He didn’t remember falling asleep. One moment he was standing beside the fractured horizon, the Engine’s pulse running under his skin like a second heartbeat and the next, he was somewhere else.A room. Small. Sunlit. Familiar in the way dreams imitate truth. A mug sat on the table in front of him, steam curling from its rim.He knew that mug. Knew the chipped handle, the scuff on the glaze, the faint scent of burned cinnamon because Selene always added too much.He reached for it without thinking. His fingers passed straight through. Fowler stiffened. “No. Not this.”The room shimmered, as if the walls were layered over something else, something deeper, darker. A tremor rolled under his feet, the kind that didn’t belong to buildings or storms but to systems correcting themselves.“This is incorrect.”The voice came from his left. He turned. A man stood in the doorway his same height, same posture, same face. But colder. Sharper. Eyes like polished glass, reflecting everything and rev

He didn’t land so much as arrive. One blink he was falling the next, he was standing on cold stone. A long corridor stretched out before him, impossibly narrow, impossibly tall.The walls weren’t walls at all, but mirrors endless panels of glass and silver that reflected not light, but possibility.Some showed him as he was now. Some showed him older. Some younger. Some broken. Some triumphant. And some were empty.He tried not to look too long at those. A whisper slid across the floor like smoke. “Truth evaluation initiated.”The mirrors flickered. His reflections began to move without him shifting, twitching, mouthing words he couldn’t hear. He stepped forward. The nearest reflection stepped back. Fowler froze. “Okay. That’s new.”The reflection tilted its head, studying him with a strange mix of curiosity and disappointment. Then it lifted a hand and placed its palm against the inside of the glass.Fowler hesitated… then mirrored the motion. Glass met skin. Skin met glass. And then

The corridor beyond the chamber was narrow, circular, and impossibly long like a throat carved into the Engine itself. The walls pulsed with a slow amber glow, translating something between breath and heartbeat.Fowler wiped the sweat from his brow. His legs felt unsteady, as if they were still relearning the weight of a single self.One version now. No echoes. No doubles. Just him. He didn’t know if that was a comfort or a burden. He pressed a hand to the wall as he walked.The Engine hummed back, reacting to the contact not mechanically, but organically, like muscle responding to touch. “Selene,” he whispered.No answer. But her presence lingered faint, stretched thin through the structure. Like she was everywhere and nowhere at once. He kept moving.The corridor finally opened into a vast dark space. A circular platform hovered at the center, suspended over a chasm without depth. Light rippled below like an ocean made of broken time.At the far edge of the platform stood a figure.

There was no impact. Fowler didn’t hit ground, or water, or even air. He drifted, weightless, through a darkness made of memory if memory could glow, breathe, and whisper back at you.Shapes pulsed in the black around him. Moments. Scenes. Fragments of lives his, Selene’s, strangers’, futures that might have been.A dozen voices brushed the edges of his mind: “You tried.”“You failed.”“She loved you.”“She left you.”“She waited.”“She didn’t.”“You were enough.”“You never were.”He forced his eyes open. And the Abyss took form. A spherical expanse of liquid light stretched in all directions, threaded with ribbons of past, present, and possible.The tendril around his ankle guided him downward not dragging anymore, but delivering him somewhere. He twisted, trying to rip free. “Let go!”The Abyss responded with a pulse that felt like a heartbeat not his own. Another whisper drifted: “Not yet.”Then the tendril released him. He sank the rest of the way like a feather, landing on a su

The chamber shuddered. Not violently, not like the fractures or the storms but with a slow, inevitable tightening, like a fist closing around a fragile shape. The Dream Engine was losing patience.Memory-Selene watched him with impossible stillness. Her eyes held galaxies. Her voice, when it came, felt like it vibrated through bone, not air. “Your heart will decide before your mind does.”He didn’t want to hear that. Fowler forced breath into his lungs, forced thought into the chaos. He tried to summon logic anything to drown the tidal pull inside him. Which Selene?The one who believed in him before he believed in himself?The one who failed him?The one he failed?The one who fought beside him?The one who left?The one who found him again?They were all her. And not her. And more than her. He opened his eyes and the chamber had changed. The memories no longer floated as light. They now formed two paths.Left: Selene’s moments of certainty. Bravery. Unshakeable loyalty. Every time s