The museum shuddered as if something massive was waking beneath its marble floors. Aven felt the tremor in his bones, his breath catching. A hundred displays flickered around them, the glass humming with tension, as if reality itself was about to splinter.
Rhea grabbed his arm, pulling him close. "It's starting," she hissed. "The future is bleeding through. We don't have much time."
The corridors glowed with a sickly blue light, projections stuttering in and out—images of streets on fire, towers crumbling, children crying out from worlds that never existed. The data core's meltdown had triggered a chain reaction neither of them fully understood, but they knew one thing: the museum was now a tear in the fabric of time itself.
Aven tried to steady his breathing. But he saw too much—futures that might have been, ghosts of himself in armor, in chains, in the arms of Rhea beneath foreign suns. It felt like he was breaking apart from the inside.
"We can't stop it," he gasped. "It's too much—"
"We don't stop it," Rhea said. Her voice was hard, resolute. "We bury it."
She dragged him through the chaos, past shattered cases where phantom limbs clawed through the glass, past machines that sparked and died mid-existence. Above them, the ceiling pulsed like a heartbeat.
At the end of the hall, the great server chamber loomed, doors thrown open. Streams of white light poured from inside, casting grotesque shadows along the walls. The hum of the core was louder now, like a thousand voices screaming in unison.
"Listen to me," Rhea shouted over the din. "We shut it all down. That means cutting the power to the entire archive. The failsafes will collapse the museum into the time fracture—it'll erase every failed future at once."
"And us?" Aven demanded.
Rhea's eyes glistened. "Maybe us, too."
Aven hesitated, the roar of dying futures filling his ears. But then he saw her face, fierce and fragile, the face he had seen in so many fractured possibilities. He nodded.
"Then we end it together."
They ran into the core. The servers pulsed like dying stars, leaking arcs of energy that lanced across the room. Rhea leapt to a console, typing in commands so fast her fingers blurred. Sparks flew, the room vibrating with impossible frequencies that made Aven's teeth ache.
Suddenly the shadows coalesced into something massive at the far end of the chamber—a crawling beast of black glitch and static, eyes like fractured glass. It howled, the sound splitting the air.
Rhea screamed. "Hold it off! I'm almost there!"
Aven grabbed a metal rod, swinging at the creature as it lunged. The impact sent a surge of freezing pain through his arms. The monster shrieked, reforming itself instantly, but Aven swung again and again, every blow punctuated by Rhea's frantic keystrokes.
The creature's tendrils lashed across his chest, cutting deep. He howled, stumbling back. The thing loomed over him, jaws opening to reveal swirling chaos.
Then Rhea's voice cut through: "NOW!"
She slammed the final command. The room burst with light, the servers screeching like tortured metal. The creature howled as its body disintegrated, the glitch unraveling into sparks. Aven fell to his knees, blood soaking his shirt, vision white-hot with agony.
Beside him, Rhea clung to the console, tears streaming down her face as the servers burned from the inside out.
The walls cracked, a roar like an earthquake shaking the ground. Aven crawled to her, grabbing her hand. "Rhea—"
"I'm here," she sobbed. "I'm here."
Together, they watched as the future itself tore apart, the projections shattering, the monstrous echoes dissolving into light. The museum collapsed inward, stone and steel imploding toward a point of blinding white.
Aven held Rhea tight. "No matter what happens," he whispered, "I'm with you."
She nodded, resting her forehead against his, as the world around them ceased to exist.