Understanding.

I found myself in my own memories…

My voice, ragged, desperate in warning.

Haruto turned, too slow—

The girl, his daughter Chiyo convulsed in his arms, her laughter breaking like glass as her skin cracked, splintered, then collapsed into ash.

Ash that smeared across his hands, that clung to his lips when he whispered her name.

His wife fell beside him, her knees striking stone, fingers clawing at dust that would never be flesh again.

Haruto didn’t look at her. He turned.

He turned to me.

The weight of his stare bore into me, his voice calm, sharp enough to cut through the screams.

“Wake up Cassian Holt.”

The world shuddered as he began to fade aswell.

“Your duty isn’t over Cassian Holt. You still have to save her.”

. . .

I woke screaming.

The sound tore out of me, shredding my throat raw. My gaze snapped down, bracing for the sight I dreaded—

—but it wasn’t there.

My legs.

My legs. Whole. Solid beneath me as if they had never been severed. Flesh knitted, bone fused tight, fabric unbroken—like the horror had never happened.

I staggered, clawing at my stomach, dragging fingers along skin that should have been split wide open. Nothing. Not even a scar.

Relief hit first, then curdled into something worse. Disgust.

Because it never stopped.

No matter how many times I was torn apart, no matter how many ways the world tried to end me, my body refused. It pulled itself back together. It stitched. It reformed. It revived.

Just like back then.

Dragging me upright when I should’ve been allowed to fall.

I wasn’t grateful.

I forced myself upright. The floor glistened slick with blood—mine, hers, theirs—it was impossible to tell anymore. And across the room Juno and Rilke, facing down Sylvaine. Not far from them, the broken husk of a machine, Exidus. My gun was slightly farther in the same direction.

I stared.

Sylvaine’s face slowly shifted, changing, and for a heartbeat I swore she wasn’t a girl anymore. Older. Sharper. Familiar in a way that made my chest clench. But the memory—whatever it was—stayed just out of reach.

You have to save her.

Haruto’s voice thundered in my skull.

But who was I saving?

That’s when I saw it.

Something that didn’t belong.

A rectangular scrap of paper, lying less than a foot away.

I bent, moving like a man half-crippled. No pain—but shock still hollowed me out, and my body limped with invisible injury.

I could feel Autumna’s golden eye behind me twitch upon seeing him alive again, the sound of petals shifting. 

“So you’re the man who refused,” she murmured, voice too soft for the ruin she stood in. “The one who bears the curse of immortality.”

Cassian ignored her.

His steps dragged, uneven, a limp echoing in the broken chamber. He sank to one knee and picked up the paper from the floor.

He studied it in silence, it was a photograph. The floral family smiling, their daughter caught mid-laugh, inked smiles frozen in time.

Autumna said nothing, only watched.

Cassian rose slowly, the picture trembling in his hand. He lifted it so the light caught the surface, faint color blooming back into the faded paper as though it remembered what it once was.

“I may not be able to die,” he said at last. His voice was hoarse, but steady. “But who’s really cursed? Me… or you?”

Autumna’s expression didn’t shift. Yet the flowers along her arms rustled against a wind none of them could feel.

“You are no god,” she said coldly. “You are no human. You aren’t worthy of anything.”

Cassian took a step forward. Juno and Rilke froze, eyes locked on him. Autumna’s golden gaze did not waver.

“You’re just a broken girl, given a second chance.” Cassian said. “But it would never replace what you were  robbed too early of.

“Not what you were owed. But also what you were given.”

Autumna’s lips parted, the faintest crack in her composure. “What are you saying?”

He raised the photograph, finger pressing against the faded corner.

“Haruto. Ms. Haruto. And their daughter — Chiyo Haruto.”

Her eye widened, a flicker breaking through her stillness.

“They were inseparable,” Cassian went on, “except when Haruto’s work called him away. But curiosity… it does more harm than good.”

He lowered the photo, then gestured toward the core in her hand — the Helix pulsing faintly in time with her breathing.

“We both studied that thing,” he said. “We never understood it, not really. But we knew it carried endless possibilities. Including the end of the world.”

His voice cracked, but he forced the words through.

“It summoned a being that could harness the sun itself. It tarnished the earth beyond repair. Haruto tried to save his family — to take them somewhere safe. But he was too late.”

Autumna’s body swayed slightly, like the weight of invisible chains were pulling at her.

“His daughter,” Cassian whispered. “Turned to ashes before his eyes. And then he followed her, killed.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. Even the sound of the wind outside seemed to die.

Cassian’s hand tightened on the photo.

“Chiyo knew nothing of pain…” his voice was almost gone now, raw, “…but she felt something no one had ever endured before.”

The chamber seemed to hold its breath. Autumna’s golden eye flickered, the flowers across her skin quivering, waiting for the word to fall.

Cassian looked at her — straight through her — and spoke.

“True abandonment.”

Autumna said nothing at first. She only stood there, still as the flowers stitched into her skin, watching him with that strange golden eye. Cassian’s words hung in the air like ash, refusing to scatter.

Her lips parted. “You think you understand me,” she began, voice measured, even delicate. “You think you can stand there, with your cursed body and your pity, and speak of what I was robbed of?”

She stepped forward. The air stirred, petals whispering against each other.

“You know nothing,” she said, firmer now. “Nothing of what was taken. Nothing of what it means to scream for someone who will never answer.”

Another step. The ground quivered faintly beneath her bare feet.

“You know nothing of the years I spent cursing every dawn, of the nights where I prayed for the stars to burn themselves out so I would not have to look at them. Nothing of the rot that settled in me when the world refused to stop spinning after she was gone. Nothing of the hatred that grew, and grew, until it was all that I had left—”

Her voice cracked, rising sharper, louder with each syllable, flowers shivering violently along her arms.

“NOTHING of the weight that crushed me, NOTHING of the silence that strangled me, NOTHING of what I felt when the fire took her away, NOTHING—NOTHING—NOTHING!”

Her voice exploded into a scream, shattering the air, her throat raw, the word still burning as though she could never let it go.

Then silence.

Cassian hadn’t moved. His head remained low, hair shadowed his face, until at last he lifted it. His expression wasn’t pity, nor anger. 

Just a crooked, deliberate smirk.

“You’re right,” he said softly. “I don’t know.”

He let the pause drag, watching her tremble with the echo of her own fury.

“But you don’t either.”

Her golden eyes widened.

“Because you aren’t Chiyo.”

“You aren’t their daughter.

The smirk curved wider, crueler.

“You’re her mother.”