The tide rolled backward. Not receding reversing. Each wave curled inward like a reel of film rewinding itself, pulling foam and starlight into silence.The horizon flickered between day and night, then settled into a golden dusk that refused to move. Selene woke with salt on her lips.Her hand reached for the sand instinctively and found it warm, alive, pulsing faintly beneath her fingertips like skin remembering touch.She sat up slowly. The beach was endless again, but different this time. The air hummed with echoes laughter, music, wind chimes, whispers all blending into a single rhythm that sounded suspiciously like a heartbeat.And then she realized. It was a heartbeat. Not hers. Fowler’s.She stood, turning in slow circles. The ocean glowed faintly under the still sun, its surface rippling with patterns too precise to be natural spirals, loops, neural lattices.Each wave was a memory running backward and forward at once. “Fowler,” she whispered.The sea responded not with sound

He surfaced from silence like a diver returning to breath. At first, there was nothing no sound, no light, just the slow unfurling of thought.Then came the rhythm. The same one he’d felt before: steady, human, alive. Only now, it wasn’t his alone. The Dream Engine had found him. Fowler opened his eyes.He stood in a chamber that breathed. Its walls shimmered with fluid geometry, every curve shifting like the inside of a living organism.Filaments of memory and light wove through the air, threading into one another, pulsing in time with the beat beneath his feet.He recognized the architecture Selene’s design. Her touch was everywhere: in the symmetry, in the restraint, in the warmth hidden beneath the impossible. She had done it. She’d rebuilt the world.He reached out and brushed his fingers along one of the living walls. It responded instantly, blooming with gold.The glow rippled outward, tracing the pattern of her signature through the surface elegant, intentional. She was here.

He woke mid-breath lungs filled not with air, but with light. The world around him was motionless.Frozen mid-collapse.The sea suspended above, the shards of himself hovering like broken constellations.And before him, her hand Selene’s hand caught halfway between reach and retreat, light bleeding from her fingertips, fracturing into dozens of ghostly duplicates across the still air.He tried to move toward her, but space itself bent wrong every step folding backward, every reach bringing him no closer.“Selene!” His voice tore through the stasis, half sound, half thought.Her voice came faintly, distorted. “Fowler don’t move. The boundary hasn’t decided which side we’re on.”“The boundary?” he rasped. “Between what?”Her image flickered, splitting into two Selenes one in light, one in shadow. Each spoke out of sync. “Memory and…”“…Echo.”He understood instantly. The Dream Engine hadn’t just rebuilt them it was filtering them, sorting what belonged to reality and what was only resid

He fell through silence that felt alive. Not a descent through air, but through memory each layer of dark threaded with light, each flicker a piece of himself stripped bare.Then, with a sudden breath, he stopped falling. He stood in a space too vast to measure. The walls if they could be called walls were made of moving light, strands of it flowing like water through glass.They pulsed in rhythm with a sound that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn’t a heartbeat. It wasn’t a hum. It was the sound of remembering.The Source Node. Fowler knew it without needing to be told. This was where everything the Pulse, the Engine, the Dream had been leading him.The convergence point of every echo, every life, every version of Selene and himself that had ever existed. The air shimmered when he breathed. Even his thoughts made ripples in the geometry of the room.He took one slow step forward. The ground responded not with weight, but with intention. His foot sank into light like it

He was standing in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, rain in his hair. The look he gave her wasn’t the one she remembered.It wasn’t hardened by loss or tempered by guilt. It was open, curious as though he’d just seen a stranger who felt familiar for reasons he couldn’t name. “Can I help you?” he asked.Selene didn’t move. Couldn’t. His voice hit her like gravity. Soft. Grounded. Human. She swallowed hard. “Fowler?”He frowned slightly. “Do I know you?”The world seemed to tilt. The air in her lungs felt borrowed. She stared at him alive, breathing, new.His eyes were still the same green-gray storms that had followed her through the years, but there was no weight behind them. No history. No pulse of light.He didn’t remember. The Pulse had rewritten him. “I” she started, but her voice faltered.The rain softened against the pavement, every drop seeming to hang midair before hitting the ground like time was trying not to intrude. Fowler stepped closer. “Hey. You okay?”S