For a heartbeat, Jason thought the light had gone silent again. Then he realized it was breathing.The air itself was pulsing with rhythm, faint, steady, deliberate. Every flicker of light seemed to exhale with his heartbeat. And every time he drew breath, something in the reflection breathed with him.Then it started whispering. At first it was soft, like echo. A shimmer under his voice. But then the words became clear, identical tone, identical cadence. “You’re too late.”Jason froze.His reflection stared back from the shattered silver sea, no longer mimicking his movements, but standing just slightly off-beat, as though it existed half a second ahead of him.He swallowed hard. “No.”The reflection tilted its head, smiling faintly. “You broke the labyrinth, Jason. You broke her, too. Why shouldn’t you break yourself?”Jason’s pulse slammed through him. He stepped closer to the glass. “You’re not me.”“Then why do I remember everything you do?” the reflection murmured. “Why do I fee

He woke to the sound of a heartbeat. Not one, a thousand. Each thud came from a different direction, a different tempo. Every beat was his.Jason opened his eyes and saw five skies layered atop each other like torn veils. In one, dawn bled gold. In another, the sun had already burned out.Between them drifted silhouettes, his own, walking through worlds that didn’t belong together. He tried to move and split. The motion fractured him into a dozen selves, each stepping into its own timeline.He blinked and stood inside a sun-washed city. The smell of herbs, the hum of street vendors, children laughing under banners of peace. His hands were steady, gloved, clean.A nurse brushed past him. “Doctor Miller, the stabilization wards are holding!”He froze. Doctor Miller. On a cot near the window, Aria slept peacefully, human, whole. Her hair glowed in the soft light, no trace of mirrored silver.He felt warmth bloom in his chest, a life where she had never been broken, never divided. Where h

He woke without breath because the lungs weren’t his alone. Each inhale caught on another rhythm. Each blink arrived a fraction too soon, as if two people were trying to use the same set of nerves.The world came back in pulses of light, first red, then gold, then the faint shimmer of glass under his skin. He sat up. The movement felt rehearsed and wrong, every muscle arguing about direction.Jason, said the voice in his skull. Stop moving. You’re tearing the seam. He froze. “Aria?”Yes, and no. Don’t talk. We share the same throat now. He touched his face. Smooth, unfamiliar. When he looked down, the hands staring back were both of theirs: long-fingered, callused, a faint tracer of light running beneath the veins like circuitry and blood. A body half-made of ember and reflection.The ground beneath him was liquid stone, mirroring a sky that had no horizon. Cities bloomed and collapsed in silence at the edge of sight, rippling like dreams trying to remember themselves.This was not a

The silence hit first. No sound. No wind. Just a pulse that wasn’t quite heartbeat, wasn’t quite thunder, slow, deliberate, echoing through the air like the ticking of a dying clock.Jason froze where he stood, staring across the fractured sky. And there, stepping out of the burning horizon, was him.Same eyes. Same stance. Same quiet rage under the skin. But colder. Perfect, almost mechanical, like someone had rebuilt him from memory and stripped out everything that made him human.Aria stood between them, barefoot in the glass dust. The light that lived under her skin pulsed unevenly, half gold, half shadow, flashing faster the closer the two Jasons came to her.Jason’s throat felt dry. “That… thing”The double tilted its head. “is what you were meant to be,” it finished, speaking in his voice. Every syllable vibrated like it came from somewhere behind his ears. “The version that didn’t hesitate.”The world rippled at his words. Reflected cities flickered into existence and died aga

There was no impact. No sensation of falling, only stretching, like every cell in Jason’s body was being pulled into a thread and woven through fire.He gasped, but his lungs filled with light instead of air. Each breath carried a sound: fragments of Aria’s voice whispering his name in a dozen tones, overlapping until meaning dissolved.Don’t fight the thread… let it choose you.He stumbled forward. The ground was translucent, veins of color pulsing beneath his feet. Above, an ocean of mirrored stars swirled slowly, each reflection showing a different scene: Aria laughing on a rooftop, Aria dissolving into ash, Aria standing over his own corpse.He reached toward one, the rooftop version, and the star flared, burning his fingertips. The vision screamed, “Not this one!” and vanished.Every light recoiled. Jason realized the stars weren’t memories; they were possibilities. And the gate wanted him to choose.He took another breath and nearly collapsed. The air here was too heavy, full of