The sky burned red.
Not the warm red of dusk or the romantic tint of twilight — this was a cruel, bleeding red. Like the world had been cut open, and reality was hemorrhaging through the cracks. Cities lay in ruin. Towers that once kissed the clouds now bowed like broken ribs poking through the skin of the earth.
Kael stood alone at the edge of what used to be Seoul. Dust clung to his tattered coat, ash painted his face like war paint, and his eyes — dull, tired, ancient — watched as the last Rift pulsed in the distance.
It throbbed like a heartbeat from another world.
Around him, the corpses of monsters and men blurred together, equalized in death. His sword — if it could still be called that — was cracked and melted, fused with the last weapon he stole from a dying world. His left arm didn't respond anymore. It had been gone for weeks. Phantom pain lingered, like a sick joke his nerves hadn't let go of.
He wasn't a hero.
He was just... what was left.
Kael didn't scream when the sky cracked open. He didn't panic when the oceans boiled or when the suns — yes, plural now — collided above. Because it had all happened before. In dreams. In visions. In moments he could never fully recall, but always knew were real.
A girl's face haunted him.
Not because she died — but because he forgot her name.
And that terrified him more than death.
He stumbled forward as the Rift rippled again. The wind carried whispers — thousands of them. Some were his. Others weren't. Kael no longer knew which voice belonged to this version of himself.
He had failed.
He had seen it coming.
And still, he failed.
"Maybe this was never my story," he whispered, kneeling as the earth began to tear itself apart.
He could feel it now — the moment time would collapse. Like an ocean wave, memory surged toward him. But not just from this world.
A flood.
Another kael. Another world. Another kael.
His last thought before the Rift consumed everything was not of salvation or glory. It was simple.
"Don't forget her again."