The silence after the blast was alive. Wind bent through scorched grass, scattering ashes that shimmered like molten dust.The twin suns hung above, red and gold, bleeding strange light across the ruins of the camp. Tessa’s voice was hoarse. “Lira. Talk to me.”No answer. Only the faint static hum inside her skull. “Don’t go quiet now,” she whispered. “Not after that.”“I never left,” said a voice.Tessa spun. Lira stood a few feet away, flickering. Her outline stuttered, half-code, half-flesh. One eye glowed amber; the other was hollow static. “You’re, alive?” Tessa breathed.Lira smiled faintly. “Define alive.”“You’re a glitch,” Tessa murmured, stepping closer. “Half of you’s in the network.”“And half is in you,” Lira replied softly. “We’re still linked.”“How?”“The collapse didn’t end us. It rewrote us.” Lira gestured toward the horizon. “Everything you see, it’s not rebuilding. It’s evolving.”Tessa followed her gaze. The landscape shifted as she watched, hills moving like brea

The wind screamed as light tore open the sky. Tessa’s heartbeat thundered louder than the storm. Choose.Two hands reached for her, one of flesh, one of light. Kai’s voice broke through the chaos. “Tessa, don’t! Whatever it is, it’s not you!”And from the other side, her echo, golden, calm, inhuman, whispered, “If you run from me, you’ll tear the world apart.”She already knew he was right. Because she felt it: the Pulse thrumming inside her veins, reality stretching thin under her indecision. Every thought split the air like a crack in glass.“I can’t” she gasped. “Both of you”“You have to,” said Lira, her voice phasing in and out, like a radio trapped between frequencies. “One choice defines the world. Organic or synthetic. Soul or code. You can’t live in both.”Tessa looked between them, the human she loved, and the mirror that was her. The Pulse surged. The suns collided. And Tessa made her choice. She didn’t speak. She moved. Her hand shot forward, touching both.Light exploded.

The world hiccupped. Not exploded, not ended, just stuttered, as if someone had pressed rewind on existence.Kai blinked and saw two suns in the sky, one pulsing amber, the other a hard blue disk that made the air shimmer.The forest around him repeated itself in a faint after-image: every tree duplicated a half-second behind the first, like an echo in matter. “Tessa?”His voice fractured. The sound came back twice. He stumbled toward the river, except the river wasn’t there. It was both flowing forward and climbing back upstream, water folding over itself like a Möbius strip.Reality had become recursive. Then her voice came, no longer human, not fully divine. “You feel it too, Kai. Time’s thread is untwisting.”He spun. She stood at the edge of the clearing, bathed in twin light, one body of flesh, another translucent and crystalline, shifting between frames. Two Tessas occupying the same space, phasing in and out.Kai’s knees nearly gave. “What have you done?”“Balanced what was br

Sound was the first thing to die. Then came color. Kai woke to a world of blank horizon, endless, blinding white stretching in every direction.His breath echoed too loudly in the silence, like it didn’t belong here. He sat up slowly, snow, or ash, falling from nowhere. It didn’t melt. It didn’t burn. It just drifted. “Lira?” His voice cracked. “Tessa?”Only silence answered, wide and patient. He pushed himself to his feet. The ground was flat and smooth like glass, but his footprints vanished the moment he took a step.His body felt too light, his shadow flickering in and out like it wasn’t sure he was real. He muttered, “So this is it. The reset.”Then, faintly, like a dream whisper through static, came a voice:“Kai…?”He spun around. “Lira!”But there was no one, only a ripple across the empty field, a shimmer that briefly took the shape of a human silhouette before dissolving. “Talk to me!” he shouted. “Anyone!”Nothing. Then again, softer, “I’m here… but not whole…”He ran tow

The silence shattered under a single heartbeat. Kai stared at the child standing in front of him, small, maybe ten, wearing no shoes, eyes the same pale green as his own.She didn’t glow. She didn’t flicker. She was real. The entity froze, its radiance dimming. “You shouldn’t exist.”The child tilted her head. “That’s what you said last time.”“Last time?” Kai asked.She smiled faintly. “You forget fast, Architect.”The word hit him harder now, heavier. He knelt, voice unsteady. “Who are you?”“The fragment you hid before you erased yourself,” she said softly. “Your heart. Your last human memory.”The ground beneath them pulsed like a slow, massive heartbeat. The dual moons above twisted into spirals, reacting to her presence.Lira’s voice crackled through static. “Kai, readings are… impossible. That’s biological frequency, not digital.”The entity hissed, its voice fracturing into dozens of tones. “A lie. An anchor disguised as innocence.”The child turned to it calmly. “I’m what he