*Narration – Belenus**
The door opened…
And eternity blinked.
Reality didn't shatter—it *questioned* itself. The threshold between what *was*, what *could have been*, and what *should never be* collapsed into one bleeding horizon. What lay beyond wasn't a world in the conventional sense—it was a fracture in meaning, a wound carved into the flesh of fate itself.
A place where paradoxes *lived*.
Where memory and oblivion kissed.
Where gods went to die, and worse… to be *forgotten*.
We stepped forward as three.
Lunadora, her eyes silver galaxies in motion, radiant and resolute—a symphony of moonlight clad in godsteel threads.
Solnaria, our daughter of starlight and soulfire, glowing with an aura that shimmered like future-dust. Her very breath resonated with primordial memory, as if the multiverse whispered through her every heartbeat.
And me—Belenus, no longer just the Timelost Phoenix. I was the **Chrono-Ember Sovereign**, flame harmonized with causality, a sovereign of shattered time and burning truth.
Together, we descended into the beginning of the *end*.
---
### **Location – The Rifted Epoch, Layer One: The Forsaken Verge**
It greeted us like a dirge.
The **Forsaken Verge**—first layer of the Rifted Epoch, a realm where orphaned timelines came to rot. Its skies spiraled in reverse. Trees bled ash. Gravity buckled. Echoes of extinct worlds layered over each other like discarded dreams.
Mountains floated sideways, tethered by iron thoughts. Lakes burned with frozen flame. The ruins of entire civilizations—both organic and mechanical—coexisted in disharmony, frozen mid-collapse, as if time had forgotten how to finish their stories.
We walked carefully—each step echoing with centuries.
Then we *felt* it.
A hum.
A hunger.
The Rift was aware.
And it *responded*.
---
### **Wave One – The Riftborn Wretches**
They came in silence.
Not creatures. Not people.
**Riftborn Wretches**—once-souls, now corrupted by the temporal infection of the Rift. Their bodies spasmed between forms—one moment human, the next draconic, the next Titanic, the next nothing at all. Limbs from timelines that never existed. Faces that wore my scars and Lunadora's sorrow.
> "Time-infected entities," Andarta whispered into my neural resonance. "Causality unsynchronized. Threat level: Eroding Reality."
They didn't breathe. They *echoed*.
Their screams didn't make sound—they made **static** in existence.
Lunadora unsheathed her void-silver glaive, the Moonrender. With each stroke, she sang a forgotten lullaby of ancient moons. Her cuts were clean—ripping wretches apart with compassion and precision.
I unleashed my chrono-flame in wide arcs. Fire that didn't just burn—it **healed** broken timelines in its wake, searing entropy and restoring form for an instant before the targets were annihilated.
Solnaria…
She didn't fight.
She walked *through* them.
Reality shimmered around her steps. Her aura dissolved the corrupted with harmonic pulses. Stars coalesced at her fingertips, weaving time-threaded melodies that unraveled their unstable forms with gentle grace.
> "Why do they cry?" she whispered.
> "Because they remember being *real*," Lunadora answered.
When the last fell, the Verge sighed.
But the Rift had more to say.
---
### **Wave Two – The Echo Sovereign**
He emerged like a prophecy unspoken.
**The Echo Sovereign.**
He was… me.
Or rather, the **version of me that never found peace**.
Clad in scorched obsidian armor laced with crimson filament. A crown of solar bone crackled atop his head. His eyes—my eyes—held no warmth, only the fracture of infinite regret.
This was Belenus from a timeline where Lunadora had perished.
Where Solnaria had never been born.
Where wrath became religion.
> "I am the Belenus that *conquered*," he spat. "The Phoenix who burned *everything* until silence was all that remained."
> "You are the Belenus who *never* healed," I said, stepping forward. "The one who mistook vengeance for purpose."
He attacked without warning.
Our flames met in an implosion of light and time.
He was fast—faster than light, bending entire seconds into weapons. His fire screamed with abandonment. His punches came with the weight of extinct stars. But I was not his equal.
I was his **balance**.
I fought not to defeat, but to *liberate*.
My flames danced with Lunadora's lunar current. Her presence became a tether of harmony. And together, we formed the **Solarum Noctura Spiral**, a vortex of synchronized love and destruction.
Still, he fought on—until I saw it:
A tear.
A single tear falling from his left eye—one he didn't know he had left.
And in that moment, I stepped *through* him—not to strike, but to **embrace**.
Time slowed.
We burned in each other's memory.
Then he collapsed into light, whispering:
> "Love her… better than I did."
And he was gone.
---
### **Narration – Solnaria**
*When Father saw himself fall, a part of him mended.*
*When Mother wept as the Rift stilled, a star was born.*
And I?
I heard **Her**.
A voice that did not belong to time, or fate, or even truth.
It called me not by title.
But by **nature**.
> "Daughter of Starlight and Flame. You are more than heir—you are anchor."
It named me:
**Epochborne**.
And through the veil of the Rift, I *saw* Her.
Not a beast. Not a god.
But a **weaver**.
A being of threads and memory, eyes formed from dying galaxies.
She waited in the storm to come.
---
### **Final Scene – The Tower of Entropy, Layer Two Looming**
There, at the far edge of the Forsaken Verge, it stood like a divine accusation:
**The Tower of Entropy**.
It was not built of stone or steel—but of *choices that were never made*. Its walls trembled with regret. Its stairs climbed sideways, sometimes backward. Its surface rippled with scenes of lost possibilities.
A million paths converged in that monolith. A beacon. A trial.
And a warning.
Solnaria extended her arm, her palm pulsing with the music of all that still *could be*.
> "This is where the real climb begins."
> "What if we're not ready?" Lunadora asked, gripping my hand.
I turned to them both.
> "Then we become ready. Not because destiny demands it… but because we chose to."
And as we ascended the first impossible step, the Verge behind us collapsed into stardust.
The Rift roared.
And the battle for the **Rifted Epoch** truly began.