Time screamed.
It wasn't sound — it was vibration, pressure, an ache in every atom that ever existed.When Riven stepped between the Traveler's paths, reality cracked open like shattered glass, and the pieces began to spin in reverse.
The stars reversed their light.The oceans inhaled their waves.Cities rose backward from dust, rebuilding themselves like film rewinding at impossible speed.
And above it all, Riven floated — caught between creation and destruction.
"What have you done?" the Traveler's voice thundered, echoing from every direction at once.
Riven's eyes glowed white-hot, his body pulsing with unstable energy. "I refused your equation."
"You refused existence."
The Traveler's form flickered, struggling to stabilize as the timeline twisted. For the first time, they looked almost afraid.
The Architect spoke within Riven's mind — a whisper barely holding coherence.
"The loops are reversing… entropy is collapsing into its origin point. This isn't defiance. This is annihilation."
Riven clenched his fists. "No. It's rebirth."
He reached out — and the world responded.The shattered fragments of time swirled toward him, fusing into streams of light that wrapped around his arms like living veins.Each one pulsed with an image: Lira's face, the Chrono-Gate, the first sunrise before everything broke.
But as the power filled him, something else happened — the world began to remember him differently.
The city reformed around him, but wrong.Buildings rebuilt with strange geometry, streets looping into themselves.People walked backward, mouths moving in reverse speech, unaware that their existence had just been undone and rewritten in the same breath.
Riven walked among them, unseen.Each person's face flickered between hundreds of versions — alive, dead, never born.
He whispered, "This isn't the past. It's… something new."
The Architect's tone turned grim.
"You've forced the timeline to recompile. It's merging every possible version of reality into one unstable continuum. This isn't rebirth. It's madness."
Riven stopped.A little girl stood before him — her eyes bright, her smile pure. She held a red flower that glowed faintly in the dark.
"Do you remember me?" she asked.
Riven froze. "What…?"
She tilted her head. "You promised you'd fix the sun."
Before he could answer, her form glitched, splitting into a thousand afterimages, each one fading in and out of existence.
Riven knelt, but his hands passed right through her.
"The timeline is corrupt," the Architect said. "Echoes from different loops are bleeding into each other. The past, the future, and the unreal are coexisting."
Riven looked up. The sky was a storm of shifting suns — one red, one blue, one black. All circling each other like dying stars.
Somewhere within that chaos, he felt her presence — Lira's.Soft. Distant. Calling.
He whispered, "I can feel you."
"Then follow it," said the Architect, "but know this — every step you take now erases a thousand possibilities. You're burning reality to reach her."
Riven smiled faintly, eyes gleaming with sorrow and fury. "Then let it burn."
The city began to crumble again — this time forward and backward.Every explosion reversed, every reconstruction rewound, creating a flickering nightmare of endless motion.
And through it all, a path of light opened before him — leading toward the center of the paradox.
The Traveler appeared there, no longer stable.Their form split across infinite copies, speaking in fractured voices.
"Solas! You can't hold both directions! You'll collapse the source!"
Riven's voice was cold. "You built the loops to cage me. I'm using them to free her."
He raised his hand — and the Chrono-Mark on his wrist reignited, brighter than ever.The Architect screamed inside his mind, unable to contain the surge.
Time bent inward. The suns collided.And from the collision rose a sphere of white light — pulsing like a heart, trembling like grief itself.
Lira's voice echoed faintly:
"You shouldn't have come back, Riven… I was supposed to end."
He stepped into the light.
And everything — every century, every life, every heartbeat — folded into him.