The world looked the same.
Skyscrapers shimmered under a pastel sunset. Neon signs blinked lazily in the distance. Airships glided across a steel-blue sky, casting long shadows over floating markets. Children laughed somewhere below.
But Aeris couldn't breathe.
Because Kael wasn't in it.
She stood atop a rooftop in central Veyron City, the wind pulling at her coat. Her fingers trembled as she scanned her Memory Thread—a line of lived experiences, usually golden and vivid.
Now?
It was frayed.
Blackened.
Kael's name was a void where memories used to be.
Her powers flickered, unstable. She gritted her teeth and punched the concrete beneath her, cracking it like thin ice.
"If time forgets him, I won't."
Aeris activated her Rift drive. A blue interface bloomed in front of her, outlining Key Divergence Points—moments where timelines branched off.
One glowed blood red.
It read:"Kael never existed."
She touched it.
And fell.
She landed hard on a cobbled street. No futuristic architecture. No tech. Just gas lamps, horses, steam trains. A Victorian parallel.
A brass automaton marched by. "Evening, citizen."
Aeris ignored it.
She knew this place.
It was the first timeline Kael had ever saved her from.
Except here—he hadn't.
And that version of her was—
"Dead," whispered a voice behind her.
She turned.
A tall figure in black stood in the mist. His face was masked, but the voice—calm, clinical—felt like razors behind silk.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
Aeris raised her hands. "I'm looking for someone who was erased."
He tilted his head. "Then you're already breaking Rule One of Temporal Containment."
A badge gleamed on his coat: Paradox Guild.
She froze.
"I thought we destroyed you."
"We were never truly gone," he replied, stepping into the light. "We just evolved… like your friend Kael never did."
She lashed out, a whip of energy slicing toward him—only for it to pass through air.
An illusion.
The Guild had found her first.
And they didn't want Kael remembered.
She ran.
Down the alleyways of forgotten time.
Through graveyards of failed timelines, where memories hung like cobwebs on old lampposts.
Each corner whispered her name—but not his.
The world corrected itself without Kael.
People she'd saved with him were alive—but had suffered worse.
Heroes they'd trained never rose.
Whole cities were scarred.
And still, the world turned.
Aeris screamed into the night, her power cracking the sky.
"I don't care if he wasn't meant to be. I was meant to love him."
Lightning forked down in her rage.
And it worked.
For a second, reality rippled.
A glimpse.
Kael in chains—somewhere in a suspended pocket, suspended in fractured time, blinking in and out.
Eyes full of confusion.
And pain.
"Kael!" she shouted, reaching through the ripple.
But the image vanished.
The Forgotten's voice whispered again:
"He can't hear you, Aeris. Because you made him real. And I unmade him."
Her breath caught.
"Then I'll remake him. I'll break every law. I'll tear through time itself."
And the sky answered.
Because someone else was watching.
A robed figure appeared behind her—face hidden, hands glowing with Chrono fire.
"You want to bring him back?" they asked. "Then you'll need to commit a sin greater than rewriting fate."
Aeris turned.
"Who are you?"
The figure pulled back their hood.
It was Kael.
But older.
Wounded.
His eyes carried centuries of pain.
And he said the words she never expected:
"I'm the Kael who never met you. And I came back to stop you before you break the world trying to fix the one thing it couldn't hold."