They walked in silence for a long time.
The path before them was new. It curved, almost shyly, out of the fragments of the Liminal. It wasn't jagged or aggressive like the flame temple or the drowning coastlines. This one felt more like a worn road, built by someone who had walked it too often.
Kaero stayed a pace ahead of Aouli, his shoulders tense but unreadable. Gone was the easy swagger, the casual teasing. In its place was a man watching every movement of his own hands, every shift in his step, as if he were trying not to leave footprints.
Aouli felt it: a weight building. Not from the Liminal. From Kaero.
They reached a small rise.
Beyond it stretched a flat, endless field.
But this field wasn't natural. It was quiet. Too quiet. The air had no scent. The soil, no texture. The grass didn't move.
Kaero stopped.
Aouli almost ran into him.
"Something wrong?" Aouli asked gently.
Kaero didn't answer right away.
Then, with effort, he said, "We shouldn't be here."
"Why?"
Kaero didn't turn around. "Because this place remembers me."
The wind—what little of it there was—stilled entirely.
Aouli took a step forward, standing beside him now.
The field ahead began to ripple.
Grass bent and reshaped, forming symbols—lines of language that moved like smoke, glyphs etched with loss.
And then Aouli saw it.
A city rising in the distance.
Not growing—but remembering itself into being.
Metal towers, half-collapsed. Streets wound like spirals. Lights flickering inside buildings with no power grid. A skyline that shimmered with the hue of memory. Not quite real. But not illusion.
Kaero's world.
Or what was left of it.
Aouli felt the pressure settle in his chest. The same one he'd felt when Gaia had shown him her final breath.
He turned to Kaero.
"You never said—"
"Because I don't talk about it," Kaero cut in sharply. Then, more quietly: "Because I can't."
Aouli waited.
Kaero closed his eyes.
Then, as though a dam inside him broke: "I was there when it ended."
Kaero's Memory
The city drew nearer.
Kaero walked slower now, steps dragging like someone pulled toward a place he both needed and hated to see.
"My world wasn't Earth," he said. "But it was close. Advanced. Crowded. Resourceful. We fixed things faster than we broke them. Until we didn't."
He stopped beside a half-formed archway.
A child's swing hung from one side, dangling into void.
"We had a core beneath the capital. Tapped it for energy. Clean, endless power. Until the tectonics went soft."
A flicker of memory unfolded before them.
People running through streets as buildings cracked above them.
A woman standing on a balcony, holding a child with white eyes and braided hair.
Kaero's voice cracked: "That was my sister."
The woman vanished.
The child flickered, then faded.
Aouli didn't speak.
Kaero stared at the memory.
"She was the one who believed. Even when the sky broke, when the clouds turned metallic, when the ground peeled like skin—she said we could fix it."
His hand balled into a fist.
"She died on the third day. I lasted five more."
He laughed bitterly.
"Funny, isn't it? I always thought survivors were the lucky ones. But here I am. Alone."
The buildings ahead crumbled again.
The scene reset.
Again. And again.
"Is this what I am now?" Kaero whispered. "A walking monument to what couldn't be saved?"
Aouli stepped closer.
"No," he said. "You're not a monument. You're a map."
Kaero turned to him, confused.
"A map of what happens when we don't listen. When we run too fast. When we leave the dreamers behind."
Kaero looked away.
"I thought being numb would make it easier."
"It does," Aouli said. "But only if you're not walking with someone who remembers too."
The Liminal shimmered.
A new light broke across the skyline.
Not a sun. A beacon.
And within it, a doorway.
Kaero stared at it.
"I've seen that before," he murmured.
Aouli said nothing.
"On the last day. It opened in the sky. Thought it was hallucination. But it wasn't."
Kaero looked to Aouli.
"You walked through a door into life. I crawled through mine into aftermath."
A breath passed.
"I'm sorry," Aouli said.
Kaero shook his head. "Don't be. You didn't build my world. You're not here to undo it."
Aouli's gaze was steady.
"No," he said. "I'm here to carry it. With you."
Kaero gave a small, broken smile.
"Stars and roots, you're poetic."
"I learned from trees."
They both laughed—quiet, tired, but real.
The kind of laugh that belongs to people who've survived their own endings.