The first world burned itself down on purpose. Rayyan felt it before the echo fully formed a sharp, deliberate severing, like a hand ripping out a vein rather than letting it bleed.He staggered mid-step, breath catching, the taste of iron flooding his mouth. Miriam was at his side instantly. “That wasn’t panic,” she said, already knowing.“No,” Rayyan whispered. “That was resolve.”They stood on the roof of a half-repaired hospital, the city below humming with uneven life. Power flickered block by block. Nothing was synchronized anymore. Nothing was clean.And yet. It worked. Iseul looked up sharply from where he sat, eyes unfocused, hands trembling.“They did it,” he said. “They destroyed their stabilizer.”Miriam turned slowly. “Destroyed… how?”Rayyan closed his eyes. He saw it. A world of layered megacities and vertical governance systems nested inside systems, every decision routed upward, filtered, delayed, perfected.When the anchor stepped back, fear didn’t fragment. It conso

The silence was wrong. Rayyan noticed it before anyone else did not because it was loud, but because it refused to be filled. Sirens had faded. Fires were mostly under control.Voices still carried through the streets, but they moved around something unspoken, like water flowing around a submerged shape. The city had reached a pause. Not peace. Assessment.People stood in clusters now, talking low, gesturing less. Eyes followed Rayyan when he passed not accusing, not reverent. Evaluating. He felt Miriam tense beside him.“They’re waiting,” she said quietly.“For what?” Iseul asked.Rayyan answered without looking back. “For the next mistake.”They stopped near the edge of what had once been a central transit hub. The roof was gone, sheared clean off.Sunlight poured down into the wreckage, illuminating a circle of scorched ground where the distortion had collapsed days earlier. Nothing had grown back there. Nothing stood.It was absence made visible. Rayyan stared at it longer than ne

The warning did not arrive as sound. It arrived as absence. Rayyan felt it while standing perfectly still in the middle of a crowd that was arguing itself apart.Voices overlapped, hands gestured sharply, someone shouted his name like it was an accusation. Then, a hollow spot opened inside him.Like a memory he could no longer reach. He stiffened. Miriam noticed instantly. “You just lost something,” she said quietly.Rayyan swallowed. “Yes.”“What?”He shook his head, trying to grasp it, and failing. “That’s the problem,” he said.“I don’t know.”The world around them didn’t pause. People were still arguing about food distribution, about who decided access routes, about why nothing worked the way it used to.But beneath it, something had been removed. Not broken. Not consumed. Excised. Iseul staggered as if struck, clutching his chest.“Oh no,” he whispered.“It found another way.”Miriam’s jaw tightened. “It stopped chasing anchors.”Rayyan looked at her sharply. “It’s hunting someth

Rayyan did not fall. The ground vanished beneath him, but there was no downward motion, no sensation of descent.Instead, the world peeled away layer by layer, like reality had decided gravity was an optional courtesy. Sound went first. Then color. Then fear. What remained was structure. Not space. Not time. Outcome.Rayyan stood inside the breach. Not as a body. As a probability that hadn’t finished resolving.Around him, the geometry unfolded, vast planes intersecting at impossible angles, each surface etched with faint, shifting symbols that rearranged themselves every time he tried to focus.They were not language. They were results. Every choice ever made, collapsed into patterns so dense they hummed. The Corrective Entity did not face him.It surrounded him. “YOU HAVE ENTERED A NON-PERMISSIBLE STATE.”Rayyan felt pressure clamp around his awareness, not pain, but narrowing. Like a corridor shrinking until only one direction remained.“You prune worlds,” he said calmly.“You don’

Rayyan opened his eyes and there was no sky. No ground.No geometry. Only distance, folded inward on itself, like the universe had forgotten which way forward was supposed to be.He did not breathe. He did not need to. He was not whole. That was the first thing he understood. Not injured. Not fragmented. Distributed. Everywhere he focused, he felt someone else focusing back.A woman choosing not to fire. A council voting to split authority instead of consolidate it. A medic refusing to abandon a patient even when protocol demanded efficiency.Each choice tugged at him not draining, not empowering resonating. “Oh,” Rayyan whispered. His voice didn’t echo. It propagated.The space around him reacted not collapsing, not correcting but adjusting, as if reality itself was trying to decide whether he was a flaw or a feature.Then the pressure arrived. Not from the Corrective Entity. From beneath it. Something older than pruning. Older than observation. A boundary. “YOU SHOULD NOT PERSIST HER