The rift pulsed like a dying star.Every heartbeat from it felt wrong — too deep, too slow, as if the universe itself had started breathing through the wound.
Riven stared at the hand reaching out of the breach. It was his hand, but colder — veins laced with light, joints made of steel and shadow.
"Step back," Riven warned."Who is that?" the boy whispered.
The voice came again, layered, echoing through the static-filled air:
"You know who I am. You just forgot."
The figure stepped out of the breach.For a moment, the timeline warped around him — time bent backward and forward, the ground itself flickering like old film.
He looked exactly like Riven. Same eyes, same scars — but with a calmness that was utterly alien. His body was half-organic, half-machine, humming with the rhythm of the algorithm itself.
"You…" Riven said quietly. "You're one of the echoes.""No," the other replied. "I'm the echo that refused to fade."
He walked forward, unhurried.The boy trembled but stood his ground.
"When the Chrono-Gate failed, your consciousness splintered. Thousands of versions of you died. But one of us learned. We survived in the algorithm, rebuilt ourselves out of data and guilt."
"And now?" Riven asked. "You came here to destroy me?""Destroy you?" The other smiled faintly. "No. I came to complete you."
The air around them distorted. Images bled into one another — cities burning, oceans frozen mid-wave, people screaming in silence. Every failed timeline was bleeding into the next.
"You're collapsing the layers," Riven growled."I'm merging them," the Mirror Riven replied. "Because the multiverse is infected — with you. Every world, every version, keeps trying to undo what you did. None of them move on."
He raised a hand. Circuits along his arm glowed like veins of lightning.
"You think you can save time, but all you do is repeat it. I'm ending the loop the only way it can end — by removing the root cause.""Me.""Us."
The boy stepped between them. "There's got to be another way!"
Both Rivens looked at him — one with pity, one with quiet despair.
"Kid," the real Riven said softly, "time doesn't care what we want.""No," the Mirror said. "But it remembers who broke it."
The two versions moved at once.Light and shadow clashed — one wielding fractured tech, the other raw chronometric energy. The sky itself screamed. Buildings bent sideways, sucked into the gravitational pull of paradox.
Each time Riven struck, he saw another version of himself die in the reflections — hundreds of possible outcomes collapsing like glass.
"You think killing me will fix it?" Riven shouted."It's not about killing," the Mirror answered, blocking the blow effortlessly. "It's about merging. We were never meant to be separate."
He pressed his palm against Riven's chest.A surge of pain — data invading memory, memory turning to code.
"Let go," the Mirror whispered. "You're the last fragment of a dying loop."
But through the agony, Riven saw something — flickering deep in the Mirror's core.A memory.
Lira's face.Tears in her eyes.And behind her — a younger Riven, building the Gate with her hand on his shoulder.
"You remember her," Riven gasped.The Mirror froze."She was never real," he hissed."Then why does it still hurt?"
For a moment, the world hesitated. The winds stopped, the suns dimmed, and even the signal fell silent.
And in that silence, the Mirror's voice broke.
"Because she was the only thing that wasn't a lie."
Riven took the chance.He triggered his device, channeling unstable chrono-energy between them. The air ripped apart, pulling both into the breach — collapsing timelines, folding inward like paper.
Before the world vanished, Riven looked at the boy one last time.
"If we don't make it back," he shouted, "find Lira's trace. She's the key. She always was!"
The breach exploded in blinding light.Then — nothing.
When the light faded, the city was empty again.Only the boy remained, standing amid the ruins.
His watch flickered once. A message appeared, written in Riven's handwriting:
"03:03 — Don't forget me."
And somewhere, deep in the void of fractured time, two versions of Riven Solas drifted — one human, one machine — both fighting to remember who they once were.