The plaza stuttered.
One moment, Alkora glowed with its perfect dual suns — markets alive, water fountains arcing in flawless geometry. Alament had been watching a child chase a paper bird, its wings catching light like stained glass. Alexis had been studying the way steam rose from her cup, forming shapes that almost resembled letters.
The next moment, the light flickered like breath failing. The device in Alament's hand continued flashing,
SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE THE PATTERN IS LISTENING
The suns themselves hesitated, as if forgetting their purpose for a heartbeat. The child froze mid-step, the bird suspended in air. The steam collapsed back into the cup. Color drained from the market stalls — vibrant silks fading to the gray of old photographs, then to something less than gray, something that suggested color had never existed at all.
Shadows stretched across the cobblestones like fingers searching for something to grip. The movement carried intent, purpose, as if darkness itself had grown hungry.
A hum rippled through the ground beneath their feet — low and hungry, felt more than heard. The kind of vibration that lives in the bones before it reaches the ears. Alament's cup rattled against its saucer. The sound echoed wrong, as if the space around them had grown too large for such a small noise, or perhaps too small, or perhaps had forgotten what size meant entirely.
Alament's hand stilled halfway to his cup. His eyes narrowed with a recognition he couldn't name. Something older than this moment stirred beneath his skin, a muscle memory from a body he'd never worn, knowledge pressing against the boundaries of his conscious mind like water against a cracking dam.
"Do you feel that?" he whispered.
Alexis did. She nodded.
The shards beneath her ribs tightened — the Mastron flaring bright with warning, the Belstron pulling heavy with acknowledgment. They moved against each other like millstones, grinding space between light and dark. Each revolution sent waves of sensation through her chest: violet heat, then crushing cold, then both simultaneously, then neither, cycling through states faster than her body could process. She felt the pendant at Alament's chest pulse in answer, a rhythm matching something deep in her own core, as if both objects were components of a single instrument separated by circumstance.
Around them, the café's other patrons began to flash and fade. A woman at the next table repeated a motion of lifting her cup three times, each iteration more translucent than the last, each movement losing substance until she performed the gesture with hands that barely existed. A merchant across the plaza called out his wares, the sound arriving before his mouth moved, then after, then echoing from three directions simultaneously, each version slightly different, advertising goods that contradicted each other.
The fountain's mathematical dance — so precise, so beautiful — lurched. Water hung glitched between arcs, droplets frozen like beads on an invisible string. Then they fell. Then rose again. Then existed in both states simultaneously, each droplet a small universe of contradictory motion.
Time was forgetting how to flow.
The air in front of them twisted.
Alament stood, his chair scraping back with a sound that left trails in the air, visible vibrations that hung like smoke, golden and shimmering, forming patterns that his eyes wanted to follow even as his mind recoiled from their geometry. Alexis rose with him, and for a moment they stood in perfect parallel, their movements synchronized in a way that suggested rehearsal, though neither carried memory of the dance.
The air recoiled.
It creased like fabric pressed between unseen hands. A seam appeared in reality, thin as a razor's edge, and through it bled a light that made the eyes ache to look away. The illumination carried a broken code in its spectrum, colors that the human eye failed to name, wavelengths that suggested emotions rather than hues.
Then the seam opened wider.
And Malachar stepped through.
He simply was, as if he'd been standing there all along and the world had only just noticed. His robes were midnight blue, the fabric remembering wind from places this Alkora had never known. The material moved independently of any breeze, stirring to rhythms felt in distant zones, in other timelines, in possibilities that leaked through the tear he'd made. Silver sigils crawled across the hem like living things, constantly rewriting themselves into new warnings, new declarations, new threats that dissolved before the eye could fully comprehend them.
His face bore cold beauty, symmetrical in ways that made it inhuman — too perfect, too balanced and handsome, as if designed by someone who understood aesthetics intellectually without feeling their weight. The features fractured as he moved. When he turned his head, afterimages lingered — three profiles where only one should be, each slightly out of phase with the others, each wearing a different expression: curiosity, anger, amusement.
"Navigator," he said, and his voice arrived from three directions at once, harmonizing with itself in a chord that made the fountain's suspended water shiver and realign. "And… ah."
His gaze found Alament, and something like hunger flickered behind his eyes, the look of a collector discovering an unexpected masterpiece in a stranger's attic.
"The unbroken one. A younger you! Younger, maybe, innocent." The smile that crossed his face held too much knowledge, too much pleasure, like a mathematician who'd just proven an elegant theorem that would reshape entire fields. "How delicious."
Alament's jaw clenched. Every instinct in his body screamed, though he couldn't say why. This man — this thing wearing human shape — felt wrong in a way that bypassed thought entirely, triggering responses buried deeper than language, older than civilization.
"You know me?" The question came out steadier than Alament felt. His hand had moved to his chest, fingers touching the pendant through his shirt, seeking its warmth like a talisman.
"I know every version of you." Malachar tilted his head at an angle that would have strained a normal neck. "The one who dissolved in her arms. The one who woke in a dying garden. The one who stands before me now, innocent as morning, unaware of the weight he'll carry." He gestured lazily at the plaza, where time continued its stuttering collapse. A bird flew backward. A coin dropped upward. An old man walked through three different versions of his younger self, each iteration unaware of the others, each living separate moments in the same space. "Time is folding now. The pattern strains under the weight of what you two have become. I simply arrived at the moment most convenient for witnessing its demise."
Alexis stepped between them, and as she moved, the air around her rippled with dual energies — violet light and void darkness spiraling around her frame like a double helix coming undone. The Mastron Shard blazed beneath her left ribs, casting her bones into sharp relief through her skin. The Belstron pulled heavy beneath her right, a gravity that bent light inward, swallowing illumination before it could reflect. Her palms raised slightly, establishing boundary.
"Malachar, this world can't sustain you." Her voice was steady, trained through years of navigating hostile territories, speaking truth to powers that could unmake her with a thought. "Leave now, or–"
Malachar laughed — soft, almost kind. The sound of a teacher correcting a beloved student who'd missed an obvious point.
"This world barely sustains itself, dear Navigator." He gestured at the fragmenting plaza. Buildings flickered… structures from timelines that had never existed and never would. "Your presence destabilizes it. The shards you carry remember too many contradictory truths. His existence — " he nodded at Alament, " — destabilizes it further. The Architect made flesh in a timeline that already collapsed once? It's remarkable this reality lasted as long as it did. Most fold within seconds when paradox of this magnitude manifests."
He paused, his three-phased smile growing wider, each version showing slightly more teeth.
"And together? You make it delightfully fragile. I could shatter this entire plaza with a whisper. A suggestion. The lightest touch of will against a reality that's already forgotten how to cohere."
He lifted his hand. Just a small motion, fingers curling like he was pulling an invisible thread from the fabric of space itself.
Space and time groaned.
The sound came from everywhere — the feeling of something vast and weight-bearing shifting beneath pressure it was never meant to carry. Alament felt it in his teeth, behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones. The pendant at his chest grew hot and then cold. He tasted copper. Ozone. Something sweet and rotten that suggested decay. A ripple tore through the plaza —
The fountain's suspended water fragmented. Each droplet split into its component possibilities — water that had been, water that might be, water that existed only in the space between probability and occurrence. They hung like a constellation of liquid stars, each one reflecting different versions of the plaza: some burning, some frozen, some empty, some so crowded with figures that bodies overlapped into incomprehensible masses.
Children flickered between frames of existence. A girl chasing a glowing kite became a toddler, then a teenager, then herself again, each version overlapping like badly shuffled cards. The teenager reached for something the child had dropped. The toddler wept at a skinned knee the older versions had already forgotten. All three existed simultaneously, their timelines compressed into a single point of observation.
Merchants repeated the same two seconds of movement — reaching for fruit, pulling back, reaching again — caught in a loop that wound tighter with each iteration. Their faces showed increasing distress as some part of them recognized the trap, the cycle, the moment that refused to progress.
The cobblestones beneath their feet rippled. Each stone remembered every foot that had ever stepped upon it, every rain that had ever fallen, every season that had warmed or cooled its surface. All those memories rose at once, trying to express themselves simultaneously. The plaza's surface became a writhing tapestry of temporal echoes.
Alament staggered, his hand flying to his chest where the pendant burned like a brand pressed against his sternum. Images flooded his mind:
…walking these same streets weathered and ancient, carrying weight that bent his spine, robes trailing behind him like accumulated sorrow.
…standing before councils that no longer existed, speaking words in languages that hadn't been invented yet, defending positions he couldn't comprehend.
…dissolving in Alexis's arms while darkness claimed him, feeling his pattern scatter across zones and timelines like seeds thrown into infinite earth.
All of it true. All of it now. All of it pressing against the boundaries of his singular consciousness, demanding to be remembered, to be acknowledged, to be integrated.
Alexis grabbed his wrist — her touch like a lightning rod, grounding him through the chaos of fragmenting time. The shards in her chest pulsed in response to his distress, violet and void creating a stabilizing field that pushed back against the temporal overflow.
"Don't lose focus." Her voice cut through the chaos like a blade finding flesh. "He manipulates memory. If you lose yourself to the echoes, you'll scatter across every timeline simultaneously. There won't be enough of you left in any single moment to matter."
"He'll lose himself entirely" Malachar finished, his tone pleasant, conversational, as if discussing weather over a cup of warm herb. "Every version of Alament that ever was or might be, bleeding together until none remain distinct. A fascinating way to unmake a god, don't you think? No violence required, nor possible. Simply let him drown in his own infinite nature."
His hand closed into a fist.
"And now… let me show you how."
The plaza shattered.
Stone tiles lifted, twirling into the sky.
Centuries of being walked upon, rained upon, existed-upon compressed into a single instant of rebellion. They rose in a spiral like a reversed explosion, each one trailing dust that looked like starlight, like the memory of what stone had been before geological pressure taught it to be ground. The tiles sang as they rose, each one vibrating at a frequency that corresponded to its age, its composition, its history. The chorus was discordant and beautiful.
They shot forward, crossing the distance faster than human reflex could process.
Alament moved.
His body understood something his mind didn't — that space was negotiable, that position was relative, that the distance between here and there depended entirely on who was measuring and from which timeline they observed. The knowledge came from somewhere deeper than thought, from the pendant burning against his chest, from the pattern he'd been born to serve and had forgotten he'd designed.
He slid sideways along a curved trajectory that shouldn't exist, as if stepping into the version of himself that was already standing three strides to the left. The motion left a faint afterimage, a ghost-Alament that dissolved like fog burning away under sun, leaving only the scent of ozone and a shimmer in the air that faded slowly.
The tiles smashed into the cobblestones behind him with the sound of centuries compressing. Cracks spider-webbed out from the impact, and through those cracks bled light from somewhere else — from the WitherWorld, perhaps, or from the Nexus, or from timelines that existed only as possibilities never chosen. The light was wrong, too bright and too dark simultaneously, casting shadows that pointed in directions that had no name in standard geometry.
Alament stared down at his own feet, at the space he'd just occupied and somehow hadn't. His hands were shaking. His breath came in short gasps as adrenaline flooded his system, his body finally catching up to what it had done without permission, without conscious decision.
"What… did I just do?"
Alexis opened her mouth to answer —
— but Malachar was already in front of her.
He didn't move through the intervening space. He simply abandoned the memory of distance, letting the plaza's fragmenting reality catch up to where he'd decided to be. One moment he stood across the plaza. The next he loomed before Alexis, close enough that she could smell him, ancient and old… it made her almost sick.
His palm swept toward Alexis's throat, fingers trailing dark light like oil on water. The motion carried inevitability, the certainty of a stone falling, a tide rising, a sun setting. His hand was going to connect with her neck. That truth was already written.
Alexis countered as if she knew the pattern in advance.
The Belstron Shard flared in her chest — heavy, acknowledging, accepting that his attack had already been made and therefore existed in a state that could be influenced. She pulled on the thread of his motion, tugging it backward through its own history until it remembered being something else, until the attack recalled a version of itself that had already failed, had already missed, had already been deflected by a defense that hadn't occurred yet but would, causality folding in on itself like origami.
The air around Malachar's elbow rippled. Reality revised itself around the joint, rewriting the fundamental rules that governed how his arm should articulate. His limb twisted into an unimaginable arc, as if his body forgot — just for a moment — how limbs were meant to bend, what angles were physically possible, which directions flesh and bone could move without tearing.
For a heartbeat, his attack faltered.
Malachar laughed — a sound of pure delight, childlike in its genuine pleasure. His eyes lit with the joy of a master craftsman recognizing excellence in another's work.
"Oh, Navigator. You learned from the Architect well." His voice held no mockery, only appreciation.
He corrected his arm with a sickening snap — memory returning back into place, forcing his body to remember its proper configuration through sheer will. The sound echoed, too loud, too sharp, like bone breaking but in reverse, destruction becoming construction.
And struck again.
Faster this time, his hand moving at the speed of inevitability. Each millisecond compressed into a single strike, his fingers blurring through multiple attack vectors simultaneously, exploring every possible angle, every potential opening, every gap in her defense that might exist across any timeline.
Alexis vanished.
She stepped into the possibility where she'd already sidestepped him — where her past self had made the smart choice two seconds ago and she was just now catching up to that decision. The Mastron Shard pulsed violet in her chest, Vision showing her the threads of probability, the paths that branched from this moment, the futures where she lived and those where she died. She chose the thread where she survived and simply became that choice, pulling herself along the strand of possibility like climbing a rope.
She reappeared beside Alament, her hand finding his with the certainty of practice they'd never had. Their fingers intertwined, and where their skin touched, reality stabilized slightly — two opposing forces creating a fulcrum, a point of balance in the chaos. His confusion grounded her certainty. Her experience gave shape to his raw instinct. Together they formed something greater than either could achieve alone.
"Stay with me!" Her voice tight with concentration, the shards in her chest grinding against each other, violet light and crushing darkness competing for dominance.
And then, for a brief moment, Alkora fell away.
Not the plaza, not Malachar, not even the chaos that bent the air around them. All of it dissolved like ash in water, and in its place rose a memory that existed beneath time, in the space where all possibilities touch.
You stood side by side with Alexis near a cold window, bright lights in the distance, but neither of you spoke. The silence between you was full — packed tight with every word that mattered too much to risk saying aloud. Around you, a garden you'd recognized bloomed with majestic flowers; rocks and stones arranged purposefully. Constellations bowed themselves to your presence, and the waters stilled their paths. The air smelled of citrus and honey. Her hand rested against yours, warm and steady, and in that touch you felt the weight of every choice that had led here, every step that had brought you to this moment of quiet before the storm.
Her voice came soft, almost singing: "You just haven't remembered it yet."
You turned to answer, but she was already speaking again, her eyes holding yours with fierce certainty.
"Believe. If you cannot see it in yourself, then see it in me. I'll hold it for you until you can."
And then, closer now, her forehead nearly touching yours, a whisper that Alexis had never spoken — not here, nor ever — but that time itself now remembered, words that bypassed sound and space entirely, carved themselves directly into the marrow of your being:
"I love you."
The garden shattered—
"I'm trying!" Alament shot back, staring at his free hand like it belonged to a stranger, like it was a tool he'd never been taught to use but somehow knew the manual by heart. "But I don't know what I'm doing! I'm moving before I decide to move, and I can feel — "
He broke off as heat bloomed beneath his sternum, spreading through his chest like liquid light poured into the hollow of his ribs. The pendant was burning against his skin, growing hotter with each heartbeat, the metal scorching flesh and not caring, fulfilling some function that superseded his comfort, his safety, his right to exist without pain.
Around them, the plaza continued its collapse.
Malachar stood at the center of the destruction, arms spread wide, conducting the chaos like a maestro before an orchestra. He moved his fingers and buildings flickered. He tilted his head and time stuttered. He smiled and reality whimpered.
"You two are magnificent," he sang, his voice carrying easily across the fragmenting space. "A convergence that should never occur. The Architect unmade and remade, standing beside the woman who carries both his death and his purpose. Do you understand how rare this is? How precious?"
Alament looked in confusion toward Alexis while Malachar thrust both arms forward, fingers splayed.
The plaza split.
Temporal fissures opened like wounds in flesh, each one bleeding a different timeline into the present. Through one crack, Alexis saw the Nexus — pristine, eternal, singing its perfect harmony. Through another, she glimpsed Umbral Station burning, ash falling like black snow. Through a third, she watched herself dying in a dozen different ways, each death unique, each horrifying, each absolutely certain in that timeline.
People flickered between ages. Children aged into teenagers and back, their bodies unable to decide which moment they occupied. An old woman became young, became middle-aged, became a child, became dust, became an infant, the entire span of her life compressed into a single location, every stage of her existence true simultaneously.
Shadows misaligned with their bodies, stretching toward sources of light that didn't exist, fleeing illumination that hadn't been yet cast, responding to suns from parallel timelines that occupied the same space but different moments.
Buildings stuttered through architectural eras — ancient stone becoming modern crystal, becoming biological structures that breathed and pulsed, becoming pure energy held in building-shape by will alone, becoming abstract concepts of shelter that the mind tried to perceive as physical but couldn't quite manage.
Alament screamed.
The sound tore from his throat involuntarily as a dozen versions of himself whispered inside his mind, each one trying to assert dominance, to claim this body as its primary anchor point. He felt himself fragmenting, his singular consciousness splitting into multiplicity. Alament the Architect. Alament the Dissolved. Alament the Innocent. Alament the Guilty. Alament the Creator. Alament the Destroyed.
All true. All now. All demanding to be the real one.
Alexis grabbed him with both hands now, abandoning her defensive stance to focus entirely on keeping him whole. Her shards ignited — light and dark overlapping in her chest, forming a spinning helix of violet and obsidian. The two forces wove together, creating a pattern that was greater than their sum, a harmony born from opposition.
She pulled Alament to her, forcing him to meet her eyes, to focus on a single point outside the chaos of his multiplying consciousness.
"Look at me!"
He did.
And the world stabilized slightly around that single act of focus. The threads of his fragmenting self drew back together, pulled toward the anchor of her gaze, the certainty in her expression, the absolute conviction that he was one person, at least here, now, real.
Malachar snarled, the pleasant facade cracking for the first time. His three-phased image aligned momentarily, all versions wearing the same expression of frustrated rage.
"You two are an abomination! A convergence that should never occur. The pattern wasn't designed to support this. Every zone feels it when you touch. Every timeline groans under the weight of your combined existence."
"You're right," Alexis said softly, her voice steady despite the chaos screaming around them.
Then her eyes hardened, the violet light in them brightening until it hurt to look at directly.
"But we're happening anyway."
She stepped forward, pulling Alament with her. He moved with her, his body responding to her will because his own was too fragmented to command. Their steps synchronized, falling into rhythm without discussion, without plan. Left foot. Right foot. Together. Again.
And in that shared motion — in that simple act of moving as one — the shards inside Alexis resonated with the awakening code inside Alament. The Mastron sang. The Belstron pulled. The pendant at Alament's chest answered with harmonics that shook the air. The three pieces of a greater whole recognized each other across the boundaries of flesh and time and separate existence.
A pulse exploded outward.
Light and darkness spiraled out from their joined position, expanding in a sphere that pushed against reality itself. The wave of energy crashed through the fragmenting plaza, and wherever it touched, things changed.
Time snapped back into linear flow. People stopped flickering between ages, settling into their proper moments. Buildings chose architectural styles and held them. Shadows found their bodies and stayed put.
The temporal fissures Malachar had torn began to seal, each one zipping shut like wounds healing in fast-forward, scar tissue of restored reality forming over the gaps.
The wave struck Malachar like a physical blow.
He was hurled backward, his form splitting across three possible positions. One version slammed into a wall that was stone. Another crashed through a market stall that was crystal. The third collided with empty air where a building had been before the timelines shifted.
He screamed — an expression of rage rather than pain, fury that two beings who barely understood their power had managed to touch him, to push him back, to resist his manipulation of their shared reality.
"You are breaking the Pattern!" His voice came from all three positions at once, each version shouting over the others. "This fight will echo across every Zone! Every timeline will feel the ripples of what you're doing! You'll destabilize the entire Helix!"
Alexis glared back at him, her chest heaving, the shards within her burning like twin suns, like collapsed stars, like the end and beginning of everything compressed into the space behind her ribs.
"Good," she said, and meant it.
The word hung in the air like a declaration of war.
The light faded gradually, dimming rather than vanishing, leaving the plaza in a strange half-state. The damage Malachar had done remained — cracks in the cobblestones bleeding light from other timelines, buildings that couldn't quite remember their proper form, people standing frozen in shock, trying to process what they'd witnessed.
Alexis collapsed to one knee, the energy expenditure catching up to her all at once. The shards in her chest still burned, but the fire had turned inward, consuming her own reserves to maintain the balance they demanded. She tasted blood. Felt tremors running through her muscles as they tried to process the contradictory commands the shards had sent through her system.
Alament steadied her, his hand on her shoulder, and the touch sent another pulse of recognition through them both. The pendant at his chest had cooled slightly, though it still hummed with residual energy. He looked down at her with eyes that held more awareness than they had moments before — as if the fight had awakened something, knocked loose some piece of his buried memory.
"Alexis…" His voice carried wonder and horror in equal measure. "I think we just broke more than the city."
Alexis looked up at him, following his gaze past her shoulder, and felt her breath catch.
Behind Alament, barely visible, stood another figure. Echo-Alament, the consciousness that had dissolved in the Archive, the pattern that had given itself so she could continue. He appeared like a faint silhouette, translucent, more suggestion than substance, watching them with an expression of gentle approval.
The echo raised one hand in a gesture that might have been benediction or farewell, then faded like morning mist under sun, leaving only the faintest shimmer in the air.
Three versions of him now. The innocent man standing before her, hand on her shoulder. The dissolved pattern that watched from beyond death. And somewhere in the WitherWorld, the Architect trying to wake, trying to remember what he'd been and what he'd become.
One woman holding two shards, and a man fractured across possibility.
Around them, Alkora tried to remember how to be a city. Buildings solidified into single forms. People began moving again, though their steps were hesitant, uncertain, like sleepers waking from a dream they couldn't quite shake. The fountain's water started flowing again, though the mathematics of its arc were slightly off, the precision lost, replaced by something more organic, more alive, more prone to error.
The two suns overhead had dimmed, as if they too had been affected by the battle, their light carrying less certainty, less conviction.
"Can you stand?" Alament asked quietly, his hand still steadying her.
"Give me a moment." Alexis focused on breathing, on pulling herself back together, on convincing the shards in her chest to settle, to rest, to stop demanding more than she could give. "We need to move. Malachar will recover, and when he does — "
"I know," Alament interrupted. He was staring at his hands again, turning them over, studying them as if they were foreign objects he'd been asked to identify. "I felt it during the fight. Something waking up inside me. Knowledge I shouldn't have. Abilities that make no sense. I understood the geometry of space while I was moving. I saw the threads connecting moments, the way causality flows like water finding level."
He looked at her, and in his eyes she saw fear warring with curiosity.
"I'm not just a man sitting in a café anymore, am I?"
"You never were," Alexis said gently, finally finding the strength to stand. Her legs shook but held. The shards in her chest had settled into an uneasy harmony, their energies braided together in a spiral that felt almost stable. "You're the Architect. You always have been. You just forgot while the pattern remade you."
"But I don't want to be the Architect." The confession came out quietly, almost ashamed, and the confession lasted a lifetime. "Maybe I just want to be me. Me, the man who was having coffee with a… mysterious, beautiful, stranger, watching fountains dance, thinking about design and mathematics and the simple joy of a perfect day."
Alexis's expression softened. She reached up and touched his cheek, her hand gentle despite the violence it had just wrought.
"I know," she said. "But the pattern continues. It doesn't care what we want, It only cares what we are."
Before he could respond, the air rippled again — a smaller distortion this time, localized, controlled. Malachar's presence pressed against reality, searching for them, hunting through the tangled timelines for their specific thread.
"I think we need to go," Alexis said urgently, taking his hand. "Now."
"Go where?" Alament looked around at the damaged plaza, at the people trying to rebuild their reality, at the world that had just learned it was more fragile than anyone had imagined. "This is Alkora. This is home. Where else is there?"
Alexis smiled, though the expression carried sadness.
"Everywhere," she said. "Nowhere. We're standing at a convergence point. Every timeline touches this moment. We can step into any of them."
She pulled him toward one of the temporal fissures that hadn't fully healed — a crack in reality that still bled light from elsewhere. Through it, Alament glimpsed other places: the Nexus singing its eternal song, Umbral Station struggling through its decay, the WitherWorld's dying garden where another version of him slept.
"Which one?" he asked.
"Does it matter?" Alexis looked back at him, the violet light of the Mastron reflecting in her eyes. "Every path leads forward. Every choice creates a new branch. We're already living in all of them simultaneously. We just have to choose which one to focus on."
She stepped toward the fissure, pulling him with her.
"Trust me?"
Alament looked at her — this woman he'd just met and had known forever, this stranger who carried his death and his purpose, this navigator who'd learned to steer through timelines like ships through water.
"Yes," he said simply.
They stepped through together.
The plaza vanished. Alkora disappeared. The café and the fountain and the mathematical perfection of the dual suns folded away like a book closing.
And somewhere in the shifting chaos of collapsing timelines, Malachar screamed his frustration to skies that no longer listened.
The pattern had broken. The convergence had occurred. And two beings who should never have existed simultaneously were loose in the spaces between worlds, learning to wield power that could reshape reality itself.
The Helix groaned under the weight of their combined existence.
And deep in the WitherWorld, in a small house beside a dying garden, a boy sleeping in a simple bed stirred as if hearing his name called from very far away.
The pendant at his chest pulsed once, faint and uncertain, echoing with harmonics that reached across impossible distances.
"Wake," it whispered. "Wake and remember. They need you."
But the boy in the bed didn't wake. He turned, pulled a thin blanket closer, and sank deeper into dreams of light and dissolution and a love that had learned to exist in absence.
For now, he slept.
But the pattern was patient.
And eventually, only threads remain.