Light swallowed them whole. Not blinding, remembering. It wrapped around Fowler and Selene like warm water, holding their shapes together as if afraid they’d tear apart again.The moment they crossed the threshold, the Dream Engine rearranged itself, shifting from a chamber of unstable geometry into a long, narrow corridor.Except the corridor wasn’t made of stone, or metal, or anything physical. It was made of their lives. Memories layered into walls of moving light. The left side Selene. The right Fowler. Perfect parallels.He saw flashes as they walked, each memory suspended like stained glass: Selene at six years old, curled on a library floor with a stack of books too tall for her arms.Fowler at eight, stealing his father’s radio just to take it apart and prove he could rebuild it. Selene standing outside the university laboratory on her first day, hands shaking.Fowler dropping his application twice before finally sliding it in the slot. Selene on the Sanctum balcony the night

Light tore them apart. Not violently he could’ve fought. This was inevitable, like being unspooled at the molecular level, like the world itself had hands and was prying their fingers open.Fowler held on until the very last fraction of a second. Selene’s wrist slipped through his palm like dissolving silk. Her voice hit him across the rupture“FOWLER!”Then the corridor fractured, split, and sealed. He hit the ground hard. White dust burst around him soft, weightless, drifting like ash suspended in slow motion. Fowler pushed himself up, breath ragged.The world had changed. He stood in a long, narrow hall formed entirely of light pale, shimmering, shifting like the inside of a prism.Thousands of suspended particles rotated in slow spirals along the walls, each a pinprick memory frozen in time. His chest tightened. “Selene!”His voice didn’t echo. It dissolved. The hall swallowed the sound like it didn’t belong. A soft hum approached. Fowler spun fist tight, jaw clenched but the prese

Light poured upward like a reversed sunrise. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t patient. It surged through the null-room with the force of a world remembering how to be born.Fowler kept his hand tightly locked around Selene’s. The ground beneath them wasn’t ground at all anymore just expanding geometry, blooming in real time, responding to them.He could feel it: The Engine wasn’t collapsing. It was yielding. Barely. Selene exhaled, her breath shaking. “Fowler… don’t let go.”“As if I ever would.”The walls shifted again not flickering this time, but stabilizing into something clean, angular, luminous. A room that wasn’t a room, but the beginning of one.The presence, the Engine’s voice faltered, its form fragmenting like cracked glass. “Self-directed protocol invalid.”Selene squeezed Fowler’s hand. “Ignore it.”“This action cannot be reconciled.”Fowler stepped forward. “Then rewrite the reconciliation.”The presence spasmed forced into new logic. “…Error.”Light burst outward. Not destru

Light gathered into shape not abruptly, not violently, but with the patient confidence of something that already knew its final form. Fowler and Selene emerged into a world still finishing itself.Grass appeared first: long, silver-green blades growing in slow motion as if time here were still deciding how fast to move.A warm breeze followed gentle, fragrant, pulling threads of light through the stems like dew catching dawn. Then came the trees.They rose from the ground in spirals, bark forming as braided cords of luminescent fiber, branches unfurling like wings.Their leaves shimmered every one a different shade, every one semi-transparent, glowing faintly with colors that didn’t fully exist.A forest, but not a natural one. Not an Engine one either. Something in-between. A liminal orchard. Fowler exhaled. “Okay… this is new.”Selene stepped forward cautiously, scanning the trees, the air, the horizon that wasn’t fully solid yet. “This place isn’t a simulation,” she murmured. “It’s

The world didn’t break all at once. It peeled. The crack in the sky stretched across the orchard like a blade slicing through silk slow, deliberate, unstoppable.Light spilled from the wound in thin, violent ribbons, twisting downward and embedding themselves in the ground like spears.The orchard responded instantly. Branches folded in, leaves flattened, trunks bent toward the center as though shielding the three of them with instinctive, ancient reflex.But it wasn’t enough. Not against what was coming. Selene pulled Fowler back just as another spear of light struck the earth, blasting molten glass into the air. “Move!” she shouted over the trembling ground.The being stumbled, flickering, half-visible as panic destabilized its form. Fowler lunged toward it. “Hey! Stay with us.”“I c-can’t”Its voice split three tones, three layers, none aligned. “They’re pushing through the Threshold. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t supposed to be found.”Selene grabbed one of the being’s collapsing arms,