Chapter 167
— Evan —
I couldn't reach her anymore.
There was nothing left to reason with.
Her heart… it was gone. Not broken—consumed and swallowed whole by something darker than grief.
This demon isn't just hurting her. He's reaching inside her and rewriting her very soul—peeling apart the foundation of who she is and rebuilding it in his image.
And I can only watch.
I remember her in the Abyss—fractured, yes, drowning in pain, but still herself. Even after she learned what Josh had done… even after everything collapsed around her… There was still light in her eyes.
This is different.
I'm standing here, watching her disappear all over again—and I'm powerless to stop it.
"Becky!" I gasped, the storm swallowing my voice as our strength bled away. "I'll give you the truth, all of it—I swear. But please, just trust me now. This isn't her. When she remembered the first time, she never... acted like this!"
"You're telling me she got her memory back before!? Evan, I warned you and Josh to tell her!"
"I know, I know," I rasped, the words breaking in my throat. "But her gift is rotting—her light is literally draining the life out of us. We have to stop her! She begged me... before the memories slipped away, she clawed at me and begged me not to let her lose herself. And now we're both watching it just happen."
I choked back a sob, my voice thick with a jagged mix of agony and self-loathing. "Activate... emergency Abyss."
It was our final, haunting fail-safe and hollow mercy. To save us from death or the rot of evil, the Abyss emergency plan rewinds time to before the disaster struck. We get to live, but at a staggering cost: our memories will be wiped clean. We'll be safe, but she'll be left alone in the silence, carrying the torment of everything we've forgotten so that we could survive.
"BECKY!!!" James's voice tore through the air, a raw, ragged scream of pure terror.
"Micah's heart... It's stopped! I'm losing her, and I'm slipping too—I can't hold on much longer!"
We watched helplessly as Kaysi walked over to Josh.
"An eye for an eye," she wheezed, blood bubbling from her lips and her lungs. "You slaughtered my mother... and now, I'm giving you back the heartache left in me."
She lunged, burying the steel deep in his chest. It was a common, jagged blade—not her sacred Crane. She was too corrupted, too drowned in hate, for the holy weapon to answer her call. As the metal bit into him, the last spark of her old self flickered and went cold.
"JOSH!" Becky's scream shattered the air.
"I understand," Becky cried. "Evan, this is the only way! I'll shield your mind from the erase—find her, tell her everything!"
"I will, I promise!"
A shard of rogue ice tore through my throat. I hit the ground, my life bleeding out into the frost.
Through a blur of tears, Becky unleashed a cataclysm. A blinding wave of ice surged outward, burying us all in a tomb of winter. Kaysi froze mid-motion, her corruption halted.
Becky's nose bled from the strain.
"Do you see!?" The demon growled, looming over the carnage. "This is what happens when you leave an anomaly run free!"
Becky didn't flinch. Her hands were caked in frost, her lips were a deathly purple, and her hair had turned bone-white. The Eternity ice flowed through her veins, glowing a cold blue—she was burning out her soul to hold the world together.
Time skipped, and she was suddenly behind the demon. She drove a blade of jagged ice into the demon's chest and twisted. Black blood hissed against the frost. She learned from the variants.
"I may be an anomaly," she hissed, her voice cracking. A glitch in your design of the universe, but I will stitch this world back together until my very last breath."
He began to dissolve into the shadows. "This is not the conclusion of this story. I will return.
As he vanished, Becky stumbled toward Kaysi's frozen statue. "I wasn't strong enough to save everyone with him here," she rasped. "I had to clear the way first."
She reached out, taking Kaysi's hand. "I'll fix this, I promise. But I have to take everything from you again."
Kaysi was no longer under the demon's control.
The demon's grip broke; Kaysi was herself once more. She nodded, her breath hitching in the frozen air as she collapsed into Becky's shoulder, sobbing.
"I'm so sorry," Kaysi choked out. "Fix it, Beck take my memories and all this away. Save us."
Hearing that name—Beck—for the first time in three years... it was the last thing I felt before the pain in Becky's eyes faded into the black as I passed out.
— Becky —
The world lurched—and then the screaming wind was gone.
The cold, the blood, the ruin… all of it vanished as if it had never existed.
We were standing on the bridge again.
No demon.
No wounds.
No anguish echoes in the air.
The timeline had reset.
The trauma had been erased from everyone's minds but mine.
Evan died the moment before I pulled us back. His death, anchored in the reset, bound him to the rewind rather than to my protection. He's alive now—but he's a blank slate. Our pact is gone, unraveled by the very power meant to save us.
And Kaysi…
She's left with nothing but a faint, phantom instinct to trust him.
I don't know what to do.
Do I tell them the truth and risk reopening the darkness that nearly consumed her? Or do I stay silent and let him stumble toward the answers on his own?
If the enemy finds her first—if someone else restores her memories before we're ready—her already fractured spirit might finally shatter beyond repair.
But I can't decide that now.
The weight of two worlds presses against my chest—one that remembers and one that doesn't.
And as the bridge stands calm and untouched beneath a sky that has no memory of what it survived…
I collapse into the silence of a world that has no idea it was saved.