That quiet after the light? Yeah, that wasn’t just emptiness. It was memory, sifting through itself, trying to figure out what scraps deserved to stick around.Lena blinked her eyes open. The world looked half-baked, unsure if it wanted to wake up or keep dreaming. The air itself shimmered with almost shapes trees flickering in and out like they were made of glass, rivers swirling with faces instead of water, cities assembling and unassembling themselves in these weird, heartbeat-sized pulses. The recursion wasn’t done. Nope. It’d just gone and rewritten the whole script around them.She tried standing up. The ground bent like old bedsheets. Each step felt haunted echoes trailing behind her: one Lena who stayed, one who never made it, one who said yes when she should’ve said no. Their voices brushed her skin. Soft but impossible to ignore.And somewhere, not even close, Damien was screaming his lungs out.He’d ended up inside the Core again. Only now, it didn’t look like that endless

The morning felt wrong. Too quiet.Ash hadn’t seen a sunrise that didn’t flicker in months. But today, the sky just… held itself together, steady as if it was watching Sophia, waiting to see her next move. No static in the air, either. Just this sense that everything was paying attention.Sophia sat on the crater's edge, knees pulled close, hair hanging loose. Gold dust threaded through it not really dust, not quite light, something stranger, humming with her breath.Damien kept his distance. He’d seen Sophia broken, bleeding, dying but not this. This version of her wasn’t fragile. She didn’t even look tired. She looked settled, like the hush before a judge speaks.Ash moved closer and knelt beside her. The ground was warm where she sat, not with heat, but with memory.Are you in pain?Sophia shook her head.It doesn’t hurt. It just feels… crowded.The air shivered. Out on the plain, clouds twisted to echo her words.—Lena’s voice crackled over the comms, careful and quiet.Telemetry

The world didn’t breathe like it used to.Every sound came back with an echo that wouldn’t let go it twisted, hung around, and slid back in, changed just enough to make you wonder if the place was learning your secrets. The light kept flickering in time with Sophia’s pulse. It faded when she lost her nerve, flared up when she steadied herself.They’d dropped the act. This place didn’t care about physics anymore.Now the recursion felt personal.Damien stood a few steps behind, holding tight to the stabilizer core like it actually meant something. That little sphere pulsed in his hands, glowing in sync with the fissure under their feet.Ash paced the edge, restless. Every time she moved, she left a faint streak of light behind, lines that took their time before finally fading.She muttered under her breath, probably not expecting anyone to answer,How do you fight something that remembers you better than you remember yourself?Lena’s voice crackled through the interlink, thin and dista

Darkness here wasn’t just dark. It had no edges, no form, not even emptiness, just the sense that something was around, trying to figure out what “existing” even meant.There was no sound, no up or down, not a hint of air. But Ash tried to speak anyway. Her words just buzzed in her chest and died there. Damien tried to reach out, or at least he thought he did, but his arm broke apart into shadows. Each movement is split into a mess of copies, all out of rhythm.Sophia drifted right in the middle of it. She didn’t move. That strange black light didn’t destroy her, it rewrote her. When she finally opened her eyes, the void changed. Shapes started to form. Fractal patterns grew out of her memories hallways, scraps of blue sky, the outline of a hand almost taking shape.Her thoughts started building the place around her.Out of nowhere, Lena’s voice sliced through the silence. Not over the comms straight into their heads.You’re inside the Architect Layer. This isn’t the recursion. This i

For a while, everything just held its breath. Not empty, not dead just waiting.Ash sat in the field where the mirrored tree used to stand. She ran her hand over the ground. Dirt, grass, warm sun normal stuff. But under all that, something buzzed. Barely there, like the hum under a power line. Like the echo of Sophia’s heartbeat, still hanging on.She closed her eyes. Listened.The world thumped once, twice. Then, soft and far away, she caught it. Sophia’s voice, scattered in the hum.Ash.Her eyes snapped open. Damien stood a few meters off, staring at the horizon where the sky had started to ripple a line of light, wavering and alive.He turned, slowly.You heard it too, didn’t you?Ash nodded, her throat thick.It’s her.The horizon pulsed again, brighter this time. Shapes flickered in the glow of cities, faces, symbols breaking apart as soon as she tried to focus.Damien whispered,She’s not gone. She’s everywhere.They started walking toward the shimmer. Every step shifted someth