He woke to the sound of himself breaking. Not a scream. Not even pain. Just a long, clean crack running through his sense of being.Jason’s thoughts didn’t align anymore, they arrived in echoes, staggered, delayed, repeating the same fragment in a thousand slightly different voices.“Jason, wake—wake—wake”He reached for the voice and found no body to move. The world around him was white and shifting, a lattice of geometric light that pulsed like a living nervous system.It wasn’t solid, but it wasn’t abstract either; every flicker of brightness carried meaning, like it was thinking him into existence. He realized the light was running through him. No, as him.His outline shimmered, pixelating in and out of shape. Memory scattered across the walls: Aria’s laugh, the sound of wind through the Observatory, the warmth of her hand when she said trust me, all fragmented, being fed into the grid like data being analyzed and reclassified.Jason tried to speak. “Aria”The lattice responded in

Light. Endless, white, formless light. Jason floated in it, or thought he did. There was no sense of up or down, only warmth and weightlessness, like being suspended in the pulse of his own heartbeat.He blinked, but his eyes didn’t seem to matter. Vision existed without sight, thought without voice. And somewhere within that stillness, a question stirred. Am I alive?The light didn’t answer. It breathed instead, expanding, contracting, like lungs the size of the world. Every pulse sent ripples through him, carrying whispers of something vast and familiar.He tried to speak her name. “Aria.”The sound didn’t travel. It unfolded in the air around him, scattering into fragments that became countless echoes of the same syllable, whispering through the distance: Aria, aria, aria... until the repetition lost all meaning.Then, faintly, a single echo answered back. “Jason?”It wasn’t a voice. It was an imprint, a memory folded into the light itself. He turned instinctively toward it, though

There was no up or down, no sound, no time. Only the after. Aria floated in it, or thought she did. The blackness wasn’t empty but crowded, packed with fragments of light like dust suspended in honey.The remnants of the perfect world drifted through the void, shimmering with echoes of what they once were: pieces of grass that whispered equations, a slice of sky still bleeding gold, a single note of Jason’s laugh caught in a loop.When she tried to move, her body didn’t respond. Her limbs were suggestions, half-formed. Her thoughts pulsed, and the void pulsed back.She remembered the collapse, the reflection’s scream, Jason’s heartbeat cutting through the false harmony. Then everything had folded inward like light remembering itself.Now, there was only this. The unmaking before the rebuild. Somewhere far away, or very near, a pulse repeated: one low, steady thud. Jason’s heartbeat again. Real, imperfect, human.She reached for it. The void resisted, stretching like thick glass. Her a

Jason hit the barrier with everything he had left. It wasn’t strength that carried him through. It wasn’t will. It wasn’t even desperation.It was the simple, impossible truth that Aria needed him, and something in the lattice still remembered that. The mirror-wall shattered.Light exploded around him, hurling him into a world that was not one world at all, but a stack of them: reflections layered atop reflections, flickering through possibility like a deck of cards shuffled too fast to follow.He crashed onto a surface that wasn’t solid. A field? A plain? A floor of glass? All three, flashing in and out. He forced himself upright, breath ragged. “Aria!”Her name echoed, splitting into dozens of tones, his voice too high, too low, too distant, returning to him like a chorus of ghosts. He looked up. The sky was breaking.Great cracks spread across it, radiating outward like lightning frozen in place. Each fissure glowed with a different color: gold, red, pale white, deep cobalt. Throug

Jason was falling through light. No, not falling, being parsed. His thoughts stretched, flattened, and reassembled into endless lines of code that scrolled across a horizon he could no longer name.The air wasn’t air; it was information humming at frequencies that his brain tried and failed to translate.Fragments of memory spun past him like shards of glass, Aria’s hand, her scream, the mirror corridor, the brief flash of her touch before everything broke.Then came the silence. A silence too absolute to be natural. Jason gasped, or thought he did, though he had no lungs.The sensation was only a ghost of breath, a line of data flagged deprecated by whatever system he was trapped inside. Error: Duplicate consciousness detected.The words pulsed in front of him in glowing red text, hanging midair. He reached toward them, but his hand dissolved into static before contact.Every time he tried to move, parts of him lagged, desynchronized, like reality was buffering. Then a whisper, faint