stitched into the fabric of time.
Kael turned to Aeris. Her eyes were wide. Her fingers trembled. But when she reached for his hand, it was not as the comrade she had been.
It was something more.
Dray turned away.
And in the shadows behind him, a flicker of flame blinked into existence—watching. Waiting.