(If you stare long enough at a god, they start to look like you.)
The train dissolved into nothing.
Not a tunnel. Not a station. Just a blank stretch of starlit silence.
Kai blinked—and suddenly, they were standing in a field of mirrors. Each one cracked. Each one whispering. Each one reflecting a version of them they hadn't become yet.
A Kai with wings and no eyes. An Elio with fire instead of skin. A Serai made entirely of scars.
Elio turned slowly. "Where the hell are we?"
"Not where," Serai said. Her voice trembled. "When."
A voice answered from everywhere at once:
"You are between. Before your choices. After your regrets."
They turned—instinctively—to where the voice came from.
But there was no body.
Just a quill.
Suspended midair.
Dipping itself in blood.
And writing in the sky.
"They're watching," Serai breathed. "The Watchers. The ones who took notes."
Kai took a shaky step forward. "What are they writing?"
The quill stopped. Turned. Pointed at him.
And the sky lit up with words:
"He broke the first loop out of love.""He'll break the second out of guilt."
Kai's heart punched his ribs. "I never wanted to be chosen."
"You weren't," the sky replied. "You were recorded."
The mirrors shifted.
One showed the moment Kai and Elio first met in their second life—behind a marketplace fire. Another showed Serai poisoning a king to save a girl with raven wings.
Another—
Showed the Dreamer.Alive.But… older. Alone. Scribbling in a void made of books and sorrow.
Serai gasped. "She's not gone. She's writing too."
Elio turned to the others. "This isn't heaven. It's a library made of gods."
Kai clenched his fists. "Then who reads the stories?"
A ripple passed through the field.
And they appeared.
Five figures. Cloaked in parchment. Faces hidden behind blank masks made of old spell paper.
Each had a different ink dripping from their fingertips—gold, silver, rust, shadow, and blood.
The Watchers.
They didn't speak with mouths.
They spoke in rewritten memories.
Kai's mother alive. Elio never burning. Serai crowned queen. A world that never looped.
Serai fell to her knees. "They're offering us... better versions."
Elio's voice cracked. "They're lying."
Kai whispered, "They're editing us."
One Watcher stepped forward—the one with silver ink.
It touched Serai's cheek.
And she gasped as a memory rewrote itself inside her: a child she never had, now laughing in her arms.
"Make it stop," she sobbed. "Please—make it stop."
Kai grabbed her, yanked her back. "Don't let them archive you."
Elio shouted, "Why are you doing this?!"
The Watchers all turned.
And a single phrase echoed across the mirrors:
"We are bored gods. And your suffering is art."
The sky fractured again.
And one Watcher dropped their mask.
Beneath it—Kai's face.
But older. Crueler. With eyes made of shattered clocks.
"You looped us into being," the False-Kai said. "You fed us every version of yourself. Every rewritten page."
Kai shook his head. "No. No, I—"
"You're not the victim," the god sneered. "You're the author who forgot he was writing."
Elio screamed. Lightning burst from his palms. Mirrors shattered.
But it only made the gods laugh.
The Watchers circled now, pages of burning prophecies spiraling around them.
One of them whispered:
"Break the next loop. Or become us."
The ground fell away.
Again.
And Kai, Serai, and Elio were falling through pages—through every version of their story ever told. Every kiss. Every betrayal. Every death. Every dream that didn't make it to the end.
Until—
They hit the ground in a ruined chapel.
Back in the real world.
Alone.
Bruised.
Breathing.
And branded.
The mark on Kai's chest had changed again.
No longer a mirror.
Now a quill crossed with a burning hourglass.
Elio crawled toward him. "What did they do to us?"
Kai stared at the sky—where words were still writing themselves in fading smoke.
"This is your final draft."
Kai couldn't breathe.
The ground still pulsed with every echo of the Watchers' laughter.Reality felt paper-thin. Like one wrong word, one stray thought, would tear it all open again.
Elio staggered toward him, sweat beading on his temple. "They didn't just rewrite the past…"
Kai met his eyes. "They rewrote us."
Ten Minutes Earlier — Inside the Fall
As they fell through the Archive-Sky, time wasn't linear—it was liquid. The air shimmered with phantom sentences, half-finished chapters of lives they could've lived.
Kai saw his hands wrapped in wedding bands, Elio wearing a crown, Serai kneeling before a god she once killed.
For a moment, the temptation was almost holy.
And that's when she returned.
Anelle.
Not the Dreamer.
But her echo.
Her shadow stitched itself across the blank pages falling around them.
"You broke me," she said, voice like torn parchment. "So I became script."
Serai screamed as the shadow sliced past her. "She's bleeding into the story!"
Anelle's ink-laced fingers reached toward Elio, smearing a future that never belonged to him.
"I'll write a new one," she hissed. "One where you beg to forget me."
Kai threw himself between them.
The sigil on his chest lit up—burning gold, resisting the rewrite.
For a flicker of a second, everything paused.
And Kai spoke into the story:
"No more gods. No more puppeteers."
Back in the Chapel
The words vanished from the sky. The gods? Silent.
But something else started ticking.
A clock.
No—a countdown.
Right on Kai's wrist. Burned into his skin.
72:00:00
Elio gasped. "What's it counting down to?"
Serai stepped back, face pale. "The final loop."
Kai clenched his jaw. "They're giving us one last draft."
"But if we mess it up," Elio whispered, "we don't get to come back."
Elsewhere—The Watchers' Domain
The five gods hovered over an hourglass filled with black sand. One turned to the others and muttered:
"They still believe they have free will."
Another replied, laughing:
"Let them. It makes the ending sweeter."
The blood-quill dipped again.
But this time, it hesitated.
In the void, where words are born and destroyed, a page began to burn itself.
It read:
"I will not be written."– Kai Valen, First Flame, Last Draft.
Elsewhere Elsewhere—In the ashes of Ilyor
A girl with silver eyes opened hers for the first time in centuries.
She looked at her palms—clean now, but marked.
She didn't know her name.
Only a phrase looped in her head:
"They promised I'd never be forgotten."
She smiled bitterly.
And started walking toward the city.
Back with our trio…
They lit a fire in the chapel's broken hearth. None of them spoke at first.
Then Kai said it:
"We have three days."
"Three days to what?" Elio asked.
Serai answered, eyes flickering gold:
"To write the ending."
Kai looked at the night sky above, now clear, calm—deceptively quiet.
"No," he said. "To rewrite it."