At first, there was nothing but the quiet that thin, almost sacred stillness that follows endings too vast for words. Then came breath.Fowler inhaled sharply, as though breaking the surface after drowning in light. The air that filled his lungs was real: cool, carrying the faint metallic tang of rain on stone.He coughed, once, twice, and the sound felt solid not echo, not memory. When he opened his eyes, he was standing at the edge of a vast plain.The world around him was reborn. Not pristine. Not perfect. But alive.Ruins from the old world jutted through the soil like broken bones, half-claimed by creeping vines. Rivers ran backward through canyons of glass, reflecting a dawn that looked new even to the sun.And above it all, suspended in the sky like a heartbeat rendered in architecture, hung the remnants of the Dream Engine silent now, fractured, but pulsing faintly, as if it still remembered how to dream.Fowler took one step forward, boots sinking into the soft, luminous soil

Light had weight now. Not metaphorical real, crushing, sentient. It pressed against Fowler’s skin, folding around him like liquid glass.The chamber that once pulsed in harmony with his thoughts was now a storm of contradiction. Every wall bled memory; every shadow whispered names that no longer belonged to anyone alive.He staggered upright, eyes burning. The Inheritance Core loomed before him no longer a sphere of calm illumination, but a vortex of opposing forces. Half golden, half obsidian. Half Selene, half something else.And inside it countless faces. Not awake. Not asleep. Remembering themselves wrong. Fowler…The voice hers, fractured, distant. He spun toward it, but the light fractured further, splintering into reflections that all wore Selene’s face. Some were human. Others were luminous, or skeletal, or carved from echo.He took a step back. “Selene, what is this?”The second waking. What we buried didn’t die it only learned to dream deeper. The light pulsed once, strong e

They fell through silence. Not air. Not gravity. Not space. Just decision thick as water, heavy as regret pulling at their bodies as though the world itself demanded an answer.Fowler clung to Selene’s hand, fingers locked with hers. Every time he blinked, the world around them changed:A city of glass below. A desert swallowing the horizon. The Sanctum rebuilt as a cathedral. A quiet kitchen they once shared. A memory of a life they never lived.Faster. Faster. Reality flickered like a dying filament. “Selene!” he shouted, voice torn away by the rushing light. “I know!” she yelled back. “It’s collapsing into the decision point!”The Core-being’s voice echoed through every variation: Choose, stay with me and guide the world… or run from me, and let it choose for itself.But neither option sounded like survival. The fall ended abruptly. They slammed onto solid ground or what pretended to be ground a glossy black surface that stretched endlessly in every direction.No horizon. No sky. J

There was no falling. There was only entry a slow, impossible dissolving, as though his body were being rewritten into a thousand quiet strands of thought.Fowler tried to breathe. The breath turned into light. “Selene?” His voice rippled outward like a stone dropped into liquid glass. For a moment there was no answer. Then “I’m here.”Her voice arrived before her form. A warmth against his side, a gravity anchoring him even as everything else dissolved. Shapes began to gather around them. Not walls. Not space. Structure.As if the Core-being’s mind was knitting itself together to greet them. “What is this place?” he whispered. Selene held his arm. “Its interior cognition. We’re inside its thought architecture.”A soft pulse moved through the space like a heartbeat. Except it wasn’t a beat, it was a decision. The world clarified.They stood in a chamber composed of shifting fractal planes surfaces folding inward, outward, fracturing, reforming. Entire patterns changed when they blinke

There was no falling. There was arrival. The transition felt like being poured into a mold that already knew their names.Fowler staggered as the world resolved around him a vast circular chamber with no visible walls, no ceiling, no floor. Only depthless space, stretching in every direction, shimmering like oil on water.The floor if it was a floor only existed because their minds insisted it did. His boots found purchase on a faint ring of light that pulsed gently beneath them, as if responding to their heartbeat.Selene hovered inches above the surface at first, before gravity or something imitating it asserted itself. She settled lightly beside him, gaze sweeping the impossible architecture. “This…” she whispered, “is not what I expected.”Fowler’s throat tightened. “Feels like it’s waiting.”A pulse answered. Not sound. Not light. Something deeper. The chamber inhaled the infinite walls bending inward then exhaled, washing them with a pressure that felt like memory pressed into a