Rayyan’s question didn’t echo. It stung. Every surface of the Axis trembled faintly, like the interior of a living creature reacting to pain. Miriam felt the tremor pass through her bones, a vibration too deep to be merely sound.Rayyan stood at the far end of the chamber if “standing” was the right word. His body flickered between solid and translucent, the outline attempting to obey human physics while the interior obeyed none.He wasn’t stable. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t gone either. He was something terrifyingly between.Miriam swallowed hard. She didn’t trust her voice, so she didn’t use it.Behind her, the two entities the Reflection-Being and the Tri-Shadow Remnant shifted uneasily, each claiming a different side of the Axis floor, each refusing to step closer.They watched Rayyan like rival wolves waiting to see which direction the threat would move. Rayyan’s gaze sharpened, though his eyes flickered with fractured refractions, as if every possible version of him was watching

There was no falling. Not this time. When the Axis collapsed, it unfolded upward like a book snapping open, like a spine unscrolling, like a world revealing its ribcage.Light surged around Miriam like liquid gold, swallowing her breath, her balance, her outline. Rayyan’s grip on her hand didn’t tighten or pull; it anchored.A calm, measured point in the middle of a storm intending to remake atoms. She felt the Rayyan she’d touched the one she chose vibrating beneath her fingers.Not glitching. Not fragmenting. Not dissolving. Reassembling. His body wasn’t flickering now; it was synchronizing, layers sliding into alignment like stained glass panes forming a coherent image.But the world around them was not so fortunate. The entire Axis his neural-core of potential futures was tearing open. Mirrored walls peeled back.Fractal pillars spiraled upward. Equation-vines snapped and rewove in midair. Light poured from the cracks in the dome like star-blood. Rayyan hissed softly.“This should

Everything trembled. Not violently. Not destructively. But with purpose as though the Axis itself were inhaling for the first time. Rayyan rose to his feet with a steadiness that didn’t belong to him before.His spine straightened, light running beneath the skin like circuitry finding its rhythm. His silhouette no longer flickered. His outline no longer wavered.His center scattered across entire realities now converged behind his ribs as a single pulse. Miriam felt it. A gravity she had never known from him. Not oppressive. Not coercive. But real.Like he was present for the first time in his own existence. The Reflection-Being and the Tri-Shadow watched him stand as though witnessing a myth awaken.The Reflection-Being bowed its head. The Tri-Shadow recoiled not in fear, but in something that tasted like grief. Rayyan turned, offering both of them his hand.“You were never meant to be separate from me,” he said softly.“But you weren’t meant to be erased either.”The Reflection-Bei

Silence hit the street like a detonation. Not absence. Not emptiness. A halt as if every atom, every timeline seam, every shard of unreal possibility stopped mid-breath.The remnants froze. Hands inches from Rayyan’s skin. Shadows suspended mid-lunge. Faces flickering through half-formed identities. Time wasn’t paused. It was listening.Miriam felt her own voice echo back to her, amplified through something larger than sound a resonance that vibrated in her bones, her teeth, the back of her skull. “I CHOOSE YOU.”The declaration rippled outward in concentric waves, bending the air, shaking the glass in shattered windows, distorting the streetlamps until they warped into spirals.Rayyan didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. But something inside him did. A light not bright, not golden, but warm pulsed once beneath his sternum. The remnants reacted instinctively.The tall one the one flickering between all the Rayyans he could’ve been leaned forward like a predator catching scent.“No,” i

Light swallowed them whole. Not harsh. Not burning. Just absolute as if the world compressed its entire body into a singularity and pulled them through its throat.Miriam clung to Rayyan as the sky inverted, folding them into a spiraling vortex of white-gold threads. Gravity failed. Direction failed. The concept of “down” evaporated.Rayyan’s pulse hammered beneath her fingers. “Miriam,” he whispered, voice steady even as the universe bent around them,“when we land don’t let go of me.”“I won’t,” she vowed.The vortex tightened. Then. They dropped. Instead of pavement, they landed on a surface that felt like memory soft, warm, pulsing with faint echoes of their footsteps before they even made them.Miriam stood slowly, breath fogging the air again. They weren’t in the city anymore. They were in a massive, circular chamber.Rayyan staggered upright beside her. He whispered the name like a confession: “The Axis Heart.” Miriam exhaled. “You said the Axis was gone…”“This isn’t the Axis,