The Riftwind howled as Kael faced the doppelgänger—Aeris's face, Aeris's voice… but none of her soul. Her eyes shimmered, not with emotion, but with endless void, like windows to collapsed timelines.
Kael didn't move.
Neither did she.
Time stilled—not metaphorically, but literally. Around them, falling stars paused mid-plummet, the fractured skies freezing in a loop of vibrating stillness. The multiverse held its breath.
"You're not her," Kael said, his voice low, controlled. "But you're close enough to make my blood ache."
The not-Aeris tilted her head, strands of stardust-laced hair sliding across her cheek.
"She fragmented herself," the figure whispered. "To protect you. To protect the child growing inside a reality that no longer exists."
Kael's heart skipped.
"You lie."
"Do I?" she said, stepping forward, bare feet silent on the ripple-glass floor. "Then why do you dream of her holding a child every time you sleep inside the Rift?"
Kael staggered back, stunned.
He had seen it.
Over and over. Aeris, smiling in a world washed with golden light. A baby in her arms. But it was never clear. Just whispers. Like a dream half-remembered after waking.
His fingers hovered over the Riftlight shard in his chest.
"She didn't just hide inside the Abyss," the copy said, circling him. "She scattered her soul across six anchor timelines. You're standing on one of them now."
Suddenly, Kael saw it.
This place—this version of the Rift—wasn't empty. It was resonating with a forgotten warmth, faint echoes of Aeris's laughter embedded in the wind.
"If I gather the six shards," he muttered, thinking aloud, "I can remake her."
"Or unravel her completely," the figure said. "Some echoes want to come home. Others... want to be left buried."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "And which one are you?"
The copy smiled—slow, eerie, haunting.
"The one that remembers your betrayal."
Lightning arced between them as Kael launched forward, arm sheathed in chrono-fire. The figure met him mid-air, their collision blasting a hole through the Rift's skin. Color bled into space—pinks, teals, silvers—as if the multiverse itself had been wounded.
Blow after blow, their battle rippled through dying stars and glitching realities.
But it wasn't the power that shook Kael.
It was her moves.
The way she ducked. Countered. Twisted.
Every strike was a memory.
Every dodge… familiar.
Because he'd trained her.
This wasn't just a fake.
This was a piece of Aeris—maybe the darkest piece.
And as they locked hands mid-blast, spinning in slow-motion through unraveling gravity, she whispered into his ear:
"You loved me in every timeline. But only the broken ones survived."
They crashed into the memory-wall behind them, and suddenly Kael was yanked into a scene from their past. One that hadn't happened yet.
Aeris—crying. Bleeding. Standing on the ruins of the Temporal Citadel.
Behind her: a coffin made of Riftmetal.
Inside it... their son.
Kael screamed as the vision shattered, falling back into his own body, panting.
The copy was gone.
But the echo remained.
Burned into his soul.
In the ashes of a broken reality, Kael found a single phrase scrawled in flame across the sky: "Only one of us gets to live."