The Novaah compound groaned under pressure—not physical, but metaphysical. The kind of weight that came when something erased returned to existence.
Skyler stood at the center of the flame-wrecked chamber. Breath shallow. Glyphs glowing across his spine, chest, and hands. His fourth seal now branded and alive.
Beside him:
Aelira.
No longer a flicker.
No longer a whisper in sleep.
She was real.
Saya stared in disbelief. "That's… impossible. You were sealed in Timeline Eleven—your entire existence collapsed with it."
Aelira tilted her head, her eyes shining with remembered eternity.
"I wasn't destroyed," she said softly. "I was compressed. Folded into the Fourth Seal as a failsafe. Mother placed me there with her last trace of divinity."
"Skyler's awakening brought me back."
Orias stepped forward, hand trembling over his glyph-sensor.
"Then you are more than a Witness," he whispered. "You are the bloodline backup. The hidden flame."
Aelira nodded. "I carry the fragment of what the gods stripped away."
"What the Novaah line used to be."
The room fell silent.
Skyler turned to Orias, voice low and shaking.
"You said our bloodline was cursed. Suppressed. That we were reduced to normal humans to avoid multiversal extinction."
"But if Aelira carries the fragment of what we were…"
He looked down at his hands—flames curling, symbols shifting.
"Then what am I becoming?"
Orias answered, voice grim:
"Something they thought impossible."
"A True Witness with divine memory in unsealed form."
The Book of Recalled Flame flipped again.
A prophecy page revealed itself:
"When the flame returns to flesh, and the sealed blood walks once more—
The Archive shall burn, and the gods shall forget they were ever gods."
Aelira turned to her brother, gaze steady.
"Skyler… we're not human anymore."
"We're what comes after memory."
At that moment, a pulse rippled through the multiverse.
Across the stars:
Witness-Hunter ships turned toward the Novaah coordinates
One of the chained Seals in deep memory-space rattled free
In the Mirrorverse, Skyler's other selves began to awaken—each one flickering into awareness
And in the center of it all?
Skyler and Aelira, standing side by side, flame curling at their feet, their blood no longer whispering—but roaring.
They had crossed the threshold.
And now… the multiverse would have to reckon with a bloodline that remembered everything.