> "Some awaken from dreams. Others awaken into them."
---
The world that waited was not a world.
No gravity, no time—only weightless thought wrapped in broken physics. He awoke again, if one could call this state consciousness. Suspended in a cradle of red mist and echoing whispers.
The mist sang to him.
> "You are late."
A voice? No—a presence. Feminine. Cold. Familiar. It brushed against his mind like fingers over a sealed wound.
He opened his eyes.
And fell.
He landed in a field of obsidian flowers. Each bloom bled silver smoke, wilting only when he stepped near. A black sky arched overhead—stars flickering like dying memories.
The wind whispered again.
> "I waited. You forgot."
He turned—and saw her.
A woman cloaked in violet shadow. No face. Only hair like liquid night and a mouth that smiled before it moved. Her presence made the air brittle.
> "Who are you?" he asked.
She tilted her head.
> "You knew me. Before you were rewritten."
> "What do you want from me?"
> "Nothing. I am simply... the memory you failed to bury."
Then she was gone.
He collapsed to his knees. The world pulsed—alive and watching.
Then it blinked.
And reality shifted.
He stood in a tower. No walls—just floating platforms held together by gravity's suggestion. Pillars of glass suspended in the void, stretching into infinity.
An altar waited.
The same runes from before—only now they burned.
A red one pulsed: Return.
A black one flared: Forget.
A white one trembled: Fall.
He touched none.
Because before he could choose—the floor shattered.
He fell.
And she whispered in the dark:
> "Fall faster, my honoured one. There's still more to forget."
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