Lio woke up with a gasp, but it was the gasp of a swimmer breaking the surface, not a drowning man. He was on his feet, standing on a vast, quiet plain under a calm, grey sky. The air was cool and clean. He was solid. He was real.
He was not alone. Standing beside him were his parents. Ira looked dazed, his eyes clear but holding the deep, haunted look of a man who had returned from a long and terrible war. Sera was pale and weary, yet the frantic, hunted terror was gone from her face, replaced by a profound, bone deep sorrow. They looked at each other, not as ghosts or echoes, but as survivors. The memory of the Vein, of the choice, was a secret that belonged only to Lio, but they all remembered the light. They remembered the sacrifice.
Before them stood a single house. Not a garden of repeats, not a pristine lie, just one solitary house on the empty plain. It was their house, the one from the final loop, looking worn and tired. It was the last anchor of the old, broken reality. The last page of the book.
Lio knew, with the certainty of the one who had chosen the first word of the new story, what they had to do.
"We have to burn it," he said. His voice did not shake. It was the voice of a man who had seen the end of the world and had been given the job of cleaning up after.
He looked at his father. There was no argument this time, no plea for the peace of a familiar tomb. Ira looked at the house, at the monument to his fear and obsession, and gave a single, solemn nod. He was ready to let it go. Sera, her face a mask of tragic resolve, also nodded. Mina was gone. The house was the prison that had created her and trapped them all. It had to be unmade.
They did not go inside. There was nothing for them in there but ghosts and corpses.
Instead, Ira unslung his satchel for the last time. He pulled out his remaining maps—the real ones, the old, useless charts of a world that no longer existed. He knelt and arranged them at the base of the dry, wooden porch steps, a pile of forgotten certainties. It was a cartographer's final, perfect surrender.
Lio found a piece of flint in his pocket, a tool he had carried for a lifetime of starting miserable, damp fires. He struck it against a stone. A single spark flew, landing on the dry edge of a vellum map of the Northern Archipelago. A tiny flame caught, wavered, and then grew, eagerly consuming the elegant, useless lines.
The fire spread from the maps to the porch, licking at the familiar, weathered wood. A windowpane cracked with a sharp pop, and smoke began to curl from under the eaves. They stood back, a silent trio, watching their home, their tomb, their prison, become a funeral pyre.
And as the house burned, the world around them began to heal.
It was not a violent Pulse. It was a gentle reshaping, a quiet exhale after an eternity of holding its breath. A soft breeze began to stir, the first they had felt in as long as Lio could remember, and it carried not the smell of salt and decay, but the clean scent of distant rain. The vast, cracked plain seemed to soften, its grey palate slowly warming with the faintest blush of green.
The family stood together, watching the flames consume their past. Lio saw the roof, the one he had slept under his whole life, sag and collapse inward, sending a shower of glowing embers into the sky. Ira watched the monument to his failure turn to ash, and a great, shuddering sigh escaped him, the sound of a man finally laying down a weight he had carried for too long. Sera held Lio's hand, her grip tight, her eyes fixed on the fire, a silent, final farewell to the house that had been both her sanctuary and her cage.
The fire burned for hours. They did not move. As the last wall fell and the flames began to die down, leaving only a smoking, blackened foundation, the thick grey clouds above them began to part.
A ray of genuine, warm sunlight broke through, casting their long shadows on the ground before them.
They stood there for a moment longer, three figures in a scarred but quiet land. The place where they sank was now just a memory, a patch of cooling ash on a world that was, for the first time, their own to map.