Light turned to sound. Sound turned to silence. And then the silence broke. A low hum rolled through the air not from outside, but from within her.Selene felt it vibrating through her bones, a resonance that was no longer hers alone. The world hadn’t shattered; it had rewound.When she opened her eyes, she was standing in a place she didn’t remember building. The sky was white. The ground was water and above her, faint and slow, the clouds were moving backward.She looked down. Her reflection blinked half a second after she did. “Fowler?”Her voice rippled across the mirrored plain, bending as though it had to travel through two different realities to reach him.No answer. She turned slowly and saw him suspended a few meters away, weightless, body upright, eyes closed, his outline flickering between two colors: the deep amber of flesh, and the pale gold of memory.“Fowler!” She ran toward him, or tried to each step sent ripples through the ground that folded back over themselves, tra

Sound came first. A low hum. The kind that could be wind, or a machine, or the earth’s memory trying to start again.Then came light hesitant, fractured, moving through the cracks like dawn through a broken window. Fowler opened his eyes.He was lying in grass. Real grass. Wet, cool, uneven beneath his hands. The air was heavy with scent soil, rain, and the faint sharpness of ozone that lingered after storms.The sky above him wasn’t perfect. It wavered slightly, as though the world was still uncertain about its own existence. Clouds drifted in slow arcs, dissolving and reforming at the edges.He sat up. The hill stretched in every direction, rolling into mist. No Sanctum. No ocean of light. No echo of the Engine’s pulse. Just a horizon that breathed and shimmered like something newly born.He touched his arm, his face. Flesh. Heat. Pulse. “Selene?”Silence answered. He stood, swaying for balance. His body felt like it had been built moments ago strong but strange, as if the memory of

The city slept differently now. Not in silence, but in whispers. As Fowler walked its inner avenues, he could hear them soft, interwoven voices humming beneath the air like roots beneath soil.Every word was a pulse of light, every whisper a thread in the vast organism that Selene had become. The sound wasn’t eerie; it was gentle, alive. The kind of quiet that made the world feel newly born.He followed the current uphill, where the streets curved like veins toward the city’s crown. Along the way, figures turned to watch him translucent people, fragments of lives still tethered to the pulse.They smiled faintly as he passed, some nodding, others dissolving mid-motion like wind-blown dust. He wasn’t sure if they were ghosts or just memories that hadn’t decided what to become yet.At the summit stood an archway made of living stone vines of gold filament and pale green glass intertwined. Beyond it stretched a vast field that shimmered like starlight caught in bloom.The Memory Garden. H

Silence had a shape now. It breathed. Fowler opened his eyes to light soft, unhurried light that pulsed with no source, as though the air itself remembered how to glow.He lay in a shallow field of white grass. The horizon was empty, neither sky nor land, only a slow drift of translucent petals that seemed to fall upward.He moved slowly and the world didn’t resist. He was still here. Somehow. Then he heard it. A small sound. Not the pulse. Not the hum of the Engine. A breath. Uneven. Fragile. He turned.A child stood a few feet away, barefoot in the white grass. Her hair shimmered like glass catching sunrise, her eyes an impossible mix one gray, one gold.In her gaze, he saw reflection and recursion: Selene’s warmth, his defiance, the rhythm of the Pulse between them both.The Dream’s echo alive. She tilted her head, curious but unafraid. “Are you… my maker?”Fowler’s throat constricted. “No,” he said quietly. “Just… what was left.”She blinked, taking a step closer. “Then whose mem

The dawn did not end. It lingered stretched thin across the horizon, refusing to become day. Fowler walked through the new world’s hush, the air thick with luminous dust that tasted faintly of salt and memory.The girl followed behind him, silent, every motion deliberate, as if the very act of moving might rewrite what had just been born.They came to a ridge of glassy earth. Below, the world rippled outward continents still shaping themselves, rivers reversing midcourse, clouds sketching new constellations in the sky.“This isn’t how it’s supposed to stabilize,” Fowler murmured. “It’s… still thinking.”“It’s learning what to forget,” she said.He turned. “What do you mean?”The girl knelt, pressing her palm to the surface. The ground pulsed soft, heartbeat-like and for a moment he saw flashes of cities, people, lives that weren’t theirs. Entire histories blooming and fading within seconds.“It remembers everything,” she whispered. “Every world before this one. Every dream, every deat