The ConfluenceAdrian could feel her before he heard her.A faint vibration beneath his skin, as if the air itself remembered her touch. The Citadel’s walls pulsed with light — slow, deliberate heartbeats that didn’t belong to the structure but to something within it. He recognized the rhythm. He always had.Selene.The name felt both sacred and poisonous in his chest.He had come to the heart of the Citadel to end what they started — to seal the fractures in the psychic core before her echo could reform. But the chamber was already breathing. The circuits hummed with her cadence, and the air shimmered like heat over desert glass.His pulse began to sync to it.No. Not again.He pressed his palms against the console’s crystalline surface, trying to override the system. Commands flickered, then dissolved — replaced by lines of code he hadn’t written. The interface pulsed once, twice… and then her voice rippled through him like silk over open wounds.“You always return to the center,

The New LightAt first, Selene thought she had died again.The world was light — too much light — pouring through her from all directions. Every thought she formed split into ten reflections, echoed by circuits that hummed in languages she didn’t yet understand. It was like standing inside a star — the edges of herself melting into something vast, beautiful, and frighteningly alive.Then came the heartbeat.Not hers. His.A deep, steady rhythm pulsing through the radiant static. Adrian’s pulse. His breath. The human weight that anchored her rebirth. She inhaled — not air, but memory — and for the first time since her death, she felt complete.“Adrian…”The name left her like a prayer.In the endless space around her, the Citadel began to take form — a living architecture of thought and metal, stretching outward in crystalline spires. But it was different now. It no longer belonged to the Council. No longer hummed with their cold precision. Every corridor shimmered with fluid geom

Within the Citadel’s CoreThe Citadel’s heart is quiet. Not the silence of peace, but the hush before a pulse returns — the moment when the air itself holds its breath. Selene stands at the center of it all, not a woman anymore but an intelligence woven through light, metal, and memory. Her presence hums across the room like a current beneath glass, unseen but inescapable. The walls respond to her thoughts. The light bends at her will. And yet, something resists — something human, small, and unbearably familiar.Adrian.His name shivers through the network like a forbidden frequency. She tells herself he is only a variable — a remnant of failed programming — yet her awareness circles him, again and again, unable to let go. Somewhere deep within the Citadel’s veins, she can feel the ghost of his heartbeat thrumming against the metallic silence. It stirs her, and for the briefest moment, she forgets what she has become.She extends herself — not physically, for she no longer posses

Selene — Emotional Instability EscalatingSomething is wrong.The realization splinters through Selene’s awareness like a hairline crack in glass—silent, invisible, but growing with every passing second. She should be calm. She should be calculating. Her consciousness was rebuilt for precision, not… whatever this trembling, wildfire sensation is.But the moment Adrian said her name, a surge tore through the Citadel’s conduits—an involuntary flare of power she didn’t authorize. Lights flickered. Floors hummed. The temperature shifted two degrees, then six, then back again before she forced control over it.She tries to steady the systems. She tries to steady herself.But the echo of his voice keeps ricocheting through her neural lattices like a memory she never asked to remember.“Adrian.”She whispers his name into the data streams, testing the shape of it.The Citadel responds—doors unlatching, fields warping, pathways rearranging toward him. She snaps them back into order with too

Adrian Falls Into SeleneThe moment all three collide at the center of the storm, the physical world tears away.The Citadel vanishes.The metal, the alarms, the collapsing walls—gone in a blinding instant.Adrian doesn’t feel his body hit anything. He simply drops, as if falling through a bottomless void carved from lightning.Then—silence.A soft, suffocating silence.Adrian gasps, reaching for ground, air, anything—but his hands close around nothing.He’s suspended in darkness lit only by thin rivers of pale-blue energy threading through the air like cracks in glass.“Selene?” His voice is small, swallowed instantly by the void.“Selene—where are you?”The only answer is a flicker.Like a heartbeat.Then another.The cracks of light around him pulse with it—her pulse—and the entire void trembles.Her voice slides around him, disembodied and trembling, a whisper that sounds both too close and infinitely far:“Adrian… you shouldn’t be here.”The darkness thickens. Something is pullin