There's a stench in time when it begins to rot.
You don't notice it at first. The air just tastes… metallic. Like rust crawling on the tongue of memory. But then the clocks stop agreeing with each other. Shadows move opposite to light. Your past starts breathing when your back is turned.
That's when you know—
Time isn't just broken.
It's being fed on.
And the one who feeds is near.
Ashvorn.
He came through the Riftstorm like a whisper dragging a coffin behind it.
The Convergence sky above us bled from violet to bone-white as he emerged—coalescing from fractured seconds and smeared causality. Every step he took twisted the ground beneath into unbirth. Stones forgot their shapes. Trees aged and wept sap older than stars.
And he looked at me as if I were his echo.
As if he'd already buried me once.
"I know that stare," I muttered, raising the Celestial Key.
Eirin moved to my side. Her moonform flickered with divine tension. "What is he?"
"Wrong," I said simply.
But Ashvorn smiled.
And that was worse.
He wore no armor. No crown. Only a robe stitched from timelines that had collapsed under his will. Fragments of broken futures hung like ornaments across his shoulders. A child's sandal. A blood-slick coronet. The last feather from an angel who begged for death.
And around his neck—
A pendant I recognized.
My own.
From when I was five.
"I knew you," Ashvorn said, his voice like hours crumbling into sand. "When you were nothing more than a trembling child whispering to shadows."
He stepped closer.
"And I remember," he added softly, "when you asked to become me."
My body froze.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
A flash—
A tower of mirrors.
A boy with bleeding palms tracing sigils into the glass.
A voice answering from the other side:
"Very well, little Sovereign. If you survive long enough, I will greet you at the end."
I fell to one knee.
Not from injury.
From weight.
My own past pressed against my spine like a verdict.
Ashvorn circled me.
"You don't remember it clearly, do you?" he said. "The ritual of eclipsed reflection. How you tore pages from forbidden tomes, burned the name your mother gave you, and carved your shadow into a tomb's ceiling."
I couldn't answer.
Not because he was wrong.
But because he was right.
I had done those things.
In desperation.
In madness.
In hope.
"I was only trying to survive," I whispered.
Ashvorn crouched before me. "And so you chose to become a parasite of fate. A mimic. A little ghost trying on the skin of a greater terror."
He placed a hand on my shoulder.
It burned like rot.
"But you failed," he murmured. "You didn't become me. Not fully."
Eirin tried to move.
But Ashvorn froze time around her.
And I watched her scream in stillness—
A silent, perfect moment trapped in a prison of seconds.
He turned back to me.
"You wanted power without understanding. And now you stagger through realities you don't yet deserve."
Then he leaned closer, and I smelled the void between days.
"But I do remember you, Aetherion."
His grin split reality at the edges.
"I remember the child who begged to be my heir."
I stood.
The Key in my palm pulsed.
A scream echoed through its core, and I knew it wasn't mine.
It was his.
Ashvorn had touched this relic before.
Perhaps in another era. Perhaps as someone else.
Perhaps... as me.
"No," I said.
The word felt heavier than iron.
"I didn't want to become you."
Ashvorn blinked.
I stepped forward.
"I wanted to undo you."
And with that, I struck.
The Key unleashed a tether of divine chronology, lashing out like a serpent made of moments. It struck Ashvorn across the chest—splitting his form into a thousand scattered versions of himself. Old. Young. Burned. Ascended. Broken.
But none of them screamed.
None of them died.
They simply watched me.
And in perfect unison, they whispered:
"You still don't understand. You were never chasing me."
The fragments converged—
"I was chasing you."
And then they re-formed.
Ashvorn stood untouched.
A wound in the concept of time.
The world buckled.
Reality twisted.
Kael and Lyra came through a breach behind us, weapons drawn. But they saw what I saw—
Ashvorn wasn't a person.
He was a possibility that had learned how to survive extinction.
And now, he stood here…
To claim me as his beginning.
"You are the one flaw I never consumed," he said. "The one ending I never wrote."
His eyes turned pitch-black.
"But I will."
I didn't run.
Instead, I smiled.
Because in that moment, the Celestial Key whispered something new:
"He is not the only one who remembers."
And behind Ashvorn, a second Rift opened.
A figure stepped through.
And my soul screamed.
Because it was me.
Older.
Colder.
Crowned.
He raised a hand.
And said:
"Enough, Ashvorn. This time… we end you together."
Ashvorn's face twisted—not in fear, but recognition.
The sky above shattered into starlit glyphs.
Time fractured like glass.
And all three of us—me, Ashvorn, and the Other Me—were dragged into a spiral of frozen worlds.
The Key burned in my palm.
Reality whispered:
"Choose your self… or lose them all."