Kael stood at the center of the cradle, his fingers still pressed against its shimmering surface. A hum vibrated through his bones—low, old, and impossibly alive.And then the world cracked.Not with sound. Not with movement. But with time itself.No.No, no, no.This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.The cradle pulsed, and suddenly, they were falling—falling backward through fractured years.Pamela blinked, disoriented, as the biomechanical walls twisted and reshaped. Gone was the metal, the flesh-like structure. Now, they stood in a vision.A memory.Marcus staggered forward. “What the hell is this?”Kael didn’t answer. His breath hitched.Before them was a room—a nursery, soft light pouring in from a cracked window. A child stood at the center. A small boy, maybe five or six, with dark eyes and a solemn face.Kael whispered, “That’s… me.”But something was wrong.A tall figure knelt beside the boy. It wasn’t a parent. It wasn’t a caretaker. It was the Architect—young, smiling, hu

The cold steel of the cradle chamber felt alien to Elias, its walls vibrating with the hum of old technology that should have been long forgotten. He could almost hear the ghosts of the past, the whispered voices of those who had built it, echoing through the air. A place of birth, a place of death.His boots echoed against the floor as he entered, the familiar darkness enveloping him. He was alone now. The loop had finally released him, a cruel but necessary finality. He could feel the weight of the decision pressing against his chest, suffocating him. Elias had fought it for centuries. He had delayed it. He had sought other ways. But there was no escaping it now.Kael was here—at the center of the chamber, caught between two versions of himself.Elias took another step forward, his gaze fixed on Kael. The man was standing motionless, his broad frame silhouetted by the soft, pulsating light that emanated from the cradle. But Kael wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were locked on somethi

They should have never come inside.Pamela pressed her back to a shifting wall that pulsed with fractured data, her breath ragged. The sphere around them—the broken remains of the cradle—no longer obeyed the laws of space or time. Each corridor was a paradox, every turn bleeding into memory, regret, and nightmare.Kael had vanished into the heart of the fracture. Elias was gone. The team was splintered, scattered across a maze of decaying timelines.And something was hunting them.Pamela gripped her weapon tighter. It was flickering—glitching—just like the rest of this cursed place. She wasn’t sure if it would even fire. The air around her smelled like burning ozone and old tears. Static buzzed in her ears, and each step forward pulled her deeper into impossible versions of herself.A low growl echoed through the corridor. Footsteps—hers.And then she saw her.She stepped from the shadows like a ghost resurrected. Same face. Same body. But everything else was… wrong.The other Pamela

The light hadn’t faded.It pulsed—loud as thunder, silent as death.Kael stood frozen, breathless, his hand still outstretched toward the woman he had once mourned, once damned a galaxy to revive. Selene—real, broken, reborn—was before him. But as the Cradle began to collapse around them, it was no longer just her he saw.It was everyone she had been.All versions. All timelines. All echoes.And Pamela… she hadn’t vanished.Not entirely.The moment the Merge Protocol initiated, time folded inward and outward at once. Kael had watched, helpless, as Pamela’s outline blurred into radiant strands of data—ribbons of memory, emotion, and cognition streaming into Selene’s fragmented shell. It was supposed to end her. To obliterate her thread and anchor Selene’s.But something had gone wrong.Or maybe… terribly right.Pamela survived.Her body lay at the center of the Cradle’s fusion chamber, motionless—but alive. Her skin was marked with glowing sigils, her veins pulsed with energy not nativ

Silence.True silence.Not the kind filtered through machinery, not the absence of war sounds or collapsing timelines—but the kind of quiet that could only exist at the beginning of something untouched. Primal. Absolute.Kael opened his eyes.He was lying on his back, on something soft and strange. It wasn’t soil. It wasn’t stone. It was…light. A field of pale gold light, rippling like water but solid under his weight. Above him, a sky stretched vast and endless—unscarred by war, unsinged by battle, unmarred by the brutal echoes of ancient beings.He sat up.His chest didn’t feel heavy.No tether. No Architect’s grip. No cradle coils wrapped around his thoughts. For the first time in what felt like a thousand lifetimes, Kael could breathe—really breathe. He inhaled, and the air tasted like starsong. Like something blooming at the edge of time.He wasn’t alone.Footsteps approached softly, and when he turned, his breath caught in his throat.Selene.Whole. Solid. Real.No glitching. No