Aeris awoke with a sharp inhale, her fingers tangled in the sheets, heart pounding as if she'd been pulled from drowning.
The room was dim—sunlight hadn't touched their sanctuary yet. But something in the air was off. Heavier. Saturated with static, like the seconds themselves had stopped ticking.
She sat up, pushing away a damp curl from her temple.Kael wasn't beside her.
Her pulse tightened.
She reached for the pendant on her nightstand—the one fused with a fragment of Riftsteel, a token Kael gave her after the war ended. It was warm. Vibrating faintly.
"He touched a memory," she whispered.
Not just any memory. One that didn't belong.
She slipped from bed, her bare feet finding the cold obsidian tiles. The room adjusted to her mood—curtains slowly parting, revealing the suspended reality they now lived in. A world stitched from timelines that no longer existed, breathing only because they willed it so.
But even here, the past found cracks.
She stepped into the courtyard garden—and froze.
The koi pond was shattered. Water evaporating into golden mist. The vines that once curled joyfully around the marble archway had turned brittle, frost-bitten.
And Kael stood at the edge of a still-glowing Rift, eyes wide, shoulders drawn like a man who had seen a ghost.
Aeris didn't need to ask. She felt it in her marrow.
Something had come through.And it wore her face.
"Kael," she said gently, "tell me."
He turned. There was blood at the corner of his mouth. Not his. He hadn't noticed it. His expression was hollow—not afraid, not angry, just... unmade.
"She said she's the original you," he whispered. "The one left behind when we rewrote the ending."
Aeris swallowed hard. A phantom ache crawled up her spine.She remembered nothing. Yet her body tensed like it knew her double was real.
"Did she touch you?" Aeris asked, voice calm but sharp.
He nodded once. "Just my thoughts."
Aeris looked into the Rift.
Inside, a thousand versions of herself stared back—some cruel, some broken, some still dying in timelines they couldn't escape.
One was screaming.One was smiling.And one—just one—was watching.
Aeris stepped closer. The garden pulsed around her. The pendant at her throat sparked, showing a brief image—
Kael kneeling before another her. A corrupted her. One who had sacrificed too much and never found her way back.
"She's not a remnant," Aeris murmured. "She's a living regret."
Behind her, Kael whispered, "She called herself the Spark."
Aeris's breath caught.
There was a legend among the Rift Walkers—one she'd dismissed.
A theory that every choice erased a soul version of yourself… but some didn't vanish. Some hid.
And one day, they might claw their way back, demanding to be remembered.
The Rift That Remembers.
The pendant shattered.
And the air turned cold.
From the open tear, the Spark stepped through again—calm, glowing softly, the mirror-eyed woman with Aeris's face and something deeper behind her voice:
"I didn't come to fight," she said.
Kael instinctively stepped in front of Aeris.
"I came to make her remember," the Spark whispered, eyes fixed on Aeris. "Because she's forgotten who she was before she met you. And if she doesn't remember soon... she'll die when the Rift resets."
Silence.
And then Aeris said the words that shifted the fate of their sanctuary:
"Then take me back."