The sky split like skin under glass.
Aeris didn't just open a Rift—she became it.
Her body arced with radiant fractures, glowing veins of violet and gold pulsing through her like a celestial supernova barely contained. Time and space bent around her heartbeat. Her scream echoed across timelines, not in pain—but in defiance.
"You want me to choose?" she cried, eyes locking with her older self."Then I choose everything."
A blinding pulse exploded from her chest, flinging everyone across the fractured rooftop memory like rag dolls. Kael shielded Sol as the world shattered into hexagonal shards, each showing a different Aeris—broken, victorious, alone, lost.
"What did she do?" Sol gasped.
Kael, his breath knocked out, stared at Aeris floating mid-air. Her hair flowed like stardust, her silhouette fractured by light and shadow. She wasn't just inside a memory anymore—
—she was rewriting it.
"She's overriding a fixed point," Kael whispered. "No one's ever done that. Not even the Architects."
But the older Aeris wasn't gone.
She rose, cloaked in obsidian fire, face twisted in horror.
"You can't change what's written!" she roared."Every timeline demands a sacrifice!"
"Then it can take me," Aeris said, palms glowing.
She struck forward.
Their hands collided—past and future versions of herself locked in a timeless tug of fate. Between them, Sol cried out again as the collapsing sphere tightened around him, every tick of time cutting deeper.
Suddenly—Kael moved.
"This isn't her fight alone!"
He dove into the sphere, his own powers fracturing space like a glass prism. Flames engulfed him, memories ripping across his mind: Aeris bleeding in a desert, Sol alone in an orphaned reality, his own corpse in a hundred timelines.
Still, he reached Sol.
"You're not dying in a loop, kid," Kael whispered. "You're the future."
He yanked Sol free just as the sphere imploded behind them.
But it wasn't over.
The older Aeris screamed—her form unraveling, not just from the power but from possibility itself. She saw what she could've been, what she still might be, and it broke her.
"I was trying to protect you!" she sobbed, collapsing."I didn't want to become this..."
Aeris landed gently beside her fallen older self.
"Then help me become something else," she said, reaching out.
But the older version only smiled faintly, tears dripping into the storm.
"You already have."
With a final shimmer, she vanished.