In the darkness, I meet… myself. Aetherion from a past life. Still alive. Still mad.
They told me Seris had vanished.
That was the first lie.
The second came on the wind, whispering her name through the iron trees just outside the citadel. I'd only stepped out to clear my thoughts—to breathe—but the world shifted around me like paper folding into fire. One blink. One step too far from the wards. That's all it took.
Shadows poured from the cracks between the light.
They didn't move like darkness should. They sang. In a language older than time, they wound themselves around my limbs—not binding, no. Inviting. And Seris's voice came with them, soft as snowfall:
"Come find the truth you buried, Aetherion."
Then I was gone.
It's hard to describe the Realm Between Realms.
It's not a place. It's the absence of all places. A liminal fever-dream. A wound in space that never heals. Gravity breaks here. Light forgets how to behave. My thoughts echoed before I could think them.
Seris was waiting.
Her eyes glowed with pale, mirrored gold—the same hue I once saw in my own reflection, before the Rift rewrote me. She stood barefoot on a staircase that led nowhere, surrounded by fragments of memories that didn't belong to me... but still hurt like they did.
"You kidnapped me," I said.
She tilted her head, studying me with all the patience of a dying god. "No," she said. "I reminded you."
She lifted a hand.
The Realm responded.
A thousand doors tore open in the air around us. They hovered, unhinged and rotting, each revealing a sliver of a life I never lived: Aetherion as a tyrant. Aetherion as a martyr. Aetherion burning worlds in the name of love.
"No," I whispered. "That's not me."
"Not yet," she murmured. "But the moment is coming. And you're not ready for it."
We walked—if it can be called walking—through cascading corridors that bent backwards into themselves. One moment I was behind her. The next, beside. Then beneath. I stopped trying to orient myself.
"Why show me this?" I asked. "Why bring me here?"
Seris didn't answer right away. She only led me deeper.
Each step pulsed with remembrance. Time didn't move here. It bled. And the further we descended, the more I could feel... him. Like a whisper behind my heartbeat. Like a scream behind a lullaby.
My own soul began to itch.
Seris finally stopped in front of an obsidian mirror. It was cracked down the center, leaking liquid memory—not blood, not glass, not reflection. Something in between.
"This is the fracture," she said.
"The what?"
"The point where you diverged. The path you never walked. The version of you that refused the Rift... and went mad."
I staggered backward. "You're lying."
"I wish I were." Her voice trembled. It was the first real emotion I'd seen from her. "He's still alive, Aetherion. Trapped. Starving. Waiting. And worse—he remembers everything you've forgotten."
I wanted to run. But the Realm doesn't allow escape. It only allows revelation.
The mirror pulsed.
And then it spoke.
Not with sound. But with recognition. I felt him before I saw him. That heartbeat. That cadence. That ancient guilt I buried in a timeline that should have died but didn't.
A face leaned through the mirror. My face.
But older.
Gaunter. Shadowed. And smiling with a madness so bright it hurt to look at.
"I remember you," he said.
I couldn't speak. My voice had vanished. My thoughts had turned to salt and blown away in the storm of him.
"I remember the first scream," he continued, tapping the mirror with one skeletal finger. "The way the Rift peeled back my mind like wet parchment. You walked away. You forgot. But I held on."
He pressed his forehead to the glass. "You abandoned me."
"I didn't—" I tried. "I didn't know—"
"You never know," he hissed. "That's your gift. That's your curse. You always arrive late to your own funeral."
I turned to Seris. "Why bring me to him? Why now?"
She wouldn't meet my eyes. "Because he won't stay contained for much longer. And when he breaks free, he won't be you anymore. He'll be the worst version of us all. The sum of every ruined choice. The god of unmaking."
"And what do you expect me to do?" I asked.
Her answer was simple. Terrible.
"You have to kill yourself."
The Realm Between Realms began to shudder.
The mirror cracked further. Blood—my blood—dripped from the frame. And the other-me started laughing. A laugh that knew every secret I hadn't discovered yet. A laugh that loved me just enough to destroy me properly.
"You're not ready," he whispered, voice melting into the dark.
And as I reached toward the mirror…
He reached back.
My fingers brushed the glass.
And the Rift split open.
Suddenly, I was inside.
Inside him.
Inside me.
And then I heard it.
"Welcome back," said my voice.
"I've been waiting a long, long time to kill you."