Five years later.

  The world didn’t end.

  It didn’t start over, either.

  It just kept going—imperfect, strange, and achingly real.

  Kale Strix lived at the edge of a forest now, in a home built from stone and salvaged panels, half-grown over with ivy. No satellites above him. No neural HUD. No Equinox.

  Just quiet.

  He didn’t talk to anyone for the first year. Couldn’t. The words got stuck between versions of himself—fragments that still surfaced in dreams. Some nights he woke gasping for air, sure he was in Loop 3 again. Other nights he dreamed of a woman with changing eyes and a voice like gravity.

  > You always tried to save me.

  But I wasn’t the one who needed saving.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He carved her name into the doorway anyway. Not as a memorial.

  As a promise.

  ---

  By the second year, he’d started planting things.

  A garden. A little food. A few trees.

  By the third, he started writing—paper, ink, by hand. A journal for no one but himself. Stories about the versions of Kale that never got a second chance.

  He wrote about the coward. The killer. The protector. The one who almost joined ZERO.

  And he wrote about the one who walked away.

  ---

  Sometimes the sky still shimmered—just faintly. A ripple of unreality, like a scar in the fabric of time.

  Kale would pause. Stare up. Wonder if a loop had survived somewhere.

  And sometimes, just sometimes, he thought he heard her in the wind.

  Echo. Not as an AI, not as a construct.

  Just the memory of a woman who never let him forget who he was.

  ---

  He didn’t need answers anymore.

  Didn’t want power.

  Didn’t want peace at the cost of truth.

  He wanted days. Sunlight. Imperfection. Regret.

  And the slow, painful rebuilding of something honest.

  One loop. Unbroken.

  One life. His.

  ---

  He finished his final journal entry on a cold morning in early spring.

  He wrote:

  > “I remember everything.

  And I still choose this.

  No gods. No loops.

  Just me.”

  He closed the book.

  Stepped outside.

  And walked into the world—not as a weapon, not as an echo, not as a variable.

  But as Kale Strix.

  Alive.