The newborn’s scream split the violet plane like lightning. Not a cry of pain, a cry of contradiction, a sound reality did not know how to hold.Light burst from their small body, pulsing in waves that shook the very air. Kael surged forward the real Kael, fire rippling up his arms, jaw clenched, eyes molten. “Get away from them!”The counterfeit Kael didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even turn. He simply held out his hand palm steady, expression serene. “You need not fear me, little one.”The newborn sobbed, light fracturing into shards around their skin. “I’m not little, I’m not yours, I’m...I’m”Their voice dissolved, overwritten by the turbulence inside them. The storyteller wrapped their arms around the child, pulling them close, shielding their trembling body. “Look at me, don’t look at him, I’m here, I’m here”The plane answered their heartbeat with tremors, the whole realm destabilizing under competing truths. Kael stepped beside them, hands aflame. “Don’t listen to him.”Bu

First came her footsteps. Light. Unhurried. Certain. Then came her voice soft enough to hush the collapsing world, strong enough to bend its falling edges: “Do not choose for the child. Let me choose.”Lyra stepped through the breach. Not a shade. Not an echo. Not a ghost. Alive. Every note of her presence sang against the trembling fabric of the unformed silver threads rippling outward from her feet like ripples in still water.Kael whispered, hoarse: “…Lyra?”Her smile carried every lifetime they had shared, including the ones the world had tried to forget. “I told you I would return when the story needed me.”The newborn hid behind the storyteller’s shoulder, peeking out with wide, frightened eyes. Lyra knelt. The silver around her flowed like riverlight.Her voice gentled: “Little one…you have done nothing wrong.”The newborn shook. “I broke everything. I broke the world. I broke the rules. I’m supposed to choose”Lyra’s palm touched the air beside them not touching, just offering

The newborn’s foot touched the white expanse and the world inverted. Not violently. Not with sound. Silently, smoothly, like a page turning itself inside-out. Light thinned. Color drew inward.The plane dissolved into a single point, and that point expanded into darkness. Not cold. Not cruel. A darkness untouched by meaning the kind that exists before anything knows it exists.The newborn gasped. They felt the storyteller’s hand slip away, Kael’s fire dim, Lyra’s silver fade not because the others vanished, but because this place refused to acknowledge shape.Only the newborn and the First Rule remained visible, glowing faintly. The newborn’s voice echoed strangely here: “…where are we?”The First Rule answered: “Before.”They swallowed. “Before what?”The Rule lifted a hand its lines shifting like ancient script rearranging itself. “Before story. Before name. Before counting.”The darkness rippled. A wave of absence spread outward, revealing faint shadows within it. Four shadows. Fou

Light was not light anymore. It was pressure, and warmth, and sound, and memory, and the tremble of everything that wanted to become more than it had ever been allowed to be.The newborn felt themselves stretch not painfully, but with the gentle ache of waking a limb that had slept too long. Every color that poured into them felt like a new story entering their bones.Gold: courage spoken in a trembling voice. Red: memory of hands refusing to let go. Silver: song woven around loss until it glowed. Violet: the moment before possibility chooses a direction.And then Something else. Something that did not have a color yet. It pressed against the newborn’s ribs like a heartbeat waiting to be named.They opened their mouth to breathe and exhaled light streaming out in ribbons that wrapped the collapsing plane and held its edges apart. They whispered: “Don’t break. Not yet. I’m not ready.”The trembling slowed. The plane obeyed. The newborn gasped. “Did I… do that?”The answer came as four

The newborn screamed as the fissure widened not in fear, but in recognition. “This isn’t possible,” Lyra whispered, silver flaring like a blade drawn in panic.Kael’s fire roared up his arms. “It shouldn’t be here. This world wasn’t built for it.”But the Principle rose anyway, dragging its colossal form out of the crack like a mountain remembering how to stand.Its molten eyes scanned the newborn’s world the colors, the breath, the new horizon, the visitor who did not fit any rule before locking onto the child. “YOU. YOU ARE THE ANOMALY THAT SURVIVED THE RESET.”The newborn staggered backward, their glow shaking violently. Kael moved in front of them immediately. “You don’t touch them.”Lyra crossed her arms, silver flaring into a shield around the child. The storyteller lifted the newborn into their arms, holding them tightly against their chest.The visitor, the stranger who had only just arrived watched the Principle with a solemn, unreadable expression.The Principle stepped forw