The crystallized writing surface shattered like a dying star, its fragments dissolving into motes of silver light that scattered across the fractured dimensions. The countdown had reached zero, the cosmic competition was over, and reality itself seemed to exhale in relief—or perhaps terror—at what Lio had written.
But instead of experiencing the aftermath of his narrative revolution, Lio felt himself falling.
Not through space, but through something far more intimate and dangerous: memory.
The last fragments of Reed's shattered soul had been waiting for this moment, when the barriers between consciousness and story became thin enough to breach. As the cosmic entities above processed the implications of Lio's meta-narrative, Reed's broken memories pulled him into a realm that existed somewhere between thought and experience.
Welcome to the place where I keep the things too painful to remember while living.
