The remnants of the battlefield still pulsed with fractured light, the sky above smeared in hues of electric violet and bleeding gold. Time hadn't settled—it trembled. Every second that passed felt borrowed, like the universe itself was holding its breath.
Kael stood at the edge of the cliff where the battle with the Architect's clones had ended. Below him stretched a rift not just in space, but in time—a gaping wound of twisted seconds and unraveling memories. Aeris stood behind him, silent, her breath shallow, her hair whipped by the wind that whispered things that didn't belong to this reality.
But it was the object Kael held that demanded the world's attention.
A small, obsidian shard—pulsing, alive. Not merely a piece of the Rift... but its core seed.
"Where did you find it?" Aeris asked, stepping closer, her voice taut with restrained fear.
Kael's voice was hollow. "It was inside me. It activated when the Final Architect spoke my real name."
Aeris blinked. "Your real name?"
Kael turned, slowly. "Kael is just a derivative... a veil. My true identity was locked, rewritten when I first fell through the original Rift."
His hand trembled around the shard as memories not his own began to flood in—scenes of a child not in this world, speaking with timelines like friends, erasing futures, rewriting fates like stories on parchment.
"I was the first Riftwalker. Not just a victim of the paradox... I was its origin."
The air snapped. Somewhere in the distance, time screamed.
Aeris backed away, horror dawning across her face. "That means—Kael, you... you created the Rift?"
"No," Kael whispered, eyes brimming with truths he wished he didn't know. "I planted it."
The scene cut to the Paradox Citadel, deep in a suspended realm outside time. Three shadowed figures—the last remaining members of the Timebound Council—watched through the Astral Veil.
"Kael has found the Seed," one whispered, their voice like cracking glass.
"Then the Chain shall break," another murmured. "And the Eternal Loop will begin its last turn."
Back on the cliff, Aeris stood frozen, but her heart surged forward.
"So all of this—every version of you I've met... every battle... every loss... was because you were trying to undo something you caused?"
Kael couldn't look her in the eye. "I didn't remember. But my past self... he built the Architect. Programmed it to collapse false timelines. It was meant to be mercy."
"Mercy?" she choked. "Billions died."
"And I didn't remember any of it until now."
Silence stretched, deep and endless.
But before she could speak again, the sky cracked open like a pane of glass.
A massive figure descended—half-man, half-void, wearing armor made of frozen minutes and a crown of celestial runes. His eyes glowed with the same energy as the shard in Kael's hand.
The Seed-Eater. The true villain hidden even from the Architect.
"I've waited eons to reclaim what you stole, Riftfather," the creature bellowed, voice echoing across infinite versions of the moment. "Give me the seed... or I will devour the last timeline left."
Kael pushed Aeris behind him. "Run. I'll hold him—"
"No," she said, gripping his hand, voice steady. "Not this time."
Their palms glowed—linked not by fate, but by choice.
And behind them, the rift began to reshape... reacting not to the threat, but to the truth.
As the Seed-Eater charged with a blade forged from compressed centuries, the shard in Kael's palm ignited—and from the Rift behind him, a third presence emerged.
A child, with Kael's eyes... and Aeris's touch.
"You summoned me," the child whispered, hovering between seconds. "Now choose—do I end the loop, or begin it anew?"