❄️⚡️Darkness In Us All

Ch.16

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The air was still.

I stood at the threshold of eternity, the edges of reality crumbling like ash around me. I could feel Caitlin's new power humming through the multiverse like a steady drumbeat—she was no longer just Killer Frost or Caitlin Snow. She had become something ancient, elemental, and eternal.

And yet... I felt incomplete.

My mother—no, Nora, the Speed Force itself—watched me with celestial calm, her glowing form pulsing like a heartbeat from another age. "You feel it, don't you?" she asked, her voice echoing across galaxies.

"Yes," I whispered, my voice cracking like static across broken time. "I feel... unfinished. Like there's still a part of me missing."

She stepped closer, and with a gentle wave of her hand, the cosmos bent. The storm of time roared to life above us—planets, stars, timelines bleeding into one another in a radiant storm of light and shadow.

"Savitar was your shadow," she said, raising her hand, and the sky parted to show me that dark version of myself—arrogant, broken, lost in pain and pride. "He was your fear, your failure... but he was also your beginning."

I looked into Savitar's burning eyes in the vision and felt it: the spark of something unrefined, unstable... a prototype.

"You are not just a remnant," Nora said softly. "You are the perfected form. The culmination of all speedsters who came before."

A pedestal rose before me, forged from molten light and inscribed in every language—Atlantean, Kryptonian, Egyptian, even tongues from before Earth had air to breathe. And at its center hovered the Philosopher's Stone.

"It's not just a stone," Nora said. "It's pure Speed Force. Crystallized destiny. And it is yours."

I stepped forward. My hands trembled as I reached for it—then the universe exploded.

Energy ripped through me, fracturing every atom, rearranging every molecule of my being. My vision whitewashed. My body became code, then light, then sound, and finally—time itself.

My suit cracked apart like an old chrysalis, peeling away to reveal something new. The black and chrome armor of Savitar wrapped itself around me like an old promise kept. But it was different now—cleaner, alive, etched with sacred lightning sigils and golden threads of cosmic script.

Blue-white lightning raced across my arms and chest in fractal patterns. The insignia on my chest pulsed like a living heart: the lightning bolt surrounded by an eternal ouroboros of time. My face mask sealed, then glowed with divine clarity.

This was no longer Savitar.

This was me—the God of Time.

I felt connected to all of it. Jay Garrick's first step. Wally's laughter. Max Mercury's devotion. Even ancient speedsters—the ones whispered of in myth. I saw Atum-Ra sprinting across the Nile's sunrise. Hermes racing with messages for Olympus. Shango, the West African storm runner, dancing through thunder. The Norse god Hermod riding Sleipnir to Helheim.

I was them all... and more.

Nora's voice returned, reverent now. "You have become what the Speed Force always intended. The protector. The rebirth. The storm that chooses what moments endure."

I turned to face her, and even she seemed to pause—awed by what stood before her.

"Now," I said, my voice layered with power, echoing like a chime through every era, "what must I do?"

She smiled. "Your ascension could not come at a more dire time. The walls of time strain. Something foul stirs beyond the stars."

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