The storm of Lio's borrowed memories receded, leaving him shaking on the dusty floor, but with a terrible, crystalline clarity. He knew the shape of their prison now. He had felt its teeth. He pushed himself to his feet, filled with a new and frantic purpose. The time for wandering, for being a victim of the world's whims, was over.
He looked at his parents. The shock had settled, leaving a strange, lucid calm in its wake. They were all, finally, on the same page. They saw the bodies. They knew the house was a trap. This shared knowledge, however, did not unite them. It fractured them.
"We have to destroy it,"
Lio said, his voice raw but steady.
"The house. We have to burn it down. Erase it. Maybe that will break the loop."
Ira, who had been staring at his own corpse with a quiet, analytical intensity, turned to Lio. The fog of madness was completely gone, replaced by a resigned intelligence that was far more chilling.
"No," Ira said, his voice perfectly calm. "No more burning. No more running." He gestured around the dusty, silent room. "Don't you see? We're finally home."
Lio stared at him, aghast.
"This isn't home! It's a tomb! We died here!"
"Exactly," his father replied, a hint of relief in his tone. "We died here. It was… quiet." He pointed a trembling finger at the slumped figures. "In this version, we just fall asleep. There's no Hollows, Lio. There's no war over nothing. There's no sky full of blood." He looked at his son, his eyes pleading. "Out there is a nightmare. In here… is just an ending. A peaceful one."
He wanted to stay. He wanted to lock the door, sit at the table, and wait for the quiet, painless death he remembered. The man who had been obsessed with fleeing the sinking world had finally found a shore he was willing to die on, even if it was the shore of his own demise. He was choosing the comfort of a known death over the terror of an unknown life.
"It's a lie!" Lio's voice rose, filled with the fresh, visceral horror of the memories he now carried. "It's not one peaceful death! It's all of them! I saw it, I felt it! We drown in here! We burn! The walls crush us! This house isn't a sanctuary, it's a machine that finds new ways to kill us, and we are its fuel!"
"Then let it," Ira said, his voice breaking with exhaustion. "It's better than the journey. It's better than the hope. The hope is what hurts, Lio. The hope that things can be different." The great mapmaker, the man who believed in lines and destinations, had given up on the journey. He wanted only a final, fixed point, even if that point was a grave.
The father and son stood on opposite sides of an uncrossable chasm. Lio, having seen the true horror of their eternal suffering, now craved only change, a broken line, a new path—anything but the same circle. Ira, finally forced to confront the consequence of his fear, now craved only stasis.
They both turned to Sera. She stood between them, the silent arbiter of their future.
"Sera, please," Ira begged, his voice soft. "No more. Think of it. No more hunger. No more fear. We can just… rest."
"Mother," Lio implored, his own voice desperate. "You can't listen to him. This is the choice you told me about. The choice the other you made—to stay. It's a trap. It's not an ending, it's just giving up. We have to fight."
Sera looked from her husband to her son. In Ira, she saw the man she had loved, now lucid but utterly broken, begging for an end to pain, a final peace at any cost. In Lio, she saw a boy who had been forced to become a man, forged in the fires of a hundred lifetimes, now filled with a fierce, desperate will to live.
She looked at her own dead body, sitting so peacefully at the table. She looked at the empty chair where the ghost of her daughter had sat. One path was surrender, a quiet acceptance of the illusion. The other was an impossible fight against the very mechanics of their reality. Her choice would be their final act.