Silence, again. But this one was different it had depth, gravity, and the terrible patience of eternity. Fowler floated in it, arms outstretched, eyes open. He couldn’t tell if he was falling or suspended.Around him, the light that had once been the Sanctum drifted like dust caught in moonlight, each particle whispering with a tone that could almost have been her name.Selene. Selene. Selene.The whisper built and collapsed in waves, like a tide eroding the edges of his mind. He didn’t fight it. He let it carry him because even now, even inside this endless void, it was the only thing that felt real.Then came warmth. Not around him, but within. A pulse, faint but steady gold light flickering beneath his ribs, the last echo of their link.“Selene,” he murmured, half a prayer, half a vow.The pulse answered. And suddenly he wasn’t in the dark anymore.He stood in the middle of a half-remembered world the city before it fell, streets slick with rain, neon bleeding into puddles. He kn

There was no light. Not at first. Just a slow, rhythmic pulse soft as breathing, deep as oceans. It filled the dark, steady and patient, as if waiting for him to wake.Fowler opened his eyes into the silence. He was lying on what looked like glass, though it wasn’t cold. Beneath it, galaxies drifted in slow spirals fragments of color, memory, time.The air shimmered faintly, a thin fog glinting like static dust. He tried to sit up, and the motion rippled outward the whole world responding as though it were skin.For a moment he thought he was still dreaming. Then he heard her voice. “You shouldn’t have followed me.”Selene’s tone came from everywhere and nowhere. He turned, searching the haze. “Selene?”A figure stepped forward, clothed in starlight. Her body was human again or at least wearing the memory of it. Hair dark, eyes still burning with gold beneath the shadow.But her outline flickered at the edges, like reality struggled to hold her shape. He rose slowly, heart hammering.

The detonation didn’t sound like an explosion. It sounded like the world being rewritten the scream of light through matter, the tearing of time.The air folded inward, then burst outward in a flood of radiance so pure it erased shadow, sound, everything.Fowler was thrown backward through the wreckage of the tower. For an instant, gravity forgot its purpose.He hung suspended in the storm a man outlined by annihilation while the city below became nothing but light in motion.Skyscrapers bent like glass reeds. Streets melted into threads of molten memory. The sky inverted, colors devouring one another until only the white core remained the source.Selene’s voice broke through the noise, trembling inside him. Fowler don’t fight it!He tried to breathe but the air was alive, buzzing with impossible density. The gold in his veins flared, searing through his body like a second heartbeat out of sync with his own.“Selene!” he shouted, though his voice didn’t reach air it fell inward, pulle

The hand that caught Fowler’s wrist felt impossibly warm.mFor a moment, he thought it couldn’t be real just another hallucination born from the breaking light.But when he looked up through the darkness, through the swirling fractures of memory and debris, he saw her.Selene. Or something that wore her shape.She hovered above the abyss, light spilling off her in threads that pulsed like veins. Her eyes were not gold anymore they were fractured spectrums, like every color was trying to exist at once and couldn’t decide which to be.“Selene…” His voice broke. The word was half relief, half disbelief.She smiled faintly, pulling him upward. “Still falling for me, huh?”He laughed a sharp, broken sound as she drew him through the collapsing void. The darkness around them rippled like liquid glass, folding inward and outward with every movement.But when they breached the surface, the world that waited above was not the one they’d left.They emerged into silence. A vast field of stillness

The dark had texture. It wasn’t the absence of light, it was a pressure, a hum, a living silence that stretched endlessly in every direction.Fowler floated inside it, unmoored, his body neither present nor gone. His first thought wasn’t a word but a question pulsing through the emptiness:Which one am I?No answer came. Only the slow, steady rhythm of the heartbeat he’d heard before too even, too alien to be his own.Then came the sound. A low resonance, deeper than thunder, older than thought.It rippled through him, and with it came fragments flashes of memory, images flaring and vanishing before he could hold them: Selene reaching, the double’s hand burning through his chest, the mirror world folding inward.He gasped, or thought he did. There was no breath, no lungs only the idea of breathing. The darkness began to change.Light bled through the void faint lines sketching themselves into existence, tracing circuits in every direction until they formed a massive lattice suspended