Look to the flames, they say, as if it explains everything.
Look around you. Look at how horrible it is, at the way things are. Look at the monsters everywhere, the flames of disaster consuming everything, as if that were an explanation, a reason. They treat it like cause, and it's an effect. I see that now, for all the good it does.
What caused the flames in the first place? Well, the Iblis Trigger, he said. True enough, I guess. Sonic was the Iblis Trigger. Sonic was the Iblis Trigger because killing him triggered Iblis. Duh. Blaze always was right to look down her nose at me the way she did. I should have seen that for what it was. A trick by a trickster. He told the truth, in the end, for all it mattered.
But it would have happened anyway, someday. Everyone dies someday, and everything goes away. If the princess had died, would the flames have emerged then? Or would she have cried at his funeral, five, ten, fifty years in the future? The flames would have come out, burning out of the seasoned wood of time, maybe stronger than they did. Maybe we all wouldn't have been there to help, then.
Everything that happened was inevitable and preventable all at once. The timeline changed, but the end didn't. Blaze told me once that every star in the sky was a burning ball of gas. They have to burn out sometime, don't they? Everything ends. Everything dies.
Blaze was no exception.
I'm no exception.
Solaris has fallen. Everyone else is gone, disappeared. And I can feel the nothingness coming for me. I can feel every second, every moment of my past slowly coming undone, shaping itself into something else that might have been. I can feel the life slipping away from me, even as I remain here, an afterimage of a time that never happened. There will be another Silver, but will he be the same? Will he want to fight for something as much as I wanted to fight to save my world? Will he look to the past for answers the way I did?
Will anyone remember me? Will Sonic or Elise, or Blaze, wherever she might be?
Did I ever really exist in the first place?
Everything is slipping away from me now. I don't remember how I got here, how I decided to change things. Her face is slipping away from me. I can't remember who she is, or who I am…
But we looked together, and we found the Grail.
But what's the Grail? That story has only just begun.