The world fractured like a pane of glass under a scream too ancient for mortal memory.
The Vault of Echoes—once a stable sanctuary buried in the folds of time—was now unraveling. Reality bled in colors unnamed, and the air had grown too dense to breathe. Time twisted at odd angles. The concept of "now" shattered.
Kael felt it first. His thoughts tangled with memories he never lived. A battle on the edge of Saturn's rings. A kiss stolen in a universe that no longer existed. Each blink warped him further from the present.
Aeris gripped his hand tighter. "Don't lose focus."
Her voice became his anchor. Even as her wings bent and flickered like broken holograms, even as her form bled stardust from the pressure of the Dissonance's presence, she stood firm.
Across the ruins, Dray braced himself with his staff, muttering a counter-temporal chant, binding runes mid-air with glowing hands. His body shimmered, barely stabilized, flickering between versions of himself—one with a crown, another with a noose around his neck.
"We can't keep the timelines tethered," he shouted. "The Dissonance is collapsing every possible outcome into a single, chaotic present!"
"And it wants to be the only thing that survives," Kael muttered, stepping forward.
The Dissonance's voice echoed from every particle of reality.
"Hope is treason against entropy."
Then it moved.
The vast, formless entity tore through the Vault with speed unfit for something so colossal. Its limbs—if they could be called that—slashed across the tapestry of existence, cutting away potential like pruning branches from the Tree of Time.
With a sound like the grinding of forgotten eons, the Dissonance struck.
Kael raised the Forgotten Heart just in time. The weapon flared with defiance, deflecting the blow—but it splintered under the pressure. Cracks danced across its surface.
Kael gasped. "It's breaking—"
"No," Veyra snapped, stepping forward. "We're not."
She raised her own weapon—an obsidian blade reforged with fragments from every past she once tried to erase. Her eyes glowed, tears streaking down her cheeks as shadows crawled across her face.
"I saw this. In every failed timeline. This was the moment I gave up. Not this time."
She struck.
Her blade pierced the Dissonance's outer form. Not deep—but enough to stagger it. It roared—not in pain, but in shock.
"You shouldn't be able to harm me!"
"You said it yourself," Veyra whispered. "Hope is treason. And I'm a traitor to the end."
Behind them, something shifted.
The vault responded not to power—but to unity.
A hidden chamber emerged—a golden spiral staircase that didn't descend into the ground, but upward, into a sky of nothing.
Kael turned to the others. "That's our path."
Dray frowned. "To where?"
"To the Prime Tomorrow." Aeris answered quietly. "The source. Where the first decision was made. Where fate began. And where we rewrite it."
They ascended, the stairs forming with every step, built from resolve and defiance.
Below, the Dissonance howled, slamming against the Vault, its form too vast to follow. But it would find another way.
Kael could feel it.
At the top of the spiral, a doorway waited.
Not a door of wood or steel.
A tear.
In the very idea of choice.
Behind it lay the Prime Tomorrow—timeless, unformed, and infinite.
As Kael reached for the threshold, Aeris placed a hand on his chest.
"If we do this… we might not come back the same."
Kael met her gaze. "Then we come back better."
They stepped through.
Into the birthplace of everything.