The Garden was no longer behind them.
It had become a pulse. A memory. A distant resonance that echoed faintly as the three travelers stepped into the threshold of a realm where time did not unfold—it inhaled.
Orion, Kael, and Lyra now walked the edge of a dreamriver.
It shimmered with translucent current, flowing sideways across an impossible plain of suspended moments. Beneath its surface danced thoughts not yet born—fragments of desires, fears, and half-formed universes. Time here wasn't a thread. It was a tide.
"This place…" Lyra whispered, trailing her fingers near the current. "It's alive."
"Not just alive," Orion murmured. "It's aware."
Kael narrowed his gaze as a ripple passed through the river. For a heartbeat, his face reflected back—not as he was, but as he might have become: older, colder, crowned in iron and regret.
He turned away. "Let's not linger."
But the river did not agree.
A low hum rose from its depths—then burst into a scream of color. The dreamriver surged upward, forming spiraling shapes of light and intent. Figures emerged—echoes of the trio themselves, half-made and wrong.
Twisted Orions with eyes like broken stars.
Kaels who wore the armor of tyrants.
Lyras crowned with flame that consumed everything it touched.
The reflections stepped from the water and moved with purpose.
"They're not us," Lyra said, summoning her fire.
"No," Orion said, drawing his hand into a sigil of possibility, "but they're what we could've been if the seed had never been planted."
Kael didn't speak.
He simply charged.
Steel met memory. The false Kael fought with ruthless efficiency, as if it had trained not to protect, but to conquer. The two clashed along the riverbank, each strike shaking the very dream-stuff of the realm.
Lyra faced herself—a version of her drunk on flame, laughing as she burned entire futures just to see them scream. Their blades met in flares of violet and gold, sparks falling like stardust.
And Orion—he faced not a twisted self.
But many.
Each one a possibility he'd once refused. A king. A martyr. A hollow vessel. They surrounded him, each carrying the same voice as the Nameless but shaped by different endings.
"You can't protect them all."
"You should have chosen the blade."
"You are a contradiction. And contradictions unravel."
He raised both hands.
"Then unravel me."
The sigils carved into his skin shimmered, and his form fractured into a cascade of selves. For every shadow that struck him, a new version of Orion met it—each carrying a different strength, each echoing back the choice that defined him.
Not power.
But defiance.
And then—quiet.
The river calmed. The reflections faded, their substance unwinding back into the current.
Kael panted, bleeding from a gash along his ribs. "What was that?"
Orion knelt, watching the river spiral gently again. "It tests us. Shows us what might have been. If we break here, we never leave."
Lyra stared at her fading double. "And if we pass?"
"Then it lets us see what's next."
The water parted.
And a bridge rose.
Not stone. Not light. But woven from stories—each thread a world, a name, a sacrifice.
They crossed together, and as they did, the stars above bent inward. One constellation blinked out.
Orion looked up.
"They know we're coming."
Far ahead, past the river, a vast silhouette stirred. A city suspended in time, built inside the corpse of a forgotten god. Towers woven through bone. Streets paved with prayer.
Kael exhaled. "What is that?"
Orion's voice was quiet. "The Archive of the End."
And it was waiting for them.