HE'D NEVER KNOWN BRIGHTNESS LIKE THIS.

Mori winced against the harsh light. Blank space stretched around him endlessly. Mori thought he could walk for miles and nothing would change.

Where is this place?

He tried to push himself to his feet, but his limbs wouldn't move, weighted down with leaden exhaustion. A muted dizziness ebbed and flowed over him, as if he floated over gently-bobbing waves. Mori could feel the wounds on his body, but nothing hurt. The last he remembered was being lifted out from the void, of light streaming from his chest and breaking the sky. Maybe this was what they'd meant by escaping the void.

Mori's eyes fluttered closed. Perhaps this was it, he thought. The peaceful bliss he'd promised himself, a lifetime of serenity...

He didn't know how long he slept for, carried along by soothing waves. The next conscious thought he had might have been hours later, or maybe days, weeks. Mori opened his eyes to find Suria sat beside him, staring thoughtfully into the distance.

"How did you get here?" Mori mumbled.

Suria glanced down at him. "The same way you did."

"But..." Mori looked her up and down. He remembered the mess he'd been when he'd first arrived. Bloodied and broken, half-delirious and completely disoriented. Suria, by contrast, was the picture of calm.

A smile glimmered on her lips for a moment. "Whatever you did in the void weakened the Artificer's power," Suria said. "Cleansing the pleoma after that was a simple matter."

Mori looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Suria looked back at him, confusion on her smooth features. "What is it?"

"You knew how to get here all along," he said. "Didn't you?"

Her face flushed, rose spreading across her cheeks.

"Don't look at me like that," she said. "The Artificer's power over us increased with time. So only one of the newer clockmakers could have broken free of it, like you or Junot. The rest of us didn't stand a chance."

"You could have at least said something."

Suria sighed. "Look, that's all in the past now. I didn't come up here to fight," she said. "I wanted to thank you. Now that you've weakened the Artificer, the rest of the clockmakers should be able to get here as well."

"But I thought..." Surely he'd been asleep for longer than a week. The grand system must have already crumbled away by now. "They're still alive?"

Suria nodded. "Time moves differently her. You've probably only been gone a day or two."

His heart surged with relief. "But the world is still ending?"

"It doesn't matter anymore," Suria replied. "Now that the passage here has been opened, we can build a new world here, away from the Artificer's control."

"Build a new world?" Mori shook his head. "How?"

She looked surprised. "You haven't tried yet?" Suria said. She spread her hands, and grass flared in a circle around her feet. Flowers pushed through the soil and bloomed in sunset-shaded waves. For a moment, he felt a breeze touch his face, scented with rose and lemon. "This is a space of pure creation. You can create whatever you want — no clock towers or timepieces. None of the Artificer's devices." She smiled. "At last, that will all die with the world it created."

He supposed it should be a good thing. But somehow, Mori couldn't see it that way.

"You know," he said, half to himself. "For all its talk about wanting to have the power to create, the Artificer did make something special in the end."

Suria snorted. "That place wasn't special. You realise that, don't you? The system was just a way for it to gain power."

"I don't know," Mori said. He thought of the way the sun mingled with the skyscrapers on Arkos, gold and azure, mixing orange and pink at the edges. The first flakes of snow from the starred sky on Dysis. The splash of the heavens just shy of the tower on Aurelios, infinite and ethereal. The complex system of gears that powered it all.

He longed to see it again. He could build a thousand worlds here and never recreate that feeling. He wanted to see the sun rise over Arkos again. He wanted to rebuild Elete and put together the last piece of the puzzle. He wanted to make another timepiece; to feel that quiet exhilaration as he finished crafting one, wound it up, and let his creation become part of the world.

Because that was the feeling that gave him life, gave him purpose. For all its cruelty and ambition, the Artificer had only wanted to build things.

And in a way, didn't that make them similar?

He looked up and saw Suria staring at him, a curious look in her eyes.

"You really want to go back?" she said. "Even if you were the only one who wanted to stay?"

Mori nodded slowly.

"Well, if that's what you want..." Suria let out a long sigh. "Ren had some ideas for extending the life of the system. None of them would have worked within the grand system, but if you know exactly what she wanted to do, you could build it here."

Mori looked at her. "You're serious?"

She nodded and raised a hand. Light flowed from her, extending from her chest and into her palm until it glowed white. She lifted her finger and traced the outline of a doorway in the air between them.

She looked at Mori and let out a gentle, delicate laugh. "For anyone else, I'd say it would be too difficult to try. But it seems the clockmakers of Arkos refuse to be limited by such trivial things. Between the two of you..." she shook her head. "Well, I look forward to seeing what you come up with."

The doorway shimmered. Mori saw the sky resolve though it, the stars and the sunlight, the light on the water and the towers that built it all. He heard music in his ears again, the wistful, thrilling melody he longed to dance to once more.

Suria must have seen it in his eyes, because she smiled.

"Go back and find Ren," she said. "Go change the world."

Mori looked back at her for a moment, then back into the entranceway, a smile of his own spreading across his face.

"I will."