The Last Echo

Time doesn't pass in the Last Echo.

It haunts.

Kael stepped through the dimensional rift like wading into a frozen dream. The portal snapped shut behind him with a crack like breaking glass, and he was instantly surrounded by a world of reflections.

Everything shimmered—fractured timelines, suspended in mid-collapse, played out in glowing shards that hovered like constellations. Memories. Mistakes. Moments that never were.

Aeris laughing under starlight.Aeris dying in his arms.Aeris turning away from him with violet eyes.

"Welcome," a voice whispered, not in his ears—but inside his mind.

He turned.

She stood at the center of the Echo: Aeris Omega—the version of her shaped by abandonment, rebirth, and fury. The living paradox.

Her violet eyes glowed in the shadow of a broken moon overhead. The silver of her armor reflected every life they could have had—and never did.

"You came," she said, voice echoing with timelines stacked atop each other. "I wasn't sure if you would."

Kael's fists clenched. "I didn't come to relive the past."

Aeris smiled, bittersweet and shattered. "Then why are you trembling?"

The ground beneath them pulsed, revealing echo after echo—Kael's regrets, his sacrifices, her loneliness. He saw her... abandoned in collapsed realities, forgotten in fragments. He had never turned back. She had never stopped waiting.

"Do you know what it's like," she whispered, "to scream into dying worlds and never have anyone answer?"

He swallowed. "I do now."

The air thickened with power.

Aeris Omega raised her hand—and time around them collapsed inward. The Echo obeyed her. Every version of her swirled into one devastating force.

"I'm not here to destroy you, Kael," she said. "But I will take back what I lost. Even if it means tearing apart every lie she built in your heart."

And just like that—

She attacked.

Reality shattered as Kael blocked her first blow. Light and shadow rippled across fractured memories. Every strike carried the weight of ten lost timelines.

He didn't want to fight her.

But she left him no choice.

"You're not my enemy, Aeris," he cried.

She slammed him back with a wave of temporal force. "No. I'm your consequence."

Kael crashed into a wall of frozen memory—the moment he chose the other her—and for a second, it stunned him more than the impact.

As he struggled to rise, Aeris Omega approached. But her hands trembled. Her breath caught.

"Do you feel it, Kael?" she whispered, softer now. "The fracture in your soul? The part of you that still remembers me?"

A pause. A silence that screamed.

And then she stepped back.

"Next time," she said, voice low and lethal, "you'll have to choose."

With a twist of her fingers, she vanished—leaving Kael alone in the Echo, surrounded by broken futures and a single burning truth:

The war wasn't over.

It had just turned personal.