The gate loomed above them—an impossible structure, suspended in nothing, with no visible hinges or lock. Its surface shimmered like starlight rippling through water, and in its center pulsed a single glowing eye—closed, but breathing.
Aeris leaned against Kael, her energy flickering erratically. She hadn't spoken since the encounter with Eira. Her hands twitched as if reaching for something not there—something forgotten.
Dray approached the gate slowly, his runes beginning to react.
"This isn't just a door," he murmured. "It's a memory... carved into the universe."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "Then how do we open it?"
Dray reached into his satchel and pulled out a thin, blade-like shard of obsidian. "With the one thing older than time."
The shard pulsed in his palm, absorbing the echoes of Aeris's energy.
"She's the key," he said softly. "Because she holds fragments of what came before. Of the First Choice."
Kael looked down at her.
She was shivering—not from cold, but from something deeper. Her eyes met his.
"I remember it," she whispered.
Kael blinked. "What?"
Aeris's voice was distant. "The Gate. I've been here before… before I was born."
Dray pressed the obsidian shard into the eye of the gate.
It blinked open.
And the world dissolved.
They fell.
Not down, not up—but inward, spiraling through moments that weren't theirs:
Kael, as a child, standing in a field of dead stars, watching his mother walk away with a man whose face was blurred by shadow.
Aeris, in a cocoon of golden light, screaming as unseen hands pulled pieces of her soul apart and stitched them into something new.
Dray, standing before a tribunal of faceless gods, begging them to erase his magic.
Time collapsed. Sound bent. Meaning warped.
Then—
They landed.
The world around them was blank.
White, but not light.
Soft, but not silence.
They stood in a space between definitions.
Shapes flickered at the edge of perception. Not things, but possibilities—a child that might have been, a battle that never happened, a kiss never stolen.
In the center of it all was a figure.
Tall. Cloaked in threads of stardust and gravity. No face. No voice.
Only presence.
Kael instinctively stepped in front of Aeris. "What is that?"
Dray fell to one knee, eyes wide with awe.
"That," he said, "is the Echo of the First."
The figure moved—not walking, but shifting reality around it.
A voice echoed in their minds. Not spoken, but felt.
"You trespass not through space, but through the choice that birthed time."
Kael gritted his teeth. "We didn't come to trespass. We came for answers."
The figure's form rippled. Aeris stepped forward, weakly.
"I'm breaking," she said. "Something inside me... it's splitting apart."
"Because you were forged from contradiction," the voice said."Chaos and order. Light and ruin. You are not one... but many."
Dray looked up sharply. "She's an Echo construct."
"No. She is more. She is the knot that binds the breach."
Kael stared at Aeris.
"She's the reason the Rift exists."
The figure nodded.
"She is the anchor and the sword. She was born not to witness the end... but to decide if it should begin."
Aeris shook her head, tears in her eyes. "I never asked for this."
The voice softened.
"None who shape fate ever do."
Suddenly, the space shimmered, and around them the Gate of Origin revealed its true form:
An infinite web of every choice ever made—threads of fire, ice, blood, laughter, screams—all branching from one central point.
And in the center...
A flicker.
A glowing ember.
The First Choice.
The voice returned.
"Three stand at the edge of change.One bound by regret.One stitched by contradiction.One marked by blood not yet spilled."
"To pass, you must choose what was once unchosen."
A single strand of timeline unraveled before them—shimmering with Kael's blood, Aeris's light, and Dray's silence.
Aeris reached for it.
It burned.
Kael caught her hand.
And the voice asked:
"Would you end the cycle… or begin it again?"
The world trembled.
A new presence stirred beyond the gate.
Not Eira. Not Vaelen. Something older.
Watching.
Waiting.
Smiling.