Liora stood frozen for a long moment, staring at the brilliant path, understanding settling over her with a mixture of awe and dread. Whatever this pathway represented, whatever possibility it promised to restore, it connected directly to the very being who had spent countless ages ensuring that possibilities like this one never had the chance to unfold.
She did not yet know what waited at the path's end. But she understood, with growing certainty, that whatever it was, it mattered more than almost anything else they had discovered so far.
Far from the Vault, in the strange, boundless space where the Redactor carried out his endless work of refinement, he found himself returning, again and again, to the conversation he had shared with Aether within that quiet, dreamlike meeting. The boy's answer had lodged itself somewhere within him, a small persistent weight he could not simply revise away.
*Because the people who endured those tragedies deserve to be remembered.*
