The light didn’t end. It throbbed alive, infinite and for a while Fowler forgot what shape meant. He was thought without anchor, drifting through currents that felt like music without sound.Every direction was forward, and none was. Every second was a lifetime compressed into a heartbeat. Then gravity returned. He fell.It wasn’t a violent drop more like being drawn down through the folds of a dream, the brightness thinning until shadow returned at the edges. When he finally landed, it was with a soft impact on dust cool, fine, metallic.He opened his eyes. He was standing in a field of pale light stretching to the horizon, where shards of broken sky floated in the air like pieces of glass.The clouds above were motionless, fractured as if they’d been painted on. Fowler’s first breath tasted sterile. Artificial. “Selene?” he called.Only his echo answered soft, hollow. Then, from somewhere in the distance, the hum began again.He turned toward it, every muscle alert. It wasn’t the sa

The white fire rose like a wall between them a living storm of memory and energy. Every pulse of it carried fragments of voices, moments, and images their life together refracted into chaos.Fowler’s skin burned from the proximity, but he didn’t step back. “Selene!” he shouted over the roar. “You’re in there I know you are!”The figure tilted her head, the movement slow, inhumanly graceful. Her eyes burned gold, her voice steady as the hum of machinery.“Selene is a remnant. The cycle continues.”He clenched his fists. “You’re not a cycle. You’re us!”The ground trembled. Lines of light shot out from her feet, spidering across the glass plain. Each one pulsed with her heartbeat or what used to be hers. Fowler could feel it through his chest, syncing, dragging his pulse along until it hurt.He dropped to one knee, panting, sweat and blood mixing down his face. “You can’t… erase what we were.”Her expression didn’t change. But something flickered a hesitation, a delay between her words

The air still trembled from the explosion. Fowler staggered to his feet amid the wreckage, chest heaving, every breath tasting of copper and static.The chamber around him was half-gone its walls shattered into suspended shards of glass-light that hovered weightlessly in the dark.Beneath them, the fissure yawned open, a slow pulse rising from its depths like something enormous breathing in the dark.And within that pulse a rhythm that echoed his own heart. He gritted his teeth. “Selene…”No response. Not in his head. Not in the air. He pressed a shaking hand against the side of his skull. “Come on, talk to me.”Silence. Then, a flicker faint, fading a whisper inside him. Fowler… run.The sound came like a dying spark, more instinct than voice. He froze. She was still here. Still somewhere inside the layers. But beneath his feet, the fissure moved again.The molten light began to rise. It wasn’t fire, it was structure: geometric, recursive, building itself into impossible forms.A sha

The streets were gone. They had dissolved into light, peeled upward into the air like smoke being sucked into the heavens.All that remained was the tower a spire of shifting glass and memory and the woman standing at its base. Selene.Or the shape that wore her face.The resemblance was too perfect: the tilt of her mouth, the soft curve of her jaw, the quiet intensity in her eyes.Yet there was something wrong. The air around her shimmered like heat, bending light the way gravity bent time.“Fowler,” she said, and her voice carried like a prayer through a broken cathedral.He stopped a few paces away, the ground humming under his boots. “You’re not her.”Her expression flickered not hurt, not surprised something older. “Aren’t I? I have her memories. Her love. Her last breath burned into the Engine’s core.”He shook his head slowly. “She wouldn’t have built a world out of lies.”The false Selene smiled almost tenderly. “You think truth survives creation? Every god starts as a story,

The first thing Fowler heard was rain. Soft. Relentless. Falling against stone and glass with an almost rhythmic calm a sound that felt too gentle for what should’ve come after annihilation.He opened his eyes slowly. The world above him wasn’t the fractured sanctum or the storm of light he’d fallen through it was sky. Not shattered, not aflame. A flat, violet-gray expanse that pulsed faintly, as if it were alive.He sat up. He was lying in the middle of a street or something that used to be one. The air shimmered faintly, the horizon bending in strange, liquid curves.Buildings leaned inward like tired giants, their outlines unstable, flickering between architecture and geometry.The city was there… but rewritten. Every light glowed faint violet. Every reflection in the puddles looked a half-second out of sync.Fowler pushed himself to his feet, dizzy. His coat was shredded, his arms streaked with golden veins except now they weren’t gold. They pulsed violet, the same hue that had de