The timeline they stepped into was dust and echoes.
A hallway of shattered clocks stretched for miles. Walls peeled like old parchment, time bleeding from cracks in amber pulses. The scent of rusted memory filled the air—a silence too heavy to be natural.
Kael stepped lightly, the golden residue of his power leaving fading footprints behind him. "This place… it's been erased."
Aeris hovered just above the broken floor, her silver aura pulsing softly to keep them anchored. "It wasn't destroyed. It was... forgotten."
He turned to her sharply. "Forgotten by who?"
That's when the clocks began to tick again. Slowly. Mockingly.
Tick… tick… tick…
Then, laughter.
Not loud. Not booming.
Worse.
Familiar.
A child's giggle—distorted, stretched like old film tape. It echoed behind the walls, inside the clocks, inside them.
Kael clenched his fists. "That laugh—"
"—was in your visions," Aeris finished, eyes wide.
The air twisted, and from the end of the hall, a figure crawled from a tear in time.
It didn't walk.
It glitched.
One second it was crawling.
Next, it stood perfectly upright.
Then backward.
Then still.
The Forgotten.
Skin like smudged ink. Face fractured, repeating Kael's expressions in loops—anger, hope, pain—like stolen memories stitched into flesh.
"You left us," it croaked in a voice that sounded like ten thousand Kaels all speaking out of sync.
Aeris stepped forward. "Who are you?"
"I am the time you erased to save yourselves," it said. "I am the heartbeat Kael never had. The breath Aeris never took. I am what happens when you choose."
Kael whispered, "It's not a parasite."
Aeris's eyes narrowed. "It's a timeline. Alive."
The Forgotten spread its arms, and realities shattered outward like feathers. A hundred versions of Kael and Aeris—dead, broken, lost—rained around them in translucent holograms.
"I was born when you rewrote time to be together," it whispered. "And now, I am the consequence you can't rewrite."
The sky above the hallway peeled away, revealing a massive network of broken timelines—floating in a shattered orbit like a graveyard of choices.
Aeris floated up, eyes glowing fiercely. "You don't scare us."
The Forgotten laughed again. "I don't need to scare you. I need to remind you."
It snapped its fingers.
And Kael vanished.
Aeris screamed, spinning midair—but all around her, the clocks shattered and rebuilt.
Kael was gone.
Not just physically.
Erased.
No trace in her timeline.
No memory in the Rift.
Not even her power could locate him.
Aeris trembled. "No."
The Forgotten stepped closer. "You made him real by loving him. So I made him unreal by unmaking what you chose."
And with that, it vanished into a crack of red lightning.
Elsewhere.
Kael gasped.
He woke in a forest of frozen possibilities, trees made of broken watches and leaves ticking down to zero.
He clutched his chest.
He didn't remember Aeris.
Didn't remember who he was.
All he had was a whisper in his mind—a voice made of starlight and sorrow:
"Come back to me."
And far away, deep in the bleeding time-wounds of the multiverse, Aeris whispered the same words aloud—
"I'll find you. No matter how long it takes."