The moment Kael touched the Paradox Core, time stilled — not just paused, but held its breath.
The battlefield vanished.
The Rift King froze, eyes wide with a realization too late to undo. Aeris hung midair, her hair floating like starlight in slow motion, her lips forming a scream that hadn't reached the air yet.
Kael was no longer within time. He stood inside the Threadspace — the tangled veins of existence, where every possibility whispered like a forgotten lullaby.
In front of him, the Core pulsed like a dying sun, begging to rewrite everything. But Kael didn't take control of it.
He did something far worse.
He let it feel him.
His grief. His love. His mistakes. His deepest fear — not of dying, but of living without her. Of losing Aeris to fate, or war, or to a version of herself who didn't remember love. And suddenly, the Core twisted. Responded.
It fractured open, revealing…
A second Aeris.
No scars. No battle armor. Dressed in the white and crimson of a future that hadn't happened yet.
She looked at Kael — not with pain, but with knowing.
"I'm the version you abandoned," she said softly. "The one you chose to save the world instead of."
Kael's breath hitched.
"I was happy, Kael. Until I remembered. Until the timelines bled, and I saw what we could've been. You can't undo this. You can't save everyone."
"I'm not trying to save everyone anymore," he whispered. "Just the one that still believes I can."
The Rift King suddenly unfroze, yanked from the silence as if someone cut the strings of stillness. He roared in fury, surging toward the Core.
Kael acted faster.
He split himself.
Not metaphorically — literally.
One Kael pushed Aeris out of time's pull, shielding her.
The other charged into the Rift King, taking them both into a collapsing shard of reality that was imploding like a dying dream.
Two Kaels. Two fates. One impossible choice.
Back in the real battlefield, the sky cracked open — a radiant wound — and from it descended the real Aeris, gasping for breath as time stabilized around her.
She screamed his name.
But no voice came back.
Only silence.
And the Core… was gone.
Vanished.
And so was Kael.
✨ Where did Kael go? Which version of him survived? And what has awakened in Aeris now that the timelines have touched her soul?