He awoke standing, the world around him was glass. Not smooth, but fractured millions of suspended shards reflecting different skies, each one bleeding light in a different color. When he breathed, the shards shifted, echoing the motion of lungs that were no longer entirely his.Beneath his boots was no ground, only a reflection, the ghost of a floor that seemed to hold him up out of respect, not gravity.Adrian reached for his chest. The uniform was gone. The medals, the scars gone. His hand came away covered in gold dust that shimmered and fell upward instead of down. He blinked, and his hand belonged to someone else: younger, thinner, trembling.A whisper ran through the air, soft and close “You took her place.”He turned.In the broken light, he saw figures walking through the mirrors. Some wore his face, others Selene’s. All of them were distorted, faces bent sideways, smiles stitched in reverse, eyes glowing faintly as if remembering something holy.Adrian staggered back, heart

The sky was coming apart, not with thunder or flame, but with silence. A soundless rupture split across the horizon, peeling the night like old paint. Beneath it, the city glowed in unnatural stillness, every window reflecting a gold shimmer that wasn’t light but memory.The Eye’s pulse faint, failing bled across the skyline in long, stuttering waves.Vivienne Hale stood on the cracked observation deck of the command outpost, wind whipping her hair into her eyes, headset sparking with static. The air tasted like electricity and fear.“Adrian” she rasped into the comm. “Respond. Please.”Only static answered. A low, intermittent hiss that broke once into the faintest human echo before collapsing again.She closed her eyes, grounding herself against the railing. Her heartbeat thundered in her throat.He’d gone back in, of course he had.She’d watched his signal vanish into the Eye’s dying field, his vitals fragmenting into unreadable patterns. Command had ordered her to shut the system

There was no waking, only remembering. Vivienne’s eyes opened to a sky that wasn’t a sky, a black expanse textured like oil, rippling with veins of light that pulsed to the rhythm of her heartbeat.The air shimmered around her in slow motion, thick with the scent of ozone and something faintly metallic.The ground beneath her was translucent, a mirror of glass suspended over an abyss. Beneath it, faces shifted like trapped stars, flaring briefly before vanishing again. Some she recognized. Most she didn’t. All of them whispered.Welcome back, You’re late. You shouldn’t have followed him.Her throat burned when she tried to speak. “Adrian”The sound cracked the air literally. A thin fissure of white lightning streaked outward from her mouth, racing into the distance until it was swallowed by the dark, and then, somewhere within the black horizon, a pulse. Slow, familiar.She turned toward it, her pulse syncing to its rhythm, the same rhythm she’d once traced against his wrist in the si

It wasn’t an explosion. It was an undoing. Vivienne’s body came apart in silence no fire, no heat, no pain. Just light folding in on itself, peeling her layer by layer until she wasn’t sure where her skin ended and the world began.Every atom of her being was stretched across dimensions she couldn’t name.She heard the sound of her heartbeat disintegrate, not stopping, but splitting into countless versions of itself, each echoing at a different frequency. Somewhere in the swarm of sound, she heard Adrian’s voice again.“Vivienne.”Her name, drawn out like a plea. She tried to reach toward it, but her hands dissolved into light. Her memories followed, fracturing, scattering, moments flickering in random bursts.Her first mission with Adrian. Her laughter under gunfire. Selene’s voice in the corridor, saying, You’ll never understand him. The Eye, whispering, You already do.Then, silence. For a heartbeat, she wasn’t anyone. Something touched her consciousness. A thread. A thought not he