"They all died, didn't they?"
Lynn asked, shaken.
The old man said quietly, "Yes. I stayed with them as they slowly grew old, and saw them through the final stretch of that eternity."
But he had not died.
Or rather, he still could not rest easy about the world he had created.
More importantly, there was the truth he had discovered at the very beginning, yet had never dared tell his companions and closest friends.
Was this world truly real?
And this had become the last obsession of his life.
For although they had completed their revolution, they still did not know where this eternity had come from, or where the source of it all lay.
It was after those years that he began to delve deeper.
He used his fire.
Bit by bit, he burned through the fog of eternity.
And when, after an endless span of time, he finally found the world's core within that vast, boundless world, the answer it gave him was so crushing that he lost control of himself.
"Just as I first suspected, the world I inhabited wasn't real. It was indeed an enormous dream. That was why it felt illusory to me. But what I never imagined was..."
He spoke quietly.
"That I was the master of this dream."
At that moment, Lynn's pupils widened violently.
The old man paced forward, step by step. With every step he took toward the past, he grew younger, and calmer.
"Everything began because of me, and everything ended because of me. But I don't know what I went through. Perhaps I lost myself. Perhaps I experienced war before this eternity... but none of that matters anymore. From the moment this dream appeared, it kept changing, moving from eternity toward finality, then from that finality toward eternity