The name tastes like iron and thunder on her tongue.
It shatters the chapel windows inward. Candles extinguish mid-flame. The stained glass overhead peels like old skin. Even time recoils.
The Watcher falls to one knee.
He bleeds—not red, but gold.
The kind of gold that memory uses to sew itself back together.
---
Cairos stares, stunned. "What… did you say?"
Haera's voice is calm, certain.
> "His real name. The one before he became the Watcher. Before he ascended."
Cairos looks between her and the creature writhing before the altar.
> "I didn't know he had one."
> "They all do," she replies softly. "Even gods start as someone."
---
The Watcher claws at his throat, his face still veiled in shadows.
> "You should not remember," he spits.
"You should not exist outside the script."
Haera steps closer, heart hammering, voice steady.
> "I don't follow scripts anymore."
---
And suddenly the air splits—a violent rift opening in the chapel's stone floor.
From the crack rises the history of the Watcher's truth:
A boy once loved a girl who was doomed.
He watched her die in every lifetime.
So he tried to rewrite the universe.
And in doing so, he broke it.
---
The vision engulfs the room. They are no longer in the chapel.
Now, they stand in a vast memory-scape:
A battlefield soaked in ash.
A palace wrapped in vines.
A burning sea.
A tower full of clocks.
Each version of the Watcher tried to save her.
And failed.
---
Cairos watches the memory unfold. "He was you."
Haera nods. "A different me. In a different time."
"But why did he become… this?"
The answer floats up from the broken echo like a ghost.
> "Because I couldn't stand to lose you again."
---
The Watcher—still glowing gold—begins to change.
His robes unravel into mist.
His shadow fades.
And beneath it, a boy no older than them kneels, trembling.
His eyes are haunted.
Not cruel.
Just tired.
---
Haera kneels before him. "You've punished us all because you couldn't forgive time."
> "I tried to control it so it wouldn't steal her from me," he whispers.
> "But control turned you into a monster."
---
Behind them, the blank ledger still glows, the pages fluttering in a wind that doesn't blow.
Cairos places his hand on it.
> "Then maybe you don't need to control it anymore."
---
Haera turns to the Watcher—no longer a god, just a boy called Solan.
> "Let go. Let us try."
---
The chapel reforms around them.
The rift closes.
And Solan, the once-Watcher, lays the last of his power into the book.
The ledger writes one final line:
> "The chains are broken. Let them love without end."
---
Solan disappears in a breath of stars.
And the memory of him lingers only in their veins — the ache of all the versions of love that tried, but didn't survive.
Until now.
---
Outside, the first snow of winter falls.
But Haera feels warmth blooming in her chest — a fire not from fear or death or fate, but from freedom.
Cairos laces his fingers with hers.
> "So what now?" he asks.
> "Now," she says, "we live the life we never got to finish."