Light—pure, blinding light—ripped through the Horizon Spire.
Kael shielded Sol with his arms, their bodies tumbling through waves of collapsing timelines. Aeris—no, the Riftbreaker—was clutched in his other arm. Her eyes were wide, dazed. Her power surged violently but lacked direction, like a storm grieving its own destruction.
"Where are we?!" Sol cried, voice echoing like a child's scream inside a broken cathedral.
Kael blinked hard.
They weren't in the Spire anymore.
They were inside the Fracture Loop—a temporal echo chamber, a prison of infinite maybes and nevers. Broken buildings hovered sideways. Dead versions of Kael and Aeris lay fossilized in glitched amber. In the distance, a clock tower hung upside down, its hands spinning backward.
"This is… the Architect's playground," Aeris murmured, her voice quieter, softer than before.
"How did we survive?" Kael asked.
She didn't answer.
Instead, she reached out and touched Sol's cheek, and for a moment, her fingers sparked with raw, golden light.
"He's stabilizing the loop. That shouldn't be possible." Her eyes trembled. "Unless—"
"Unless what?" Kael demanded.
"Unless his code was rewritten with something… beyond the Architect's reach."
Kael knelt beside Sol.
His son's eyes glowed faintly now. Not just blue like Aeris's past... not red like Kael's future-sight. But white—a pure, impossible light.
Sol looked up.
"I saw everything," he whispered. "Every version of you. Every version of her. Every time you chose each other… and every time you didn't."
A chill slid down Kael's spine.
"What are you, Sol?" he asked.
Sol blinked slowly. "I'm the consequence of your love and the correction of your mistake."
Behind them, the sky cracked.
A massive temporal shard fell through the clouds—reality bleeding out like ink through torn parchment.
From within the tear stepped the Paradox Twins—the Architect's newest soldiers. One bore Kael's face twisted in agony, the other wore Aeris's smile twisted into cruelty.
"Time's up," the male twin growled. "The boy belongs to the Rift."
Kael stood. "You'll have to go through me."
"Then bleed like you always do, failure," the twin spat.
As they charged—
Aeris whispered, almost to herself:
"If we fight them here, we lose Sol."
"Then where?" Kael shouted, dodging a blade of pure entropy.
Aeris raised her hands.
The ground beneath them shattered—and a path formed through memory: a hallway built from their first meeting, their first mission, the kiss in the storm before Null's death… and the night they whispered forever with nothing but fear and hope in their lungs.
"We go back," Aeris said.
Kael stared. "Back to when?"
She took Sol's hand and Kael's too.
"To the moment I became the Riftbreaker."
The Paradox Twins howled, lunging.
Aeris's power surged.
The world exploded in reverse, pulling them into the bloodstream of time.
And as they vanished—
The Architect's voice echoed through the realm like a curse etched in thunder:
"You're not rewriting destiny… you're detonating it."