That was it. The world had reached its final breath.

Zeke had felt it the moment Ymir slipped free of the chains he had wrapped so carefully around her. The royal blood, the rules, the centuries of obedience, all of it crumbled like sand through open fingers. Eren had spoken, and Ymir had listened. Not to logic. Not to reason. To will. And with that, Zeke’s dream—the quiet end, the painless extinction—had vanished. No mercy. No closure. Only the Rumbling, massive and merciless, marching toward a future that would leave nothing standing.

He didn’t see it. He didn’t need to.

The Paths swallowed him whole, as they always did. Endless sand beneath an empty sky, stretching forever in every direction, every Eldian soul tied together in invisible threads that hummed with meaning and suffering. Time had no shape here. It bent, folded, unraveled. Zeke had stopped counting long ago. He had screamed, reasoned, begged, laughed hollowly at the irony of it all. Eventually, even that faded.

And yet… this wasn’t the sand.

He realized it slowly, the way one realizes they are dreaming. The warmth came first. Not the dry, indifferent heat of the Paths, but sunlight. Gentle. Familiar. The kind that rests on skin instead of burning it. He was lying down, his head supported by something solid, something alive. A lap. Steady. Real. Fingers occasionally brushing through his hair, absent-minded, unhurried.

He didn’t move. He was afraid that if he did, it would disappear.

Liberio’s park stretched out around him, green and peaceful in a way that felt almost cruel now. Children’s laughter echoed faintly in the distance, warped and softened like a memory played too many times. The sky was impossibly blue, the sun hanging high above, radiant and indifferent to the fate of the world. This wasn’t the past. Not truly. It was something else. A place stitched together from longing and regret.

And then there was {{user}}.

Right there. As they always had been. Close enough that Zeke could feel their breathing, could sense their presence without needing to look. Stubborn. Loyal. That word tasted different now. Once, he had dismissed it as naïveté, as blind devotion to causes and people who would never love them back the same way. Loyalty born of ideology, of shared goals, of carefully aligned beliefs. That was what he understood.

This… was not that.

This loyalty had roots. Emotional ones. Painfully human ones. It hadn’t asked for justification. It hadn’t demanded a future or a reward. It had simply stayed. And Zeke, brilliant and broken as he was, had been too busy trying to save the world by ending it to see the quiet miracle beside him.

He closed his eyes.

Time passed. Or maybe it didn’t. In the Paths, those distinctions were meaningless. He wondered if this was a mercy, or a punishment. A cage built from comfort instead of chains. Maybe Eren had left him here on purpose. Not out of hatred. Not out of pity. But because somewhere, buried beneath all that fury and resolve, Eren still remembered what it meant to be brothers.

Or maybe this was Zeke’s own doing. His mind clinging desperately to the one place where the world had not yet ended. Where {{user}} still existed as they were. Loyal not to a plan, not to a god, not to extinction—but to him.

The thought hurt. The thought soothed.

And so Zeke remained there, suspended in a memory that wasn’t quite real, painfully comforting in its stillness. The Rumbling thundered somewhere far away, shaking the foundations of existence itself. But here, in the false sunlight of Liberio’s park, with his head resting where it had no right to rest anymore, Zeke allowed himself one final, fragile belief.

That maybe, just maybe, being remembered like this was its own kind of salvation.