The Timeless One

"There's no need for the Lord of the Edge to deal with you, Seraphiniel. I will be enough." Sakura declares with confidence. And as the doors of the halls of Sunset's Edge closed, her reckoning with Seraphiniel opened.

Sand clashed against sand and Seraphiniel laughed.

"Enough? You'll be enough?" The Counter mocked. "You were never enough. Even now, you share the man you love with your sisters!"

"You’ll have to do better than that, Seraphiniel! I don't mind sharing him with my sisters."

"And would your alter-egos agree?" Seraphiniel said arrogantly. And the grotesque wings in her eyes projected possible futures. Of futures where Seren abandoned her, chose one or more of her sisters over her, or worse, killed her himself.

"No." Sakura wavered when she normally shouldn't. It was Seraphiniel's black sand affecting her, piercing through her emotions and digging up not just her own memories, but pulling and manifesting her alter egos from another timeline.

They stood around Sakura, whispering words of pain and hatred in her ear, pushing her down on one knee. Seraphiniel's black sand began to overwhelm her, her own golden sand turning black as they collided, producing even more spectres.

Then — a whisper: familiar, sonorous, timeless. "Remember. You are one. No matter what timeline you are. No matter what memories you have. You are Sakura, you are all Sakura, the Angel of Memory, the Ophanim of Time. Reel all of yourself in, find what connects you that Seraphiniel uses against you, then make them yours. Make them you." The Temporal Vow whispered in her head.

Sakura then scanned her own memories, her eons of life, her with her sisters in the Silver City, their rebellion, their fall. That is common to all of her, so she needs something else, something that changed her, changed every version of her.

Then she scanned not just her own memories, but the memories of every version of her. Her mind racked. Her soul frayed. It's like picking and analyzing every grain of sand in a beach that extends as far as the eye can see. She felt herself splintering like sand in the wind.

“Keep going. I got you,” the Temporal Vow whispered. always noble, always constant. When she felt her courage failed her, it was the Temporal Vow who pushed her on, like the time she first kissed Seren. And so, pushed on she did — forward, like Kazuha always does.

She drew on love, on emotion, she stopped thinking and started feeling – like Yunjin. Memories remain because we feel something that made them last, and that only makes it stronger.

Battered by Seraphiniel's black sand and the twisted and sinister whispers of her dark alter egos, she reached forward to them with all the willplwer she can muster she knew Chaewon will be proud. She searched their memories, and in all of them, she found one thing in common, love, for Seren.

Then she asked one question and one question only: "Would Seren love you right now?" And that gave all of her pause.

"We love him. More than ourselves — and to some, maybe even more than our sisters. No matter what he did to all of you to turn this dark, would he want this to happen?"

"Weren't we happy when we were with him? Isn't that what truly matters?"

Then slowly, the dark effigies of her other selves slowly turned gold, and Seraphiniel was livid.

"What?! What are you doing?! How did you reconcile your dark selves?!"

Sakura stood, panting — exhausted after peering through an infinite number of her lives. "Something... you don't understand... Seraphiniel... love... soul..." She finally pulled herself back to her feet, the Temporal Vow glowing with power on her chest.

"Something... Garam Solari knew... something that stays in your memory... even throughout all of your lives in these branching timelines... they are all me... they are all Sakura... and they all... know... love!" She declared as she spread her arms, golden sand exploded and covered her, morphing her in a fundamental and transcendent level.

Then her wings made of sand hardened into crystals, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, each feather a fragment of time and memory. The etchings in her skin turned the same color, crystalline and reflective. The Temporal Vow also morphed, its gold case slowly hardened to a perfectly symmetrical crystal in the shape of an hourglass and as it spun on her chest it glowed with all the colors of the rainbow as its prismatic properties pulled strings of time to wrap around it.

Then, in a move not dissimilar to what Seraphiniel's eyes did, Sakura's wings showed Seraphiniel, or rather what she could have been had she not fixated herself with the dark memories of time.

She showed her what Seraphiniel could have been if she had lived with love, or chosen love over fear. And Seraphiniel paused, and for the first time in eons, one emotion flooded her as Sakura showed her what could have been — remorse. And as she drowned in it, she didn't notice herself slowly turn golden.

And when she realized it, it was too late. In a last ditch effort, Seraphiniel released all of her black sand. Sakura countered with her own golden sand.

The two waves' clash shook the earth as they burst outward, spilling outside the castle in a swirling twister of gold and black. Then — at Sakura's command, they all converged back on Seraphiniel, overwhelming her, and slowly turning her body into golden sand.