There was no leap.
No fire. No collapse of body into ash. No dramatic shatter of glass.
Just awareness, pure, searing, and blinding. Elias didn't fall through time. He stood within it.
A place outside of everywhere, where time spun like a spiral galaxy and memory had weight. Infinite shards of the mirror orbited around him like satellites, each one reflecting a different version of himself. Some wore blood-soaked tunics. Others, lab coats. One wore nothing but a mask of bone and a look of quiet guilt.
He floated in the center of it all, unburnt.
"Congratulations," Rae said, but her voice came from everywhere and everyone. "You've skipped the tutorial."
Elias laughed. Then choked. Because the laughter sounded like the Watcher's now.
He turned slowly, weightless. A fragment of glass drifted close. Inside it, he saw himself, curled, fetal, as if about to be born. In another shard: Rae, smiling, holding a notebook with "Book One" scribbled on the front. Behind her? Professor Darwish.
"Why is he always watching?" Elias asked, half to himself, half to the everything.
"Because you're watching too," said a voice behind him.
He spun.
There stood Rae, but older. Eyes made of silver circuitry, veins glowing with cipher-light. She walked on the fractured glass without breaking it.
"You're not real," Elias said.
"No," she agreed. "I'm what happens if you leap again."
He stared at her.
"You mean if I do it consciously."
"If you do it completely."
Behind her, the shards began to shift, rearranging into a vast doorway of flame, the color of dying stars. It didn't open outward. It opened inward.
"You were meant to keep dying," she said. "It's the leap's fuel. It makes you forget. Makes you start over."
"But I remember everything now."
She nodded. "Exactly."
He stepped forward. The mirror shards trembled. The doorway beckoned, pulsing like a living thing.
"And if I go through that?" he asked.
"You don't become someone else," Rae said. "You become all of them."
Elias's breath caught. He looked down at his hands, then watched as every scar from every life began to reappear. Louvier's broken fingers. Kéon's ceremonial ink. That burn he got in the Red-Spiral City. Even the wound from Book One, the first leap.
The heart was not a muscle anymore. It was a map.
Rae stepped back.
"You don't have to go," she said softly. "But if you do, if you leap with your whole self—then this ends."
"What ends?"
"The recursion."
Elias looked again at the fragments. He saw every version of Rae. Every failure. Every reset. Every loss.
He was tired.
But more than that, he was ready.
He stepped into the flame.
It didn't burn.
It remembered.
Each memory lit up around him like constellations. The echo of his first leap. The cane fields. Marise's whisper. Darwish's laugh. Rae's touch. The first time he realized he was being watched. The first time he saw the cipher was himself.
He walked through flame, mirror, and flesh and did not die.
He stayed awake.
And then—
Nothing.
No sound. No light. Just a void with weight.
Until—
A voice.
"Elias?"
Not Rae.
Not the Watcher.
Someone…new.
A child?
No, older. Familiar.
"Elias, I've been waiting a long time."
And then his eyes opened, somewhere else.