Night returned like a held breath.
They made camp beneath a stone overhang, fireless. Not for lack of wood, but because the stars had started watching again.
"They're blinking," Hiro muttered, lying on his back. "Like they know we're here."
"They do," Dee said. "Stars remember things. Especially broken things."
Vampher sat apart, clutching a piece of parchment. It wasn't written in ink, but in dreams. The paper shimmered softly, thrumming with the memory of the last lock.
None of them spoke of the child with no time.
Or the veil that bled rainbows when truth was spoken aloud.
The Fifth Lock had cracked something inward. A silence that echoed louder than screaming.
Moss shifted. Branches leaned. Even the wind crept quieter.
"We've crossed too many 'what-ifs,'" Dee finally said. "I'm not sure we're us anymore."
"I'm still me," Hiro offered. "I still hate raisins. I still wish I'd kissed Koro goodbye."
A pause.
"I still see him sometimes," he added. "In the space between blinks."
"You're still you," Vampher said quietly. "But the path is rewriting."
He looked up.
Above them, a single thread of sky unraveled—bright gold, unraveling like ribbon across black.
A countdown.
"Two locks left," Dee whispered. "And then the end."
"Or the beginning," Hiro said.
Vampher folded the dream-parchment, tucking it into his coat.
"No," he said. "After the seventh lock… there's choice."
They slept uneasily, guarded by shadows that once were gods.
And somewhere deep beneath the world, in a place where failed dreams sank like bones into sand, the Sixth Lock stirred—
—not with power,
but with regret.