​Time did not pass in the City of Choice; it accumulated.​It had been a year, or perhaps a century, since the Narrative Fissure had closed. It was hard to tell. When the baker down the street decided his sourdough starter was a sentient colony of yeast that measured time in fermentation cycles, the neighborhood simply adapted to the new calendar.​Elias Vance sat behind the circulation desk of the Athenaeum. The desk was wood again—solid, scratched, and smelling of lemon polish. The Indigo Light was gone, replaced by the warm, dusty yellow of afternoon sunlight streaming through the open doors.​He picked up a stamp. He stamped the inside cover of a book titled The Thermodynamics of Love. The return date shifted as he stamped it, reading: WHENEVER YOU'RE DONE CRYING.​The library was quiet, but it was a living silence. The shelves were no longer infinite black voids or gray stasis fields. They were messy. Books shuffled themselves when no one was looking. Sometimes, a biography would

​The Violet-Black pillar of light didn't fade; it was washed away by rain that felt like liquid lead.​Elias hit the pavement hard. He tasted iron and stale tobacco smoke. He opened his eyes and blinked, expecting the vibrant indigo of the Archive or the golden light of the Garden. Instead, the world was a harsh, flickering spectrum of Grayscale.​There was no color here. Only the absolute black of shadows and the blinding white of streetlamps cutting through a perpetual, heavy downpour.​Beside him, the boy, Leo, was shivering. Leo looked down at his own hands—they were gray, his blue jeans now a dark charcoal tone.​"Where is the color?" Leo whispered, his voice sounding tinny, like it was coming through an old radio.​"Gone," Elias rasped, standing up and pulling his coat tighter. He checked his wrist; the brass tattoo was dull, inert lead. "We’re in a Draft. Sector 4. Probably a discarded mystery novel from Varen’s 'Cynical Phase.'"​Elias looked up at the skyline. It wasn't a cit

​The fall did not end with an impact. It ended with a stagnation.​Elias Vance felt the neon heat of the Synthetica evaporate, replaced by a cold so absolute it didn't just chill the skin; it froze the very concept of "warmth." He opened his eyes, but "sight" was a generous term for what remained. He was suspended in a thick, gelatinous medium that felt like un-dried ink—a viscous, lightless gray that stretched infinitely in every direction.​He tried to gasp, but his lungs found no air. Panic, the old human reflex, flared in his chest, but as it did, a realization struck him: he wasn't suffocating because he didn't need to breathe. In the Waste-Basket, the "Biology" variable had been deleted. He was a lingering thought, a ghost in a machine that had been unplugged.​Beside him, Thorne and Leo were drifting like dandelion seeds. Thorne’s iron body, once so heavy and grounded, now floated with a terrifying lack of mass. Leo was curled into a ball, his mouth moving in a silent scream.​