I didn't share with them what I saw in the tower. Not everything.
Not the version of me who died for Kaelis.
Not the blade across his own throat.
Not the way the mark on my wrist throbbed as if it had its own heartbeat.
Luro didn't question. But I could see from the quiet in his eyes that he knew already. Or perhaps he had dealt with his own once, and just never talked about it. Hiran continued staring at me as if I was going to break. Luro just waited.
We left in a rush. The sky was no longer red. It had become a weird color I couldn't identify—like smoldering copper pulled thin over blackened clouds. And in that warped light, everything was slower. Like time didn't know which direction to go anymore.
Beyond the fourth ridge, we came upon the gate.
It wasn't of stone. It was of bone and remembrance. Great pillars, tied together by tendons that shone feebly when you glanced away. Suspended from the middle hung a solitary iron chain, dangled over nothing.
And etched into the arch above, in signs I didn't know but comprehended anyway:
"Here began the First Break."
Seve had once spoken of the Breaks. How the world broke up so long ago and all loops since then a cracked replica. I used to think it was legend. But being here, I felt the air tugging at me, like it wanted me to recall something I never experienced.
"Going in?" Hiran asked.
"No," Luro replied.
"Yes," I said.
They both turned towards me.
"I've been here," I said. "Not in this life. But… I've passed this gate before. I left something behind when I passed it."
Luro nodded slowly. "Then it's time you reclaimed it."
I stepped through.
And the world fell apart.
There was no ground. No sky. Only mirrors.
Thousands of them. Spinning around me in slow, impossible arcs. Some cracked. Some intact. Some holding things I hadn't yet seen.
I wasn't standing anymore—I was floating.
And in every mirror, a different version of me moved.
One with white hair. One covered in armor made of roots. One missing an arm, dragging a blade longer than his body.
But all of them had the same eyes.
Dead, determined, and alone.
Then one mirror stopped spinning.
And the glass rippled.
A girl stepped out.
Kaelis.
Not a memory. Not an echo.
Her eyes locked on mine.
"You're late," she said, voice calm but sad.
"You're not real."
"Neither are you. Not anymore."
She circled around me, examining my face as though it didn't quite fit the image she had stored away.
"You forgot the choice," she said. "That's why the world keeps looping."
I swallowed. "What choice?"
She gestured downwards.
I looked.
Below us, a battlefield stretched in every direction. Endless. Ash-choked. Illuminated by a red sun that didn't warm anything.
And at the center of it
Me.
Carrying her shattered body.
Screaming.
Alone.
And then… releasing.".
"You fled," she breathed. "That was the First Break. You abandoned me. You cut the strand."
"I didn't know," I explained. "I didn't recall!"
She gazed up at me, eyes shining gold. Not angry. Simply truthful.
"That's irrelevant. The Loop doesn't concern itself with why. It only cares that it broke."
I shook my head. "I returned for you."
"You returned for yourself."
Silence closed in. And then she spoke a sentence that froze my breath.
"You'll have to watch me die again. If you want to make it right."
I blinked....
and she was nowhere to be seen.
The mirrors whirred faster.
The battlefield disappeared.
The mark on my wrist shattered.
A voice called out in the dark:
"One thread cut. Six still in place."
And I woke up gasping on the ground outside the gate.
Hiran dropped to the ground beside me. "You didn't breathe. For more than a minute."
Luro was already facing north. At something none of us could see yet.
I slowly sat up. The weight in my chest greater than ever.
"I remember now," I said. "I was the one to shatter the world."
And none of them disputed.
Because they already knew.
---