A distant sound, not unlike the shattering of thick glass, resonated in the air among whispers, and then faded as quickly as it had appeared.

Spyro woke as the noise died to a body that refused to respond at first, and to eyes that, if they even opened, did so to total darkness. The subtle drip…drip…drip of water hitting stone, however, combined with the feeling of the Earth element all around him, led him to believe he might be in a cave.

He ached all around as he regained feeling, first in his tail, then his talons, his arms and legs, body, neck—he slowly came to part by part, until each of them were sore. Spyro lay there, content to wait out the worst of the pain in the soothing warmth of the cave, even though it did very little in the way of relief. Still, it offered some distraction to the discomfort.

Once he realized the pain wasn't going to pass on its own, he tried to stand, but gave up when his tired brain failed to tell his talons from his wings, instead flailing about like a snake experiencing what it was like to have limbs for the first time. Or so he imagined.

One part of him wanted to ignore the fire raging under his skin and lay there forever, while the other part lacked the will to argue. Though he did try to compromise with himself, boldly offering five more minutes as if it were a fair trade to eternity.

No deal.

Spyro swallowed a mouthful of the water his snout had tucked itself into. He heaved an internal sigh when it failed to soothe his burning throat and moved on to bargaining. He'd never get the luxury to rest for even half as long as his lazier side wanted to, and he had to know that, so maybe if he—his claws suddenly bore into the smooth rock floor as a single lucid thought slipped through the haze of his mind: water?

His body leapt into action in an instant, entirely forgetting its own fatigue. He erupted from a shallow pool of water with a desperate gasp for air that instead only managed to inhale even more cave water by mistake. His gasp immediately turned into a choked coughing fit as he struggled to clear his throat, clutching at his heart with a talon while the other splashed around in the water for better footing.

Minutes passed before Spyro calmed down enough to breathe, but once he did, he wiped the wet from his eyes, blinked them a hundred times or more, and let them adjust to the darkness. His head throbbed like mad, but the pain the rest of his body felt was finally fading now.

He'd almost drowned.

Now that the excitement was behind him, and his eyes worked again, he took a moment to look around.

A seemingly endless number of translucent golden crystals, or more likely the shards of one huge one, caught his attention first, its fragments scattered all throughout the water. None of them seemed to bear any consistency in their shape or size that Spyro could understand, but they all glowed with an identical muted radiance. The glow of the smaller shards mostly served to show they were there under the water, while the larger gems that poked above its surface did well to illuminate the surrounding cave.

It stretched in all directions until the light died, obscuring the walls and ceiling in darkness and leaving Spyro to guess how far they might actually go. The floor, on the other talon, he could see from edge to edge. What he had originally mistaken for stone, was in fact another crystal—dark purple in color and almost entirely opaque, with a fainter, more sickly glow than even the gems. The floor ended before the walls even began, hinting that the water might not be so shallow elsewhere.

Spyro hazarded to guess the gems could be the remains of a Time Crystal, but he knew where he was for certain now—it wasn't a cave, but the Crystal Core.

At once, a rush of memories came flooding in.

He and Cynder had just defeated the Dark Master, or at least, the Ancestor Spirits—how he could be so sure of what to call them now, he didn't know—had. They imprisoned him in the Crystal Core itself, then vanished as quickly as they appeared. What that meant for Malefor, Spyro didn't know. Was it truly over—for good? Or would he escape again as he had from the Dark Realms?

Not that any of it mattered when the Destroyer had sealed their fates, and the fate of the entire world, from the moment it finished the Ring of Annihilation. It cracked the world into pieces no different from the shards at Spyro's talons. Malefor got exactly what he wanted in the end, even though he'd never see his insanity realized.

Spyro didn't know what to do then, so he panicked. He panicked and did the one thing he knew he could, as he had before in the Well of Souls: he turned time into crystal, saving himself and Cynder, and resigned to let the world end. The fact that everyone he knew and loved would be gone never even crossed his cowardly mind. He'd doomed himself and Cynder to drift forever in gold.

Or so he thought.

He squinted at the littering gem fragments and plucked one from the water. He turned it over to look at all its sides and even double checked each one, convinced he could prove it didn't really exist if he just scrutinized it enough. Except it did. It sat there, weighing down his talon, with the smuggest expression a crystal shard has ever had, loudly pronouncing "I am real" when Spyro knew it couldn't be.

Ignitus' sacrifice. Cynder's loyalty. Ignitus had seen them through the Belt of Fire without hesitation, and Cynder had stood by Spyro's side even as the world unraveled around them. They trusted him. They believed in him—enough to throw away their lives for him. Ignitus, he could understand, but Cynder? She would've died for nothing, and still she stayed.

In his eyes, there was only one choice to make. He wouldn't let Ignitus' die in vain, nor would he give Cynder the chance to do the same. He'd save the world no matter what—even if it meant he wouldn't survive to see it saved.

He owed them that much.

Though impossible, Spyro knew without a single doubt that both memories were real and both had happened. At the same time as he accepted his own death, he fought cowardly to save himself from it. How could he have two different memories of one moment? Especially when one contradicts the other?

His head hurt thinking about it, but a sharp exhale behind him drew him out of his confusion and sent him into panic all over again.

"Cynder!" Spyro cried, frantically throwing the gem away and turning to find her in the water.

He relaxed in an instant and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw her head perched on an ever-so-slightly raised lip of the Crystal Core, completely above the water's surface. He scolded himself for getting so distracted when he'd nearly drowned. She very easily could've been in as much danger and he was busy looking at crystal fragments?

She somehow looked peaceful, even in a place like this—half submerged in water. The idea of waking her up made him feel guilty, but as much as Cynder probably needed sleep—and they both certainly did after everything—there would be time to rest when they were safely back at Warfang.

If there's a Warfang to even go back to, Spyro thought.

It didn't look good when they evacuated, and so much could've happened in the time it took them to stop Malefor. How long had they been underground? At the dam? And how much time did they waste trying to stop the Destroyer? Not even to mention the entire day's worth of effort that it took just to cross the Burned Lands. All while the Dark Master's armies laid siege to Warfang.

Would there be anything left of the great dragon city?

Except… his memories contradicted themselves again.

Although Spyro clearly remembered having to evacuate as the Golem rampaged throughout the city, he also remembered defeating it. And by then, the Dark Armies were nowhere to be seen, so why would they have needed to evacuate? Malefor wouldn't have had a reason to keep attacking Warfang, not when he thought the Destroyer would end the world anyway.

Spyro had no idea which memories to trust and which ones not to anymore. They all felt so real, regardless of how much they conflicted with one another. One of these events did happen, but he was absolutely sure the other did, too, except the other couldn't have happened if the one did.

It hurt to even try to wrap his head around what was going on inside it.

At least one thing made sense: he had to wake Cynder up.

So Spyro slipped his talons under her snout and carefully lifted her head enough that he could whisper into an ear.

"Cynder," he said. "Cynder, wake up."

She shifted closer to him.

"Cynder," he tried again.

She made a noise blending confusion and discontent, and stirred.

From so close, Spyro could see the movement behind her eyelids as she came to. Cynder's brow furrowed with the effort of waking up, or perhaps the effort of trying to refuse being woken up. She stretched, sending ripples through the water's surface as her limbs moved under it, and after a long yawn in his face, her eyes blinked open. He felt her relax the instant she saw it was him disturbing her, tired poison-green emeralds staring right at him.

"Nn… Spyro…? Whaaat?" she moaned, then—with all the seriousness of a fully awake dragon—said, "Your talons are wet."

Her head lifted on its own as a second, shorter yawn overcame her, letting Spyro relax his arms and wipe the water off his talons with a nervous chuckle.

"Yeah, it's a… long and confusing story, I think," he sighed.

"You put us in another one of your time-freezing crystals? For I guess so long that the core of the world flooded over? The same core that I think Malefor has been sleeping in—which is not at all weird to think about, by the way—for who knows how long now?" Cynder half asked, half told. "Am I hot or cold?"

Spyro cringed at her bluntness, but she was right, no matter how much he wanted to deny it. She said exactly what he had tried to ignore until now. He didn't so much as want to guess how long they might've been out for this time.

"I was trying not to think about that. Any of that," he sighed, rubbing his face with his talons. "You make it sound a lot less confusing."

"Is it confusing?" she asked.

"You remember everything, then?" Spyro asked.

Cynder cocked her head to the side and squinted at him but otherwise gave no objection to him dodging her question.

"About as much," she yawned again, "as I did last time."

"That's more than I can say," Spyro said. "My head's all over the place right now."

"Is that normal?" she asked.

He shook his head, more in thought than as a reply.

Although Spyro doubted it, he also doubted anything in this situation could be considered "normal". "Normal" dragons didn't wake up in the future, especially not twice. Did he feel "normal" the first time? He knew he definitely didn't feel this twisted up on the inside then.

"I was pretty put together then, I think," he eventually answered.

Cynder made an illegible face in the too-subtle glow of the golden shards and gave a doubting "hmm".

Spyro simply shrugged before saying, "Anyway. Other than the water, it doesn't look like there's anything here to surprise us."

"Which itself is a surprise," Cynder pointed out.

She grinned and grabbed his forearms before he could continue, pulling him out of the water up onto a small elevation where they could actually start to dry off.

"As nice as it is to have a bit of peace, we should probably get above ground," he said, then added under his breath, "and hope we haven't actually missed too much."

"You sure? We could probably find something to attack us," Cynder teased. "It'd be rude to keep them waiting longer than we already have."

"I already almost lost a fight to water," Spyro recounted, groaning. "Is that good enough?"

Cynder nodded along in feigned consideration, then after a deliberate pause that apparently failed to yield a decision, she returned his earlier shrug.

She woke with all of her personality intact, which Spyro figured was probably a good sign. Mentally, nothing seemed different with her, only him. Maybe he'd been under the water for longer than he first assumed. He felt fine physically, if a bit different in some ways, and perhaps a little… taller than he remembered, now that he thought about it.

A quick inspection of himself revealed his body, tail, and limbs had indeed grown in length and bulk, and a few new crests like the ones on his back now stuck out from places where they hadn't before. His horns felt heavier, too, but he had no way of telling why without being able to see his reflection. He could tell they would do some serious damage in a fight now, though.

On the other talon, Spyro could see a lot more of Cynder than he could himself, and she was most definitely taller.

She was still shorter at the shoulder, but her long, slender neck lent her a little extra height over him now. Her horns had also gained significant length, and a newly grown-in fourth pair made her look a lot like she did under Malefor's corruption. That resemblance wasn't helped by the many spikes that lined the back of her neck, which together, formed a wicked crown of silver-white that practically glowed in the dark of the cave.

Her wings had grown to span more than twice their previous size, no doubt capable of carrying her body with ease, as if she needed to be even faster in the sky. They looked far too majestic to belong to the young dragon she was when they first landed on the Crystal Core.

Just how long were they in that crystal?

"Youuuu do know you're staring at me, right?"

Spyro snapped out of it with a start and nearly slipped off the edge of the short platform.

She smirked, but didn't let him dwell on it for long. Her wings spread out and she launched herself into the air in an instant, playfully smacking his snout with her tail as she flew over him.

The glint of something metal beneath the water's surface stopped him from chasing after her. There were three to be exact, near where he thought Cynder had been laying. He reached for the closest one, then stopped when he realized what it was.

In the faint glow of the gems, he could see her tail blade, and not far from it, her wing blades. They'd fallen off.