Kael stared at himself.Not a mirror. Not a reflection. Not some symbolic ghost of who he might have become. No—this was real.He was staring into the eyes of himself—a version untouched by Selene’s compassion, unbroken by Elias’s betrayals, unbent by loss. A version born not from survival, but domination. A creature sharpened by war and polished in darkness.The Warborn Kael smiled. It wasn’t a smirk or a grin—it was something hollow, something stretched across a face that had forgotten how to feel.“I used to think you were the worst of us,” he said quietly, walking in slow, measured steps. “The soft one. The one who got too close to the fire and came back afraid of the heat.”Kael clenched his fists. “I’m not afraid.”“No,” the Warborn said. “But you’ve become… inconvenient.”Pamela stepped in front of Kael before he could respond, her weapon raised.“Back away from him,” she warned. “I don’t care what version of Kael you are. You’re not touching him.”The Warborn tilted his head.

The Archive was burning from the inside out.Not with fire—but with collapsing timelines, pulsing memories, fractured light. Every wall breathed with images too fast to process—Kael’s pasts, his futures, twisted and overlapping in a storm of identity.And at the center of it all stood Kael—or what was left of him.One half darkened by the Warborn’s presence. Cold, hollow-eyed. Fingers curled like blades of glass. The other side—his side—trembled, flickering, as though it was being overwritten pixel by pixel.Pamela didn’t wait for permission.She sprinted toward the central console.“Pamela!” Elias barked. “Don’t you dare—”“I’m not losing him again!”The Archive tried to reject her. The control panel was alive, wired to Kael’s neural stream. It surged with volatile energy. She bit back a scream as pain lanced through her arm—veins lit up with neon fire.Still, she didn’t let go.“I can stabilize him,” she gasped. “I have to anchor his memory. Give him a reason to stay who he is.”“Yo

The walls of the Archive began to twist.Not crumble—twist.Time peeled away in sheets, collapsing inward as the group ran, each step falling on ground that might not exist in the next breath. Fragments of timelines flickered all around them—ghostly versions of themselves trapped in loops, echoes of choices they never made screaming like haunted shadows.Pamela grunted as another burst of gravity cracked the hallway open. “Move, move, move!”Marcus was limping behind her, his arm torn and shoulder blackened with some kind of residue from the Warborn’s psychic bleed. “I’m trying! I only have one functioning leg right now!”Kael stumbled, hand gripping the corridor’s wall as it rippled under his fingers like water. He could feel the Archive rejecting them—like it knew they didn’t belong anymore. His entire body hummed, sparking faint pulses of energy that didn’t feel like his own.Selene’s form hovered beside him—bright, fading, flickering.She wasn’t running.She wasn’t solid.“Kael!”

The ship jolted forward as it pierced through the edge of known physics.Space didn’t fold around them. It cracked—like glass, shattering against the hull. The alien vessel whined with effort, its strange core pulsing in response to the coordinates Selene had left behind.Pamela sat strapped into the command seat, her eyes locked on the main screen. Around her, the stars stretched unnaturally—colors shifting into hues the human eye wasn’t made to process. She felt her heartbeat in her teeth.“Where are we going?” Marcus asked from behind her, still bandaged, still limping.Kael’s voice came from the shadows. Calm. Cold. “To a star that never died.”The ship shuddered as the coordinates resolved—and suddenly, there was silence. Utter, impossible silence. Before them, suspended in the void like a beating heart, was a dying star cloaked in swirling clouds of radiation. It pulsed slowly. Like it was alive.Elias stepped beside Kael, gaze narrowed. “This… isn’t mapped. It’s outside the cha

The stars stretched like threads of gold, warping with each pulse of the dying ship’s core.Kael stood at the viewport, his reflection darkened by the swirling void outside. His face was calm. Too calm. It wasn’t the kind of calm that came from peace. It was the kind that came from acceptance—that something terrible was waiting on the other side.Behind him, the ship groaned. The fabric of reality buzzed as the vessel passed into another layer of fractured time.Pamela was the first to break the silence.“Kael,” she said, her voice soft, tired, “where are we going?”Kael didn’t answer right away.He stared at the glowing coordinates hovering in the center of the screen. The numbers didn’t make sense. They weren’t directions. They were equations. The language of endings.“The origin,” he said finally. “The first place time broke.”Marcus limped into the room behind her, leaning against the wall, breath shallow. He looked… different.Since their encounter at the archive, something insid