The first sign that the world had crossed a threshold was the silence. Not peace. Not calm. Just a massive, oppressive muting, as if the entire planet had drawn one breath and forgotten how to exhale.Then the merging began. Across the shattered expanse of the Plateau, the hybrid army, Witnesses and Hollowborn fused through the Wake’s catastrophic pulse, lifted their heads in unison.Their pupils spiraled, fractal and liquid, reflecting thousands of moments at once. Faces glitched between shapes.Mouths whispered voices that didn’t belong to them. Their bodies flickered like overlapping photographs, jittering in and out of coherence. “Memory is migration.”“Identity is a climate.”“We are not people. We are continuity.”Dozens spoke those sentences at the same time, though none used the same tone. Callen instinctively stepped in front of Ember as the nearest hybrid soldier staggered forward.It looked vaguely human… until a second face slid across its cheek like a reflection on rippli

They fell for an eternity measured not in seconds, but in stolen memories. Images flashed past them in the dark, Callen as a child gripping a broken toy; Ember holding her mother’s hand on a rain-soaked balcony; Miles laughing as he chased fireflies down a fading street.Then darker things, the Hollowborn wars, the burning of the Meridian Tower, the first time Callen heard the Spine whisper his name. The fall ended without impact. They simply stopped.Callen staggered upright, breath ragged, as the darkness peeled away like an unfurling curtain, revealing a titanic chamber of fractured geometry.The walls weren’t walls at all but moving slabs of reality shifting in and out of sync. Pieces of cities floated in suspended cubes. Snatches of other worlds blinked in like faulty holograms.Ember stood beside him, clutching Miles close, her face pale but focused. “Where… is this?” she whispered.Miles scanned the shimmering, broken vistas with widening eyes.“I… I’ve never seen anything like

The chamber shuddered. Not from impact. Not from collapse. But from recognition. As if the Spine, the architect of all memory, had just realized who was standing inside it.Callen’s breath fogged the pulsing air. Ember tightened her grip on his arm, embers rippling down her fingers like instinctive armor.Above them, the fused hybrid army, Witnesses entangled with Hollowborn threads, rippled through the chamber walls like living murals.Their bodies were only half-physical, half-narrative, merging and unm e rging between fragments of stories that were not fully theirs.The hybrids didn’t speak. They remembered. And the remembering hit the chamber like a storm. A man’s childhood.A woman’s first lie. A soldier’s last regret. A Hollowborn’s first hunger. A Witness’s first betrayal. All of it poured at once, crashing through the Spine like waves folding over each other.Callen staggered under the pressure. Ember dug her nails into his wrist. “Stay anchored.”“I’m trying,” Callen rasped.

Darkness didn’t fall. It filled. Thick. Heavy. Absolute. A darkness that wasn’t the absence of light, but the absence of memory.Callen felt himself floating in it, suspended like a thought that had been half-erased. Ember’s hand was still gripping his, but even her warmth felt distant, muffled behind layers of dissolving recollection. Her voice finally pierced the void. “Calle, Callen, stay with me!”He couldn’t tell how close she was. Or if she was even real right now. Time had no shape here. Neither did they. Then, A flicker.A tiny spark of gold flared in the dark, buzzing like a firefly trapped behind a wall of ink. Ember. Her glow fought to cohere again, her silhouette glitching into place with sheer force of will.But her face was twisted in horror. “Callen… your eyes”He opened them. There was nothing. Not black irises. Not white sclera. Just blankness. A void where sight should be. Callen choked on panic. “It took my childhood, it took everything connected to”“No.” Ember fra