Silence.
Aven opened his eyes to darkness, broken only by pale threads of light from cracks overhead. The roar was gone. The hum was gone. He felt Rhea's breath against his neck, her body trembling in his arms.
"Are we alive?" he whispered.
"I… don't know," she breathed.
They sat up slowly. The archive chamber was rubble, wires dangling from the ceiling, chunks of concrete littering the floor. The great servers were gone, nothing but smoking wreckage. The monstrous shadows had vanished, the glow of bleeding futures snuffed out.
Rhea coughed, wiping blood from her lip. "It's quiet," she said, voice shaking. "I think… we did it."
Aven looked around, heart hammering. "Where are the futures? The projections?"
"Gone," she whispered. "We deleted them all."
They stumbled through the wreckage, leaning on each other. In the corridors, the cases were shattered, artifacts nothing but dust. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and smoke.
When they reached the museum's main hall, Aven froze.
Beyond the shattered doors, there was nothing.
No city. No sky. Just a rolling, gray void stretching to infinity.
Rhea let out a broken laugh. "We erased the failed futures… but the museum was tied to them. We cut it out of reality."
"We're trapped," Aven said, swallowing hard.
Rhea turned to him, eyes wide but steady. "Maybe. Or maybe… this is a chance. A blank space."
The ground shivered beneath them, the edges of the hall starting to crumble into the void. Aven grabbed her hand. "What if this place eats us too?"
"Then we hold on," she whispered. "Until the end."
They stood in the flickering ruins, the world falling away around them, the void creeping closer. Aven clung to her, burying his face in her hair. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I wanted to give you a better ending."
She held him tighter. "This is ours. That's enough."
As the last walls dissolved into gray, Aven kissed her. The void swallowed the museum, piece by piece, until there was nothing but the two of them, floating in endless nothing.
No echoes of what had been. No ghosts of what could be.
Just them. Two voices in the dark, holding on, refusing to let go.
And in that silence, he heard her breathing, felt her heartbeat.
It was enough.
And then there was only black.