Silence.Then breath.Not from lungs. Not from anything human.The world itself exhaled.The trees moved—not in wind, but in rhythm. Their leaves shimmered with pulses of light, their bark flexing as if muscles tensed beneath the skin of the forest.The ground rose and fell. Not violently. Gently. Like a sleeping giant, dreaming underfoot.Kael had rewritten the universe.And it was alive.—Selene opened her eyes first. The air felt strange in her lungs—not heavy, not light. It was aware.She sat up slowly, blinking against the kaleidoscope of light overhead. There was no sky—only infinite layers of stars. Some blinked in and out like thoughts changing their mind. Others spun in spirals, singing soft songs in languages she almost understood.Kael lay beside her.Still. Not unconscious. Just… deep. As if speaking that final word had buried him in the roots of this world.“Kael…” she whispered, brushing the hair back from his face.He didn’t wake.Not yet.A few feet away, Pamela stirr

The boy said nothing. He just stood there, barefoot on ground that didn’t exist before he arrived. His eyes darted from face to face—Selene, Pamela, Marcus, Riva. Fear radiated off him in gentle waves. Not terror. Something deeper. Something more… pure. Like a newborn trying to recognize the world by sound alone. Selene was the first to move. She stepped forward slowly, her hands open, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s okay,” she said. “No one’s going to hurt you.” The boy flinched at her voice, but didn’t run. Pamela stepped beside Selene, keeping her voice low but edged with concern. “Selene, we don’t know what this is. What he is.” Selene ignored her. She could feel it—deep in her chest, a tremor, a flicker of warmth that had once been Kael’s presence. This boy… this child… it wasn’t him. Not yet. But something inside him was reaching out to her. A thread buried beneath layers of rewritten history and shattered timelines. The boy blinked slowly. “Do you know who I am?”

The sky changed the moment they crossed the threshold. It wasn’t a shift in color, or weather, or light—it was subtler than that. It was like stepping into a photograph suspended in air, where time moved sideways and gravity no longer felt committed to its own laws. The stars above them didn’t blink or twinkle—they stared. Marcus felt it first. His feet dragged, as if the earth wasn’t ready to let him pass. Pamela moved slower too, her breath hitching with every step. Riva didn’t speak. And Selene… Selene felt the weight of the air like a memory sitting on her chest. “This is it,” she whispered, not to the group but to herself. “The place where he first died.” The Valley of First Deaths stretched wide before them. A place so old it had no name, no coordinates, no reason to exist—because it had been erased from every timeline the moment it was formed. Yet here it was, blooming and decaying at once. The grass glowed faintly like it remembered sunlight. The wind moved as though it we

There was no sky. No stars. No gravity. No sense of up or down. Kael stood on something—but even that was a lie. It wasn’t earth. It wasn’t ground. It was… nothing. A blank space that pulsed with silent potential, like the canvas of a story that hadn’t been told yet.He moved forward, even though there was no direction.He breathed, even though there was no air.And yet, Kael existed.He looked around, searching for any shape, any landmark, any echo of the world he had just left behind. But there was nothing. No voices. No stars. No time. Even his own heartbeat felt suspended.He didn’t even know how long he had been walking. Seconds? Centuries? Time unraveled here like spilled thread, useless and unreachable.His name felt distant too. Not Kael. Not Warbringer. Not Valis.Just… something walking through silence.Then—light.It wasn’t harsh. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t even comforting.It was aware.It hovered in front of him in a slow swirl, folding itself into shape—not like a person,

Kael stepped through the veil of nothing and back into a world he had rewritten.The stars behind him folded inward as he emerged—taller, slower, changed.In his hand, he held a fragment of the beyond. A sigil made of light and memory. Orra’s final gift. It pulsed gently, like a heartbeat made from starlight. It didn’t glow with power. It glowed with purpose.The moment his foot touched the soft soil of this world, everything shifted. A ripple spread outward. The trees swayed. The rivers stilled. The very air sighed, as if something that had been holding its breath for eons had finally exhaled.Selene was waiting.But not the flickering memory. Not the fractured echo. Not the ghost.This was her—real, whole, and undeniably present.She stood at the base of a quiet hill, the wind brushing her hair back, her eyes fixed on him like she’d always known he would return. Her body no longer glitched. Her voice no longer wavered. The tether that had kept her caught between versions had been bu