The obelisk was gone.
In its place now stood a garden—if it could even be called that.
Time bloomed here.
Petals shimmered in fractal spirals, their colors shifting with every breath. Trees grew sideways, their bark etched with floating runes that told stories of futures yet to occur. Above, the sky was not sky at all, but a moving canvas of constellations, shifting, evolving—each star blinking in rhythm with Aeris's heartbeat.
The freed Aerises wandered this temporal Eden like ghosts regaining color. Some whispered in unison, others cried quietly at the sight of each other. They had once been alone, fragments adrift—but now they stood as one collective identity, reconciled.
Kael walked beside Aeris, one hand loosely at her back, as though afraid the moment might slip through his fingers.
"They're all… you," he said quietly, glancing at the glowing versions walking nearby.
Aeris gave a bittersweet smile. "Parts of me. Pieces I never knew I lost."
She turned and gazed upward, into the sky of breathing stars. "This place—it's healing us."
Kael felt it too. The pain of past battles, the scars left by timelines rewritten and wars unfought—it was all slowly untangling. Here, time forgave.
Then—an echo. A whisper.
Not spoken aloud, but felt in the marrow.
"Come deeper."
A pathway of starlight revealed itself at their feet, stretching through a valley of floating mirrors. Each mirror reflected not the viewer—but a possible self.
Kael saw versions of himself: one a soldier without mercy, one a father, one consumed entirely by the Rift's power, eyes glowing like suns. He paused before a mirror showing him as a child, sitting alone in the ruins of the Institute, holding a broken timewatch.
"I remember this," he muttered. "The day I swore I'd never be powerless again."
Aeris gently took his hand, her touch anchoring him. "You're not that boy anymore."
"No," he said. "But I still carry him."
They walked.
The deeper they went, the less their footsteps touched the ground. They floated, memories and thoughts shaping the space around them. Words they'd spoken in other lives whispered from invisible mouths. Forgotten glances passed between them in the air. At one point, Kael turned his head—and saw Aeris in all her forms, standing in a ring, watching silently.
And in the center—
—a new temple, rising.
Carved not from stone, but from possibility.
Its pillars glowed like polished obsidian laced with threads of golden chronology. Its doors were open, but within it stood a force they hadn't felt since the end of the war with the Architect.
The Temporal Warden.
Except… this wasn't the Warden they had known.
It was Aeris.
Or rather—an ascended version of her. Dressed in robes made of timeline strands, her eyes shone like twin galaxies rotating in sync.
Kael froze. "Is that…?"
"She's me," Aeris whispered, awe-struck. "The version who accepted the Rift and chose to protect all time."
The Ascended Aeris raised a hand and beckoned them inward.
They stepped into the temple.
Inside was silence—not absence of sound, but the kind of stillness that exists before a story begins. On a pedestal of swirling stardust hovered a device—small, spherical, pulsing.
"The Core of Continuance," said the Ascended version. "The last failsafe. If the timelines ever became too broken… this would rewrite existence. From the very start."
Kael's stomach dropped. "You mean… a hard reset?"
The Ascended Aeris nodded. "Yes. But now that Null is gone, and unity is forming between selves across realities… you two must decide. Do you activate it—and risk losing all you've gained? Or do you guard it—and trust in what you've rebuilt?"
Aeris looked at Kael. Her hand trembled in his.
He looked at the device—the weight of infinite futures cradled in its glow.
Then back at her.
"I choose you," he said. "No matter what future we face."
Aeris nodded, tears in her eyes. "And I choose to remember."
Together, they placed their hands over the Core—but instead of triggering it, they sealed it.
The Core vanished in a soft breath of light, scattering into the stars above.
From outside the temple, a surge of warmth poured into the garden. The fractured selves of Aeris, now whole, began to fade—not into nothing, but into her. Integrating. Completing.
And as the last of them dissolved into Aeris's form, a golden mark appeared at the center of her chest—a star-shaped sigil pulsing like a second heart.
Kael smiled. "You're whole now."
"No," Aeris said, turning toward him. "We are."
And for the first time in forever, the stars stood still—watching, waiting, blessing them.
Because in this rebirth, they had not rewritten time.
They had rewritten themselves.