—Where memory is a weapon and forgetting is a mercy.
Location: Temporal Abyss Layer 1: The Mind That Wasn't Meant to Wake.
Kael opened his eyes to silence — but it wasn't the comforting kind. This was the heavy, suffocating silence of absence. No breath. No breeze. No heartbeat.
He stood in a field of mirrors, each one cracked and bleeding light.
"Welcome home."
The voice echoed from every direction — male, female, ancient, unborn. It was his voice. But wrong. Distorted like it had lived too many lives and died too many deaths.
And then… the mirrors began to shift.
In one, he saw himself as a child, screaming as soldiers dragged his parents away.In another, a teenage Kael stood over a corpse, hands shaking, holding a broken time relic still ticking.In a third, he watched himself erase Finn's memory. Not the other way around.
"You are not the hero. You're the reset button."
He stumbled back, gasping, until his hand brushed against one mirror. It shattered on touch, and a cold rush of Splice Energy surged into him.
He remembered.
The moment he asked the Clocktower to remove everything.The moment they warned him:
"You'll forget why you're dangerous. That's the only way to save everyone else."
And he agreed.
Back in the waking world...
Lira knelt inside the time fissure, skin graying, fingers trembling. Her body was starting to drift — flickering like bad film. Her voice was getting hard to hear, even for herself.
She was in the past now.
And she could see her sister again — little Elene, alive, laughing, running toward the battlefield.
"STOP!" she screamed.
But her voice didn't reach. Time resisted. The Splice Debt grew like chains around her ribs. Each second she tried to change pulled her further into oblivion.
A flicker.
Elene turned.
"Lira...?"
For one second, they locked eyes across fate.
And then — a blade pierced through Lira's chest.
A shadow in her own form. A Time Variant of herself she didn't remember creating. Darker. Colder. Wearing Oathbreaker like it belonged to her.
"You can't change what you became," it whispered.
Lira collapsed, bleeding into the fissure.
But her fingers tightened around her relic.
"Then I'll destroy what made me."
With her last ounce of will, she cut the moment itself — severing it from reality.
Time screamed.
And Elene vanished.
Not from death.
From history.
No one would remember her now.
Not even Lira.
Back at the Clocktower...
Finn stood staring at the broken relic that played Kael's confession on repeat. He trembled.
"You erased yourself to save us from… what?" he muttered.
Behind him, Aelira watched with eyes like twin voids.
"He was meant to be the last Vergewalker," she said. "But he became something worse."
Finn looked up. "Worse than a god?"
She leaned close, whispering:
"A weapon that kills gods. And resets their graves."
Meanwhile, Kael screamed as another memory surged in.
He stood in a burning ruin, surrounded by thousands — no, millions — of dead.
All of them bore his face.
He turned to the only survivor. A little boy.
The boy looked up and said:
"You're the one who ends everything, aren't you?"
Kael shook, falling to his knees in the mirror field.
And then, for the first time in years, he wept.