The morning didn't arrive so much as unfold.
Light didn't break over the horizon—it seeped out of it, slowly, like someone was testing whether the world still worked after what happened inside the Echo Corridor.
I stood in the middle of the quiet street, feeling the kind of stillness that doesn't belong to any morning I'd lived through. It wasn't peace. It wasn't calm.
It was attention.
The world was… looking at me.
✦
Shadows were the first to move.
Not in any dramatic, monstrous way.Not crawling, not lunging, not warping into shapes.
They simply shifted—half a centimeter to the left.Then another.
Like every object around me subtly leaned closer, tilting just enough to "face" me.
The lamp posts.The parked cars.The plants on balconies two floors up.Even the crack lines on the pavement.
They aligned the way metal aligns to a magnet.
Quiet, invisible, inevitable.
I exhaled.Of course reality would start the day with a stare-down.
