There's not supposed to be an end, not a sad one. Yet that is all one can hope for. There isn't another, one can look and look, try and try, and they will not find any end completely divulged of grief. Trust in that maxim, that ironic axiom of life, because if you can, then maybe it will not hurt so much in the end.
Fate deprives life of living until it is satisfied, it steals and it haunts us.
One can only suppose that the single gift at the end is that there will always be an after.
Gladiolus Amicitia, Prompto Argentum, and Ignis Scientia are the after, and for Noctis Lucis Caelum that is a gift, one that makes the sadness and the pain, the grief and the heartache, worth it. It turns the piercing of thirteen weapons into the triumph of finally protecting someone he loves, it turns the numbness of death which overwhelms him as Ardyn fades away into the relief that no one else will be hurt, that he can rest.
The sun rises, three men stand side by side, and they face an end and an after. They find that the first is sad and the latter full of hope. They wonder too, because, if they have stood, and they haven't cried, and they've kept their vows, why can't fate gift them an after where there are four of them and not three?
But that is not how an end goes, and they know it, they swore by it, and they cannot live with it but they must.