I sprinted across what was left of the plain, if it could still be called that. The ground didn't stay still long enough to hold a name. Each step met something different — ash, stone, light, then nothing at all. The horizon was gone, swallowed by bending skies that looped and folded like silk caught in invisible currents.
I didn't stop running. Fragments of color spiraled in the distance, glowing faintly against the darkness. Smoke drifted upward in ribbons that refused to rise straight. And there, lying in the crater of what used to be a hill was a body…
Her armor shimmered faintly beneath a thin layer of dust, cracked like burnt glass. The symbols that once glowed across her gauntlets were dim, their light reduced to a pulse every few seconds — weak, but alive. I dropped to my knees beside her, every breath trembling with disbelief.
She was… familiar. I didn't know why. Her face, the shape of her presence — it struck something in my like déjà vu sharpened to pain. For a fleeting heartbeat, I saw another moment, her standing under a sky that wasn't broken, her eyes meeting mine with a calm I couldn't place. Then it was gone.
"Hey—hey, stay with me," I said, my voice hoarse. I reached out, brushing debris from her shoulder. "Can you hear me?"
A faint sound escaped her lips — half a breath, half a word. But before I could lean closer, the world paused. The silence was so complete it bent inward. Then suddenly, there came a voice.
"You've returned to witness your undoing, Souta"
I froze. The air thickened around me as if every second I had ever lived was being stacked on top of itself. I looked up.
Vescarion stood not far away, though "stood" was too stable a word for what he did. His form seemed to shift between realities, expanding and compressing with the rhythm of a collapsing universe. The light around him bent into rings, each one a distorted echo of time.
"The Unknown," I muttered, my voice low, defiant.
Vescarion tilted his head.
The world convulsed. The stars fell from the heavens but instead of descending, they twisted sideways, streaking across the atmosphere like raindrops sliding along the edges of an unseen dome. Some froze mid-fall, others shattered into clouds of burning dust that drifted upward.
The sky bent backward on itself, folding into layers — yesterday bleeding into now, tomorrow burning through today. I saw my own footsteps appearing before I made them. I reached forward, and my hand passed through a dozen versions of the same motion, each lagging behind the other by fractions of eternity.
The air liquefied. The ground rippled like molten clay, deforming under the pressure of time breaking its sequence. Mountains melted, then reassembled into towers that collapsed before they finished forming. Rivers flowed in loops, devouring their own sources.
Vescarion's wings unfolded — if they could be called wings, wide spans of inverted geometry that carried constellations within them, stars screaming as they were bent out of orbit.
"You stand in defiance of causality itself," the Unknown said, his voice vibrating through every version of me at once — past, present, and future.
My body trembled. My reflection appeared beside me, older, younger, and then both gone. The world flickered — frames out of order and I felt the impossible weight of being everywhere at once.
"I'm not here to chit-chat," I said through gritted teeth. "I'm here to end this."
The Unknown either smiled or perhaps it was the shape of a smile made of shadow and broken light. "There is no such thing as a good ending."
The stars above shattered completely. Gravity lost all sense of direction and importance. The Earth folded into itself like paper dipped in flame.
I didn't wait, I ran. The world beneath me refused to stay still. Time fractured around my steps; each footfall landed on a different version of the same terrain. The soil became sand, then glass, then nothing but the echo of itself. Behind me, Vescarion's presence bled through the air like a second atmosphere — oppressive, vast, conscious.
"Running," the Unknown murmured, voice rumbling through every direction at once. "How naive. The finite flees from the infinite."
I didn't look back. The distortion stretched my shadow in impossible directions — one version sprinting forward, another lagging behind, another collapsing mid-stride. The sky pulsed, folding inward, pulling stars down like falling seeds.
Vescarion extended a hand. Reality began to close around me, edges bending inward like a mouth ready to devour me—
And then it stopped.
A sound — faint, trembling, and holy rippled through the madness.
Eve was still there. Her body slumped where she had fallen, her breath shallow, her skin pale beneath the settling dust. She raised a trembling hand to the ground, tracing a half-broken cross with her own blood. Her voice came soft, cracked, yet radiant in its certainty:
"והם ניצחו אותו בדם השה ובדבר עדותם, ולא אהבו את נפשם עד מוות."
The air itself bowed to her words.
Each part of the chant left her lips like light breaking through a dying star. The verse did not echo — it resonated, vibrating through the broken world until even the distortion hesitated to breathe.
Vescarion turned.
His motion was not a turn so much as a redefinition — the fabric of existence folding to face her. His eyes, or what passed for them, were twin abysses of uncreation, reflecting not darkness but the absence of all meaning.
"You would still defy me in my dominion?" the Unknown said. The words didn't sound; they happened — like tectonic plates shifting beneath language itself.
Eve's lips trembled, but her gaze did not falter. The cross beneath her palm glowed — not like fire, but like memory rediscovering itself. "So you do fear Him," she whispered. "Looks like you are not so invincible afterall."
"Purification." she said, with every ounce of faith and determination.
The light flared.
It wasn't a burst, it expanded like the truth remembered by a dying world. The cross completed itself, and from it, threads of crimson and gold unspooled across the earth, weaving ancient scripture through the cracks of reality.
Vescarion stepped back in fear and recognition. The light clawed at the fabric of his form. For the first time since his awakening, the Unknown hesitated.
And in that pause — I looked back.
The glow reflected in my eyes, and something shifted in me.
Not awe, not terror. Something deeper — an ache that came from beyond memory.
Eve's face — bruised, faint, half-buried beneath dust looked up toward me, and for one impossible second, the distortion around her cleared. Her eyes opened. Not cold, not divine — just human.
And I immediately understood. My breath caught. The edges of my vision blurred, not from the chaos, but from recollection. The tilt of her voice, the way her presence steadied me before I even understood why — it all crashed into me like déjà vu sharpened to pain.
"...Kae?" I whispered.
The world answered before she could. The name alone broke the symmetry of everything around them. The past bent inward, the present quivered, and the future folded in anticipation — as though time itself had been waiting for that recognition.
Eve's — no, Kae's eyes softened. The faintest smile flickered through her exhaustion.
Vescarion's wings snapped open, tearing through the clouds. The sky screamed, but the light of the blood seal refused to yield.
"You cannot defy MEEEE!!" the Unknown thundered, fury distorting his voice into layers of reality. "No! It is not possible!! How?!"
The light expanded, forming a barrier that forced him back — a cross of living brilliance etched into the collapsing sky. Kae's hand trembled, her strength failing, but her voice carried one last echo, steady and filled with unearthly calm:
"How... not?"
The symbol blazed brighter than anything I had ever seen. The distortion cracked. The Unknown recoiled — not defeated, but pushed. His form folded into the horizon like smoke retreating from sunlight.
I shielded my face, shouting her name —
"KAE!"
But the light answered in her place. The radiance swallowed everything.
I stood there, surrounded by a world trying to remember its shape, my heart pounding against a truth too heavy for words.
She wasn't Eve.
She was Kae.