The towers of his Grandfather's empire were shattered, their crystal fragments floating like tears in the water.

The coral cities had been burned…somehow fire had been made to exist underwater, leaving blackened skeletons of what had been.

Bodies floated everywhere, fishmen and humanoid alike, their expressions frozen in final moments of disbelief that their paradise could fall.

And there, floating alone among the devastation of everything he had built, was Thalsian.

The Seventh Adrastia Emperor King looked older than he had in the Lineage Dream, worn down by loss that had accumulated like sediment.

His blue and gold hair still flowed like liquid light, but it was dulled now, tarnished by exhaustion!

His armor, once radiant with the authority of the sea, bore cracks and burns that suggested battles against forces that shouldn't have been able to touch him.

He floated with the stillness of someone who had already made the hardest decision of their life…sending his son away to distant star sectors where he might survive, hiding the child who would become Adras, who would become the Eighth, who would father the Ninth who now stood before him.

Achilles materialized fully into this time, his form solidifying from quantum possibility into stellar certainty.

The water recognized him with the same confusion it might show toward a familiar stranger…knowing him but not knowing why.

"Grandfather," he called out, his voice carrying through water with perfect clarity despite the impossibility of his presence here.

Thalsian turned, his injured body moving with the careful precision of someone holding themselves together through will alone.

His ancient eyes, deep as sunken ruins, blinked once, twice, processing the impossible figure before him.

When he spoke, his voice carried the bewilderment of someone whose reality had just been fundamentally challenged.

"This... shouldn't be a Lineage Dream, right?" The words came slowly, as if he was testing their reality by speaking them. "Or am I already dead?"

The question buzzed in the water between them, grandfather and grandson separated by centuries that had just been reduced to nothing, standing in the ruins of an empire that had fallen but might not have to stay fallen.

Achilles looked at the man whose memories had taught him about legacy, whose death had been another note in the symphony of Adrastia tragedy, and prepared to speak words that would reshape understanding of what death meant, what time meant, what family meant when you could simply refuse to accept loss.

"Neither, Grandfather," he said, his voice carrying the weight of impossible promise.

"I'm here to offer you what Existence said you couldn't have…a second chance."

Thalsian's eyes widened.

In this moment suspended between past and future, grandfather and grandson simply looked at each other across the impossible distance that had just been conquered.

The water of the ruined empire carried silence like a physical weight, pressing against the two figures who stood facing each other.

"Just…what is this?" Thalsian's voice cracked slightly, the composure of an Emperor King struggling against the impossibility before him.

His eyes searched Achilles's face with desperate intensity, looking for signs of illusion, of dream, of anything that would make sense. "How are you here? This isn't... this can't be..."

Achilles smiled, the expression carrying warmth that transcended the cold water around them.

"I have simply begun assimilating aspects of Existence itself, Grandfather. The fundamental forces that reality operates by…I've made them part of me. Time isn't a river that flows in one direction. It's a distance that can be traversed if you understand that past and future are just different coordinates in the same space."

He gestured to the devastation around them, to the moment frozen in its tragedy.

"I've already used this power to bring Father to my current time…saved him and Mother from their intended deaths. And now, having gained enough strength, I've traversed all the way here to take you as well."

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the floating debris seemed to pause in its drift, as if reality itself was holding its breath.

Then Thalsian laughed.

It started as a chuckle, then grew into full, jubilant laughter that sent ripples through the water.

The sound was joy and disbelief and relief all mixed into something that shook his entire frame. His eyes, which had been dull with grief, blazed with sudden life.

"So my son survived! And even had someone as astonishing as you!" His voice boomed through the water with genuine happiness. "Good. Good!"

But then, as quickly as it had come, the joy drained from his features.

His gaze swept across the ruins of his empire, across the floating bodies of his subjects, his friends, his family. When he spoke again, his voice had aged centuries in seconds.

"But... if that is the case, while I am happy..." He paused, his massive frame seeming to shrink under invisible weight. "I think I may have to stay here. With my dying empire."

HUUM!

Achilles frowned, watching his grandfather's expression crumble into something that hurt to witness.

"Because of me," Thalsian continued, his voice barely above a whisper, "all of them have perished. Every soul who trusted me, who believed I could protect them, who called me king…they're dead because I wasn't strong enough, wasn't wise enough to see the betrayal coming."

He gestured to the devastation with hands that trembled despite their power.

"How can I leave them? How can I abandon this graveyard I created? They died following me, believing in the empire I promised them. The least I can do is remain here, to bear witness to my failure until time itself forgets this place existed."

The guilt in his voice was a living thing, wrapping around him like chains forged from regret.

This wasn't the grief of fresh loss…this was the exhaustion of someone who had been carrying unbearable weight and had finally decided to let it crush him!

Achilles studied his grandfather's broken posture, the way his shoulders curved inward as if trying to protect a wound that would never heal.

He understood this guilt intimately…it was written into their lineage's DNA, this tendency to carry the weight of every failure, every loss, as personal responsibility.

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