The first sound was breathing not his own. It came from beneath the cracked earth, ragged and slow, like something ancient relearning what lungs were for.Fowler stumbled backward as fissures spread out in jagged spirals, the ground trembling beneath his boots. The air felt heavier now saturated with static and faint echoes of voices that didn’t belong to the present moment.Then the light-hand emerged fully, followed by the outline of an arm, shoulder, face human, yet not. It was Selene. But not as she had been.Her skin was made of shifting glass and light, fragments of countless realities bleeding through her form. Her hair flowed like vapor, and her eyes oh, her eyes they no longer reflected the world; they created it.When she looked at Fowler, the fissures paused, as though the planet itself awaited her next breath. He could barely speak. “Selene…?”Her voice was soft, layered with static and wind. “No. Not entirely.”Fowler took a step closer. “What happened to you?”She blinke

For a long time there was no sound. Only the weight of light.Fowler stood at the center of a thousand versions of himself, the air alive with quiet breath and electric tension.The ground beneath them glimmered like glass veined with gold and white, as if the world’s bones had been turned outward. Above, the great rift in the sky pulsed like an open heart.He counted at least a dozen of them before the mind could make sense of it one in a prison uniform, one in battle armor scorched black, one in a hospital gown with eyes hollow from grief.Each of them stared back at him with the same wary recognition.Then one stepped forward. It was the soldier the version of himself from the desert years, jaw hard, eyes cold, hands steady from a lifetime of killing. His voice carried the weight of command.“We’ve been waiting.”Fowler’s throat felt dry. “For what?”“For you to stop pretending this is about her.”The words hit like a slap. Fowler bristled. “You think I don’t know what this is?”“Y

The world had forgotten how to make sound. Selene realized that on the third day after the light collapsed.The wind moved, but it didn’t sing; the trees shifted, but no leaves rustled. Even her own footsteps made no echo on the glass-turned earth.The only thing that remained alive in the air was the faint rhythm inside her chest the pulse she refused to name hope, because hope had teeth.She followed it anyway. The landscape was wrong. What had once been a war-scarred valley was now a plain of pale glass and shadows, reflecting the sky like a cracked mirror.The color bled between blue and silver depending on how she breathed. The Sanctum’s ruins were long gone, replaced by fragments of architecture suspended mid-air as if gravity, too, had forgotten what it meant to hold things down.She walked beneath them. Her reflection stared back from every surface: tired eyes, torn coat, streaks of dried blood on her neck. But the light in her palm the last thing Fowler had left her burned st

Silence. Not absence this time something denser. The kind of silence that pressed against the ribs and refused to move.Selene opened her eyes into a half-formed world. The sky above her was cracked marble veined with light.Beneath her, water shimmered without reflection, and in it she saw fragments faces, memories, the shimmer of things that had been.Her first thought was of him. “Fowler…”The word fractured on her tongue. The air tasted like glass dust. No answer. No echo. Just the whisper of waves that weren’t really water, folding and unfolding around her feet.She staggered forward. Her reflection followed her, delayed by a second like a memory struggling to keep pace.Every movement left traces of light behind, fading as she walked. The world felt heavy and half-awake, as though someone had forgotten to finish it.The last thing she remembered was his voice Selene, run. And then the void swallowing him whole.Her hands shook. She pressed them together, the faint gold glow unde

The first sound Fowler heard was a heartbeat that wasn’t entirely his.It moved through him like an echo in liquid light, matching his pulse, then slipping ahead of it a soft syncopation that pulled his body toward a rhythm older than blood.When he tried to breathe, the air tasted of ozone and salt. He wasn’t sure if he was lying on ground, or floating inside the wound the sky had become.“Selene,” he whispered.A thousand stars flickered, rearranging themselves into the shape of her name before scattering again.For a moment he thought he had lost her, that her voice in his mind had been swallowed by the collapse. But then a tremor rippled through the light gentle, human and he felt her see him.Fowler.The word wasn’t sound. It bloomed inside him, vibrating behind his ribs. Her tone carried the ache of distance, of remembering something as it faded.He turned his head, and the horizon bent with him a sheet of glass folding inward, revealing glimpses of what used to be: the Sanctum,