The light beyond the silver doorway wasn't light in the normal sense. It was sensation. Thought. History. Theo felt it cling to his skin like smoke, soaking through to the marrow of his soul.
One step. Two.
By the third, the ground solidified again—but it wasn't the world they'd left behind.
Instead, they stood on a stretch of land suspended in a void. No sky. No stars. Just miles of scorched red rock floating in a sea of nothing. Ash swirled through the air like the last breath of a dying god.
Nova coughed and shielded her face. "Where are we now?"
Theo didn't answer at first.
His gaze was locked on a structure rising from the cracked earth ahead—a twisted spire of blackened steel and bone, wrapped in veins of silver circuitry pulsing faintly like a dying heart.
He knew this place.
"This is the final project site," he murmured. "The last facility before the Fall."
Ayen's voice was heavy. "This is where the Reset Protocol was perfected."
Theo's mouth was dry. "Where I betrayed them all."
Nova looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"I thought I could stop it," he said. "Turn the system against itself. I waited too long. Hesitated too much. And when the collapse came, it used my design as the template for survival."
He turned to them, eyes glassy. "The world didn't fall despite me. It fell through me."
Nova put a hand on his shoulder. "Then this is your chance to face it."
The spire's doors groaned open as they approached.
Inside, darkness reigned. Not the absence of light, but the presence of something deeper—regret given form. They walked down a corridor lined with capsules. Each one housed a figure, frozen in time. Some were soldiers. Others were scientists. All of them bore the mark of the Origin: a silver seal embedded in their foreheads.
Theo ran his hand along one capsule.
"She was my lead engineer," he said. "Nessa. She begged me to shut it down. She warned me the resets were leaking memory. Personality."
Nova's voice was quiet. "Why didn't you listen?"
He didn't answer.
Because the truth was simple and damning.
He wanted to believe he could control it.
Ayen stepped past him, her hand glowing with faint circuitry. The central chamber ahead pulsed with power. Console screens flickered to life, displaying overlapping timelines, system echoes, dead countdowns. In the center stood a pedestal—empty, save for a hovering core of liquid light.
Ayen approached it. "This is the Echo Seed. The last version of the world. Unused. Untouched. It's waiting for an anchor."
Theo felt it before she said it.
"It's waiting for me."
Nova looked between them. "If you activate it, what happens?"
"I become the seed's tether. I give it shape. I give it a story. But… I don't come back the same. Maybe not at all."
Nova's eyes hardened. "Then we find another way."
But Ayen shook her head.
"There is no other way," she said. "This isn't about saving the world we knew. It's about guiding the next one. Without an anchor, the reset loops endlessly. The next cycle breaks before it begins."
Theo stepped toward the pedestal. "What if I don't trust myself?"
Ayen smiled, faint and sad. "Then trust the version of you that's standing here now."
He placed his hand above the core.
Visions surged through him.
A world where Origin never rose. A world where it did—but served rather than ruled. A world with forests and oceans, children with joy in their eyes, cities that didn't burn. He saw Nova laughing in a sunlit field. Ayen walking through a library of stars.
He saw himself.
Not as a god or weapon.
But as a man.
Flawed. Trying. Choosing.
Theo exhaled—and touched the core.
It lit up like a second sun.
The spire trembled. The air cracked. Timelines folded, rewound, fused. The Echo Seed unfurled.
Ayen turned to Nova, her face serene. "He did it."
Nova watched Theo, his body surrounded by fractal light. "What happens to him now?"
Ayen smiled.
"That's up to the next world to decide."