The first thing I felt was gravity remembering me.The second was the ground.
Stone—rough, cool, real.
I lay there for a few seconds, eyes closed, listening to a wind that didn't sound quite right. It whispered in a rhythm too deliberate, like someone quietly turning pages.
✦
[ System Notice: Dimensional Return — Complete ][ Current Realm: Reconstructed Reality #01 ][ Narrative Stability — Pending Assessment ]
Pending. That was a new one.
I pushed myself upright. The world looked… edited.
The sky still stretched in soft indigo, stars pinned like punctuation marks, but constellations had rearranged themselves.A familiar one—the Quill Star Cluster—was gone.In its place hung a spiral of light shaped like a question mark.
"Figures," I muttered. "Rewrite reality once, and even the cosmos starts second-guessing itself."
Arjun's ember drifted into view, dim and unsteady. You're alive. Again. That's statistically offensive.
"Define alive."
Still making bad jokes counts.
✦
