The void blinked—and reality rearranged itself.
Ruo Qing gasped as her feet touched solid ground again. But she was no longer in the fractured city or the memory corridor. This place was… quiet.
Still.
It was a room without walls—just darkness all around, stretching into infinity. The floor was glass. Beneath it: stars.
Above her: nothing.
Before her: two figures.
One was Murdoch.
Or the man she thought was Murdoch.
He stood barefoot, wearing the clothes he'd worn the first night they met—leather jacket, shirt stained with ash, that crooked grin he used when trying to hide his fear. But there was something different in his eyes now. Something missing.
Or something added.
The second figure stepped forward from the shadows.
Also Murdoch.
But older. Sterner. With a black crown of time-thread and a dagger at his hip. His presence felt ancient. Like a knight from a forgotten prophecy, returned from war.
She stared between them.
"What is this?" she whispered.
The Echo Watcher's voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere. "You stand at the crossing. Between what was, what is, and what must be chosen."
Murdoch—the younger one—stepped forward, face filled with hope.
"I'm real," he said. "The man who loved you in the mirror court. Who bled for you. Who tried to remember you when the world tried to tear you out of me."
The older Murdoch—darker, regal—spoke with steel.
"I am also real. The version who survived your death. Who became something more, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I ruled time because there was no more you to hold onto."
She swallowed hard. "Why show me both?"
"You are the tear," the Watcher said. "Your heart is the thread. And whichever man you hold onto—becomes the true Murdoch. The other will unravel."
"No!" she snapped. "That's not fair."
The Watcher was silent.
The two Murdochs stared at her.
The younger one stepped closer. "You gave me hope."
The older one: "You gave me purpose."
The younger: "I want a future."
The older: "I want revenge for the time stolen from us."
She turned to the Watcher. "And if I walk away?"
"Then both timelines fall. One into eternal forgetting. The other into endless repetition."
Her heart thundered.
Tears welled.
She remembered every version of their love—every stolen glance, every battle fought shoulder to shoulder, every time he held her when she felt the world was breaking.
They were all real.
But only one could remain.
She closed her eyes.
"I choose—"
But the choice was taken from her.
A thunderclap exploded in the air as time itself convulsed.
A third figure stepped through the veil.
Not Murdoch.
A stranger.
Golden eyes. Wedding suit torn at the sleeve. Blood on his lips.
The groom from the fractured vision.
He looked at Ruo Qing—not like he knew her.
But like he owned her.
"Found you," he said with a grin. "Took me four timelines and a cathedral of ghosts, but I got here first."
The two Murdochs turned to him.
And for the first time—agreed.
Ruo Qing whispered, "Who are you?"
He tilted his head. "The end of the road, darling."
And vanished—dragging her into a final split.