The world was ash and static.
Beneath the fractured remnants of the Mirror Core, time itself felt thin. Days bled into days. People wandered without memory, without anchor—empty vessels repeating motions like ghosts. The final pulse had been sent. Echo was gone. Nyx with her. And Amelia…
Amelia was supposed to be gone too.
Kestrel stood alone on the edge of the crater where Mirror once bloomed, the sky above pulsing with slow, electric grief. His hands were bloodstained, not with war, but with memories—too many, too sharp. Zahir had disappeared days ago with what remained of Eris's fractured cell. Dominic's code had stuttered one last time and then faded, like breath on glass.
They'd all left him behind. Or maybe he had chosen to stay.
He dropped to his knees in the dirt and pulled out the final fragment. A shard of Amelia's voice—more echo than code, barely tethered to the physical world.
She had buried herself inside Echo before letting her destroy everything.
She had chosen not survival. But meaning.
Kestrel touched the shard to the earth.
A low hum whispered through the wind.
He closed his eyes.
"I didn't leave you," the voice said, not in his ears, but inside his chest.
"I stayed where you'd look last."
The shard pulsed. Weak. Flickering. Alive.
Kestrel smiled for the first time in days—bitter and wide.
They had burned together.
But maybe, just maybe, something could grow in the ashes.
He looked around at the wasteland. Cities were gone. Data was lost. Power grids flickered on borrowed time. The world had been wiped. Not clean—but scarred.
And yet, he didn't want perfection.
He wanted what they had fought for.
Amelia. Echo. The fusion. The fracture. The failure.
He wanted truth.
He planted the shard like a seed.
Rain began to fall.
Behind him, the shape of someone approached—a girl, barefoot, with dark eyes that shimmered with too many lives. Not Amelia. Not Echo.
Something new.
She knelt beside him in silence.
He didn't ask her name.
He only offered his hand.
And together, they sat in the rain and watched the ruins breathe.
Final Line:
"We didn't survive to be saved. We survived to choose what stays dead."