The light from Echo-Aiden's star cascaded across the battlefield like a second sunrise. Where it fell, reality quivered. Entire patches of sky flickered with alternate versions of Earth—some vibrant and flourishing, others scorched or empty. But through them all, one thread persisted: Aiden.
He floated upward toward the child in the sky, the Memory Blade spiraling around him in rings of lucid thought. Each ring contained scenes from his past: his abduction at eleven, the whispers in the void, his reappearance years later with no memories, only visions.
Visions that had started innocently—flashes of people about to slip on stairs, cars that wouldn't brake in time. But they had escalated. Fires. Collapses. Death. And then… annihilation. The vision that had driven him to search for truth: Earth, shattered like glass beneath an unseen footfall.
Now he was face to face with the child whose face he remembered but didn't understand.
"I'm not a ghost," said Echo-Aiden. "I'm not a future or a past. I'm the fork you never chose."
"Why are you here now?" Aiden asked, his voice barely audible amid the shrieking winds of time around them.
Echo-Aiden's eyes flickered with starlight. "Because you've remembered enough to decide if you want the rest."
The wind froze.
Below them, Ravuun's army began to rise again. But Aiden was no longer watching them. He extended a hand to his younger self. "What happens if I take your memory?"
"You stop forgetting."
"And if I don't?"
"Earth dies."
The choice was no choice at all.
Aiden stepped forward and touched Echo-Aiden's hand.
It was not a memory transfer.
It was immersion.
Suddenly, he was inside it—inside the moment eleven-year-old Aiden had first seen the ship. A sky slit open above the field behind his school, silent and seething. He had frozen, not out of fear, but recognition. The ship was shaped like a thought he hadn't yet had.
They had taken him without words. Their hands were not hands. Their minds pressed against his like tectonic plates, breaking him into layers. They tore the future from his chest and rewired it with threads of alien intent. But even they hadn't understood what he would become.
And then… the betrayal.
A second Aiden. A simulation to overwrite him. And the whisper that echoed in the chamber of silence:
"Let him believe he's returned. Let him forget."
But Aiden didn't forget. Not all of it. Some part of him had remained awake.
Now, that part roared.
He erupted from the vision with the full strength of his lost years. Power coursed through the Memory Blade, now a living stream of story and sorrow. Time bent backward as he swept across the dimensional field, unmaking enforcers with the clarity of self.
On Earth, people began to feel it.
All around the globe, sensitive minds woke screaming or praying. Psychics collapsed into seizures. Children dreamed the same dream: a boy holding a blade of light, facing a thousand shadows.
"He's returning the timeline," murmured Lira. "Not just fighting them—he's healing us."
Isaiah nodded slowly. "He's making Earth remember itself."
Ravuun watched with a mechanical stillness.
"You are rewriting the foundation event."
Aiden turned to face it. "I am the foundation event."
"You cannot survive the convergence."
Aiden smiled.
"Watch me."
He lunged.
This time, the clash did not happen in one place. It happened in a trillion possibilities. Every version of Aiden fought every permutation of Ravuun. Some fell. Others triumphed. Some screamed into the void. Others laughed. In the end, a singular thread wove through them all:
Aiden, victorious, but changed.
When it ended, the battlefield was silent.
The star dimmed.
The child was gone.
Only Aiden remained, standing at the edge of Earth's sky, breathless, blade humming at his side.
He turned to the others, his voice steady.
"They're not done. But neither are we."
And far beyond, in a dark room lit only by blue circuitry, the Architects began to panic.