Eraxis's POV
Power explodes through me like nothing I've ever felt.
Calla's soul slams into mine, and suddenly I'm not just Eraxis anymore. I'm us. We're something new—something that shouldn't exist. Guardian and Reaper, Life and Death, merged into one impossible being.
Through our fused consciousness, I feel everything she feels. Her fierce love for her father. Her terror at what we're doing. Her absolute trust in me.
And gods help me, I feel my own emotions reflected back through her perspective—how much I've already fallen for this brave, reckless, magnificent witch.
The merge completes in a heartbeat. Golden light erupts from Calla's body. Silver shadows pour from mine. They spiral together, forming a cocoon of power that makes reality scream.
When the light fades, we're still ourselves—but different.
Calla's eyes glow with both gold and silver. Her Guardian magic is amplified a thousandfold by my death-power. I can feel cosmic threads like never before—not just reading them, but understanding them on a fundamental level.
And I can feel time burning. Our life forces consuming themselves at impossible speed.
Ten minutes. That's all we have before the merge burns us both to ash.
Better make them count.
Theron stares at us, and for the first time, his confident smile wavers. "What—what did you just do?"
"Something you'll never understand," I say, but it's not just my voice. It's Calla's too. We speak in perfect unison, our merged consciousness thinking as one. "Love."
Then we move.
The speed is inhuman. We cross the distance to Theron in a blink, our combined power making us faster than any single Reaper could match. My shadow-blade meets his corrupted weapon, and the impact sends shockwaves through the fortress.
"Kill them!" Theron screams at the other Reapers. "Kill them now!"
The twelve Reapers attack as one. Shadow-blades slash from every direction.
We don't dodge. We don't need to.
Calla's Guardian magic forms a shield of pure golden light that my death-power reinforces with unbreakable shadow. The blades shatter against it like glass against steel.
Then we counter-attack.
Through our merged consciousness, Calla and I fight with perfect coordination. She reads the threads, seeing exactly where each Reaper will move before they do it. I execute the strikes with eight centuries of combat experience.
Three Reapers go down in the first five seconds. Not dead—we deliberately hold back from killing—but unconscious, their threads temporarily frozen by Guardian magic I never knew could be weaponized this way.
"Impossible," Theron gasps, backing away. "You shouldn't be this powerful—the merge isn't supposed to—"
"The merge has never been attempted between a Guardian and a Reaper Prince," we say together. "You're fighting something that's never existed before. Something your master never planned for."
We advance on him, and through Calla's Guardian sight merged with my Reaper vision, we see the truth of what he is—not just a traitor, but something worse.
His thread is corrupted. Just like Morvess's. The same black rot we saw on Aldwin's thread clings to Theron like a second skin.
"She infected you," I realize with horror. "Morvess poisoned your thread years ago. You're not working for her by choice—you're being controlled."
Theron's expression flickers—just for a second, I see the student I trained. The young Reaper who used to ask me endless questions about honor and duty. Then the corruption reasserts control and his face goes blank again.
"Clever," he says in a voice that isn't quite his own. Morvess is speaking through him, using him as a puppet. "But knowing won't save you. I have backup plans within backup plans, Eraxis. Did you really think twelve Reapers was all I sent?"
The walls explode.
Not just one wall—all of them. The entire Echo Chamber detonates inward, and through the gaps, I see an army. Hundreds of Reapers, all with corrupted threads, all under Morvess's control.
And at the center of the army, floating on a throne made of twisted thread, is Morvess herself.
"Hello, my dear students," she says warmly, like we're meeting for tea. "I see you've discovered the Thread Merge. How ambitious. How futile."
Through our merged consciousness, Calla and I feel a spike of pure terror. We're powerful—impossibly powerful—but we're not invincible. And we have maybe eight minutes left before the merge burns us out completely.
We can't fight an army. Not in eight minutes.
"Run," Aldwin shouts from behind us. He's pressed himself against the far wall, trying to stay out of the battle. "Calla—Eraxis—you have to run!"
"There's nowhere to run," Morvess says pleasantly. She gestures, and the corrupted Reapers close in from all sides. "The Twilight Veil is surrounded. My forces control every exit. And even if you could escape, where would you go? The mortal realm? I'll find you. Another realm? I'll hunt you. The Void Between? You'll die there faster than the merge will kill you."
She's right. We're trapped.
Through the bond—now impossibly deep from the merge—I feel Calla's mind racing. She's not panicking. She's thinking. Planning.
"The Loom," she thinks directly into my consciousness. "If we can reach the actual Loom of Time—the real one, not just echoes—we can do something. I don't know what yet, but my Guardian instincts are screaming that it's important."
"The Loom is in the Celestial Realm," I think back. "Morvess controls that realm. It's suicide."
"We're already dying. We have seven minutes left. At least this way, we die doing something that matters."
Gods, I love her. Even facing impossible odds, even knowing we're burning through our lives, she's still fighting. Still hoping.
"Together?" I ask through our merged thoughts.
"Always," she responds.
We make our decision in an instant.
Our combined power explodes outward—not an attack, but a massive wave of pure energy that throws every corrupted Reaper backward. Even Morvess's throne rocks from the impact.
In that moment of chaos, we grab Aldwin and do what should be impossible: we shadow-walk through dimensions while in merged form.
The strain is catastrophic. I feel our life forces burning faster, consuming themselves in great gulps. The merge that should have lasted ten minutes just lost two minutes from this one jump.
But it works.
We materialize in the Celestial Realm—the highest dimension, where the Loom of Time exists as a physical structure instead of just a cosmic concept.
It's beautiful and terrible. Infinite golden threads stretch across space like a massive tapestry, weaving in and out of reality itself. Each thread represents a life. Billions of them. Trillions. All connected, all pulsing with existence.
And every single one is being slowly poisoned by black rot.
"Oh gods," Calla whispers through our merged voice. "She's not planning to corrupt the Loom. She's already done it. She's been poisoning it for decades."
I can see it now through our combined vision—the corruption spreads from a central point deep in the Loom's heart. It's subtle, almost invisible unless you know what to look for. But it's there, eating away at reality itself.
"We're too late," I say, despair flooding through both of us. "Even with the merge's power, we can't repair this much damage. It would take years. Decades."
Aldwin stumbles forward, staring at the corrupted Loom with horror. "If this continues, what happens?"
"Reality collapses," we answer together. "Every thread unravels. Every life ends simultaneously. Existence itself just... stops."
"How long?" Aldwin's voice is shaking.
We examine the corruption carefully, reading the pattern of decay. The answer makes us want to weep.
"Three days," we say quietly. "Maybe four. Then everything ends."
Behind us, reality tears open. Morvess and her army are already following us.
"You can't escape me," Morvess's voice echoes across the Celestial Realm. "And you can't fix what I've broken. The Loom is dying, and with it, all of reality. I'll rebuild it from scratch—a new universe where I control everything. Where I am god."
Our merged consciousness races through options. We have maybe five minutes left before the Thread Merge consumes us. Five minutes to somehow stop centuries of corruption. Five minutes to save all of existence.
It's impossible.
Then Calla's grandmother's words echo through our shared memories: "Trust the bond. Love is the only magic that can rewrite destiny."
"Eraxis," Calla thinks to me urgently. "What if we don't try to fix the corruption? What if we do something else?"
"Like what?"
"The merge is consuming our life forces, right? Burning through our threads at incredible speed?"
"Yes. So?"
"So what if we redirect that burning? Instead of letting it consume us, what if we channel it into the Loom itself? Use our burning threads as fuel to purge the corruption?"
Understanding crashes through our merged mind. "A sacrifice. We'd burn ourselves out completely—not just our current life force, but our threads entirely. We'd be erased from existence."
"But the Loom would be purified," she thinks back. "Reality would survive."
Through the merge, I feel her absolute certainty. She's willing to die—to be erased from every timeline—if it means saving everyone else.
And I realize I'm willing to do the same.
Because somewhere in the last few hours, this brave, reckless, magnificent witch taught me what I'd forgotten: that some things are worth dying for. That love means sacrifice. That existing without purpose is just slow death anyway.
"If we do this," I tell her through our merged thoughts, "we die together. Our threads will be erased. We'll never have existed. Every memory of us, gone. We'll save reality, but no one will know we saved it."
"I know," Calla thinks back. "But we'll know. In whatever comes after. We'll know we chose love over fear. We chose sacrifice over survival. We chose to matter."
Aldwin must see something in our merged expression because his face goes pale. "No. Calla, no. There has to be another way—"
"There isn't, Papa." We turn to face him, and tears stream down our cheeks—both gold and silver. "But it's okay. You raised me to believe that doing the right thing matters more than doing the easy thing. This is the right thing."
Morvess's army breaks through into the Celestial Realm. Hundreds of corrupted Reapers materialize around us.
"Seize them!" Morvess commands. "I need the Guardian alive to study—"
We don't let her finish.
Our merged power explodes one final time. We pour everything—our love, our hope, our desperate determination—into the Loom itself. Our threads begin to burn, channeling that fire into purifying light.
The corruption screams as golden-silver fire races through the Loom, burning away the black rot.
"What are you doing?" Morvess shrieks. "Stop! You'll destroy yourselves!"
"We know," we say together one last time.
Then our threads ignite completely, and we begin to fade from existence.
But through our merged consciousness, we feel something impossible happening.
The Loom is fighting back.
It recognizes our sacrifice. Recognizes the pure love fueling our burning. And it does something that's never been done before:
It catches our falling threads and weaves them into something new.
The last thing we see before everything goes white is Aldwin screaming our names.
And Morvess's expression of absolute horror as she realizes we just won.