The dream came first.
A hall of stone and light.
Pillars rose into shadow, their surfaces etched with lines that glowed faintly, like veins under skin. The floor was polished to a mirror, reflecting the figures walking across it—armored, robed, bowed.
He knew this place.
His steps echoed without him moving.
At the far end of the hall, on a raised dais, a throne sat.
It was not ornate in the way this era liked—no unnecessary flourishes, no gold plated over every surface. It was simple, severe, carved from a single massive piece of something darker than stone, its edges clean and uncompromising.
Someone sat in it.
He walked closer.
The figure was half-silhouette, half-detail—features blurred, posture unmistakable. One elbow rested on the armrest, fingers touching the side of their face. Not a king lounging. A man thinking.
Guild emblems did not exist here. There were different symbols on the walls.
Different laws.
Someone knelt at the foot of the dais, head bowed.
"…My lord," they said. "The Breaches spread faster. The scholars… they whisper that even your power cannot hold them back forever."
"And what do you whisper?" the one on the throne asked.
The kneeling figure hesitated.
"That… you will find a way," they said. "You always have."
The man on the throne laughed once, quietly.
"Faith is a dangerous thing," he said. "It makes people lazy."
He leaned forward.
His eyes were sharp, tired, familiar.
He opened his mouth.
He spoke a name.
Shinra couldn't hear it.
The hall shuddered.
Stone cracked.
The warmth of torches extinguished in an instant, replaced by the raw cold of the no-space that lived between worlds, the one Breaches opened into.
The throne split down the middle.
Someone shouted his name again.
This time, he heard the beginning.
"Shi—"
Pain stabbed through him.
The hall shattered.
Shinra woke with his hand gripping the side of his bed hard enough that the metal frame creaked.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
For a moment, the ceiling of his Sanctum dorm blurred, replaced by the fractured image of a collapsing vault. Tall pillars became plain plaster. The ghost of torchlight flickered into the dim glow of the room's overhead fixture.
He exhaled slowly.
His hand eased its grip.
[You were dreaming, Great Master.]
Arios' voice felt closer than usual, tuned to the edges of his awareness.
"I noticed," Shinra said.
His throat was dry.
He raised a hand to his face automatically.
It came away with a thin smear of red on the fingers.
He frowned.
"Nosebleed," he muttered.
[Your neural activity spiked sharply,] Arios said.
[You pushed against the sealed sector.]
I didn't do it on purpose, Shinra thought.
[The seal reacts to proximity, not just effort,] Arios replied.
[You brushed against a memory attached to your true name.]
Shinra sat up fully, wiping the blood away with the back of his hand before it could drip.
The echo of the name fragment still rang in his head.
Shi—
Nothing more.
Like a word caught between breaths, forever unfinished.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
"How much did that strain it?" he asked.
[Not as violently as the Hub,] Arios said.
[But the pattern is concerning. The seal is weakening from both directions now—your interactions with modern Breaches, and your own mind moving closer to your past identity.]
"So dreaming is dangerous now," Shinra said.
[It always was,] Arios said dryly.
[You simply notice it more when the stakes are higher.]
He snorted quietly, despite the tension.
His band vibrated.
He glanced at it.
[Unit 3 – Briefing Room – 20 minutes.]
[Mission Type: Breach Response – Localized.]
He wiped his face properly, washed, dressed, and left the room.
The hall outside was quiet, the early hour keeping most people in their own routines.
He passed a cleaning drone humming along the floor and a Mundane staff member tapping an inventory list into a tablet. She nodded when she saw him. He nodded back.
His head still felt… full.
Not like with a headache.
More like a room that had been rearranged while he slept.
Unit 3 was gathered when he arrived at the briefing room.
Yuna leaned over the table display, arms braced lightly on either side. Riku sat backwards on a chair, chin resting on the top rail. Hana stood near the projection controls. Daren occupied his usual corner near the wall.
Kaizen and Mizuki were not present.
This was small-scale, then.
"Morning," Yuna said when Shinra stepped in. Her eyes flicked over his face, sharp as always. "You look like you slept worse than me. That's an accomplishment."
"Strange dream," he said.
Riku groaned. "Please tell me it wasn't about paperwork," he said. "Mizuki keeps invading my subconscious with forms."
"Yours deserve it," Hana murmured.
Yuna gestured at the holo-display.
"Minor Breach," she said. "At least, that's how it's classified. Localized, unstable, popped up in an older residential sector. Authority's busy with something larger on the other side of the city, so they pinged smaller guilds to handle the 'easy' one."
"The ones they don't want to waste resources on," Riku translated.
"We volunteered," Yuna said. "We need something that isn't the Hub."
Shinra studied the map.
The Breach marker pulsed over a cluster of narrow streets and older buildings—densely packed, lower-rise, infrastructure that hadn't been upgraded in a long time.
"Containment?" he asked.
"Perimeter's been set by local security," Hana said. "But their resources are thin. Not a lot of high-tiers live there. Hardly any guild coverage. Sanctum answered first."
Yuna straightened.
"Parameters are simple," she said. "Stabilize, clear entities, keep civilian damage minimal. Try not to remodel the entire avenue."
Her eyes met Shinra's briefly at that.
"I'll keep my output low," he said.
"Good," she replied. "I like my buildings not inside-out."
[This anomaly is small,] Arios said in his head.
[But the frequency signature…]
What about it? Shinra asked.
[…feels familiar,] Arios finished.
[I'll confirm on-site.]
Shinra's jaw tightened slightly.
"Something wrong?" Yuna asked.
"Just thinking ahead," he said.
She watched him a second longer than usual, then nodded.
"Gear up," she said. "We move in ten."
The residential sector had the worn look of a place the city had grown around instead of with.
Buildings leaned, not dangerously, but with the weight of age. Balconies jutted at odd angles. Wires strung between them like tired festival decorations, carrying power and data in equal measure.
The Breach had opened at the intersection of two narrow streets.
A crowd had formed at the outer barricade—residents standing behind hastily erected barriers, some in house clothes, some in work uniforms. Children peered between legs. A few people had coverings over their mouths and noses, as if that would help.
Local security officers—lower-grade Ascendants and Mundanes in vests—held the line. Their bands glowed with strain, but they didn't break formation.
When Sanctum approached, a few heads turned.
Someone whispered, "That's them," like Sanctum was a single person.
Then someone else hissed, "That's him," and the whisper turned sharper.
Shinra kept his hood up, but he didn't hide his band.
Yuna stepped forward, flashing her guild emblem to the nearest officer.
"Sanctum, Unit 3," she said. "We're here for the Breach."
The officer, a woman with lines under her eyes and a stun baton at her hip, checked her band and nodded quickly.
"Appreciate it," she said. "It appeared twenty minutes ago. We've evacuated as many buildings nearby as we can, but some people refused to leave. 'Too many memories to abandon,' that kind of thing."
"We'll keep them from becoming ghosts," Riku said under his breath.
Hana shot him a look, but the officer snorted.
"Would be appreciated," she said.
She gestured toward the inner barricade.
"Breach center is just beyond this corner," she said. "Entities are still low-tier, but… they're not behaving like the usual."
"In what way?" Yuna asked.
"They're… slower," the officer said, frowning as she explained. "They move like they're half-stuck. And they keep clustering around the same point, like they're circling something we can't see."
Yuna glanced at Shinra.
He felt Arios' attention sharpen.
[Confirmed,] Arios said.
[The frequency is offset. Not like the Hub—but adjacent. It might resonate with your sealed structure.]
So this one's mine, Shinra thought.
[Or at least interested in you,] Arios replied.
Yuna rolled her shoulders.
"Standard formation," she said. "I'll take point. Daren, second. Hana, barriers. Riku, high ground if you can find any. Shinra—"
"Rearguard," he said. "Minimal interference until needed."
"For now," she said.
They passed through the inner barrier.
The air changed.
Breaches always carried a scent—not necessarily something you smelled with your nose, but with your nerves. A metallic tang, a wrongness in the way sound bounced off walls, a pressure between heartbeats.
This one felt… muffled.
Like a sound heard through thick doors.
They turned the corner.
The Breach was anchored in the narrow space between two older buildings, right where the street twisted.
It was smaller than the Hub anomaly had been—no huge skeletal storm, no stacked fractures across the sky. Just a compact, flickering wound in space, about as wide as a storefront.
It pulsed unevenly, edges glitching in and out.
Entities clustered around it.
Not many—maybe a dozen at first glance. They moved in slow arcs, as if wading through thick liquid.
Some had the usual pale masks and twisted limbs. Others were less defined, shadows with too many angles that never quite resolved into a stable form.
They didn't rush Sanctum immediately.
They circled.
Watching.
Shinra's skin prickled.
[Their behavior is off baseline,] Arios said.
[They're… waiting.]
For what? Shinra asked.
[Unknown.]
"Creepy," Riku muttered. "Do they usually look this… indecisive?"
"No," Hana said. "And they usually try to break things by now."
Yuna narrowed her eyes.
"Don't like it," she said. "We've got civilians on the other side of those walls. We thin them fast before this escalates."
Her spear formed in her hand, light coalescing with familiar sharpness.
"Unit 3," she said. "Move."
She surged forward.
The entities nearest the edge reacted then—two lunged toward her, masks stretching, limbs elongating unnaturally.
She met them cleanly.
Her spear thrust through one mask, then swept the second aside in the same motion, light slicing through the unstable form. The entities disintegrated, dissolving back into Breach dust.
Daren crashed into another pair, fists cracking through their half-solid bodies. One tried to wrap around him like a cloak; he tore it off with a growl.
Hana's barriers snapped into place—curved planes of force that redirected slashing limbs away from doorways and windows. Her face stayed calm, but her eyes took everything in.
Riku leapt onto a low rooftop, using a window ledge as a step. He steadied himself, rifles up, and began picking off entities at mid-range. Each shot shattered a mask cleanly, leaving less for the others to deal with.
Shinra remained at the rear, as agreed.
He watched.
The Breach pulsed.
It wasn't just light.
For a heartbeat, as he looked into it, the narrow street blurred.
The old buildings shifted—not in reality, but in memory. For a fraction of a second, he saw different walls there. Taller. Stronger. Made of that same dark stone from his dream.
A hall.
A throne.
A crack down the middle.
"Shi—"
Pain lanced through his skull.
He staggered, hand coming up to his temple.
[Master!] Arios' voice compressed, sharper.
[Your neural pattern is spiking again.]
"I see it," Shinra muttered, half aloud, half inward.
The Breach pulsed again.
The entities nearest it turned their masks toward him in eerie unison.
Yuna noticed.
"Shinra?" she shouted, her voice cutting through the Breach warp. "You with us?"
"I'm here," he said.
His voice came out rougher than he liked.
He stepped forward, just a little.
The entities reacted more.
They shifted.
Not toward Yuna.
Toward him.
"Ah," Riku said from above. "They don't like you."
"Or they like him too much," Hana said.
[The anomaly is resonating with your seal,] Arios said quickly.
[It's not just drawing entities—it's drawing your memory into its event horizon.]
Can you stop it? Shinra asked.
[Not entirely,] Arios said.
[But I can buffer. If you step closer, it will get worse.]
Yuna cut down another entity, then angled back toward him.
"Talk to me," she said, closer now. "What's wrong?"
He considered lying.
It would have been easy to say "nothing."
He didn't.
"The Breach is… familiar," he said. "It's pulling on something it shouldn't."
"Like the Hub?" she asked.
"Different," he said. "Smaller. Closer."
She cursed under her breath.
"Can you still fight?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Then help," she said. "Without letting whatever that is yank you in."
He nodded.
He moved.
Not toward the Breach.
Sideways.
One of the entities, half-shadow, peeled away from the cluster and darted toward a window where he could hear faint movement inside—a civilian who hadn't fully evacuated.
Shinra stepped into its path.
It halted mid-lunge, mask tilting.
For a second, they hung there—entity and man, staring at each other.
Behind the mask was nothing.
Behind Shinra's eyes was too much.
He reached out with his hand.
The entity recoiled.
Not physically—aura-first.
Its form shuddered, glitching more violently, like a projection losing connection.
[They recognize you,] Arios said.
[Not as Shinra. As… something older. Something their existence was once shaped around.]
By what? Shinra demanded.
[By the same root that fed the Breaches of your era,] Arios said.
[And that now feeds these.]
The entity tried to twist away.
Shinra didn't give it the chance.
He struck, fingers slicing through the unstable density around its core—less a mask this time, more a knot. It tore apart under his touch, dissolving faster than the others had.
His head throbbed.
More images flashed unbidden.
A map of his old world, lines of light marking where anomalies had appeared first.
His voice saying, "If we fall, it will not be because we were weak, but because we were late."
The syllable again.
"Shi—"
He gritted his teeth.
Yuna saw the twitch at the corner of his mouth.
She swore louder this time and pushed harder, trying to draw entities away from the center.
"Daren!" she shouted. "Shift right! Give Shinra room!"
Daren, breathing heavy but steady, adjusted his position without arguing, slamming one more entity into the ground and pinning it there until Riku's shot took its mask out.
Hana repositioned her barriers, widening the safe zone around Shinra.
"You need to move?" she called. "I can carve a path."
"I'm fine," he said.
He wasn't.
[The seal is fracturing at the edges,] Arios said.
[Tiny cracks. Not catastrophic yet. But enough to leak resonance.]
Can we use it? Shinra thought.
[Use—?] Arios started.
To shut this Breach down, Shinra clarified. Without blowing it open.
Arios paused for a fraction of a second.
[Possibly,] he said.
[If you let a thin layer of your sealed pattern brush the anomaly's core, it might misrecognize and shut itself in response, like a program seeing an old command.]
And the cost? Shinra asked.
[Your pain. Increased degradation of the seal. Acceleration of memory recovery.]
The Breach flickered again.
A low, throbbing hum built at its heart.
Entities still swarmed, but fewer now.
Yuna, Riku, Daren, Hana were doing their work well.
He could let them finish.
He could step back, endure the half-remembered flashes, wait for the anomaly to close on its own schedule.
If it closed at all.
He saw a door on the third floor of the nearest building crack open a sliver, a pair of frightened eyes peeking out.
He saw the way the Breach's pulses were starting to sync tighter, the pattern of it trying to strengthen instead of fade.
He made a decision.
"Cover me," he said.
Yuna spun toward him. "What are you—"
"Just for a few seconds," he said. "Keep anything from touching me."
She hesitated.
Something in his expression, the tightness around his eyes, made the argument die on her tongue.
She nodded once, sharply.
"Unit 3!" she called. "Lock the perimeter! Nothing reaches Shinra!"
"On it!" Riku shouted, already re-aiming to intercept anything moving in Shinra's direction.
"Barriers shifting," Hana said, palms moving as she reshaped invisible lines.
"Don't take too long," Daren grunted.
Shinra walked toward the Breach.
Each step made the pressure worse.
The narrow street warped at the edges of his vision as if it were being seen through water. Sound muffled, then sharpened.
The Breach brightened.
It pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
[Careful,] Arios said.
[If you let it pull too much, you'll be dragged into a full memory reconstruction. And possibly a collapse.]
"I'll stop before that," Shinra said.
[You never did before,] Arios muttered.
He stopped just outside the edge of the anomaly's distortion field.
He could feel the boundary—the place where reality thinned.
He raised a hand.
His fingers trembled.
Not from fear.
From the effort of holding himself in two places at once.
He reached inward.
Not to his full power, not toward the raw core that wanted to break free—but to the edge of the seal, where cracks had begun to form.
He found one.
Thin.
Frayed.
Like a hairline fracture in glass.
He pressed.
Pain spiked, sharp and electric, behind his eyes.
The syllable slammed against his mind again.
"Shi—"
He pushed past it.
A thin stream of pattern—not power, not quite—leaked out. It wasn't aura. It wasn't energy.
It was structure.
Old.
The Breach felt it.
The anomaly's pulse stuttered.
[It recognizes you,] Arios said.
[Or the version of you that existed when the first collapse happened.]
The Breach flickered more violently.
In its surface, the street vanished.
He saw the hall again.
The throne.
Broken.
Fire where there had once been light.
Bodies.
Not just human.
Not all intact.
He saw his own hand, blood on the knuckles, reaching toward something that wasn't a person.
Something like a hole with intention.
"Shi—"
The syllable shoved at his ears from both outside and inside now.
His nose bled again.
He staggered, but did not step back.
[Shinra!] Arios snapped, dropping the formal address.
[That's enough. Pull back.]
The Breach's edges began to shrink.
Not in a smooth, controlled way.
Like an eye squinting shut against too-bright light.
Entities jerked, losing coherence as the anomaly's anchor stuttered.
Yuna's spear flashed through two more without resistance.
Riku's shots landed almost lazily now—targets that couldn't quite decide if they existed enough to dodge.
"Shinra!" Yuna shouted again. "Whatever you're doing—finish it!"
He gritted his teeth.
"Working on it," he managed.
He tightened his grip on that leaking pattern.
Then he cut it.
Not the Breach.
Himself.
He severed the flow.
The pain roared.
The Breach shuddered.
Then, with a soundless wrench, it collapsed inward, folding into a point so small only the deepest part of his senses could feel it—
—and then it was gone.
Silence rushed in to fill the space it had occupied.
The street snapped back into proper focus.
For a heartbeat, everything was still.
Then his knees gave way.
He dropped.
The world tilted.
The ground rushed up.
He barely felt it when he hit.
Voices came through in pieces.
"—na!"
"—hold him up—"
"Blood—"
"Shinra, stay—"
He tried to open his eyes.
Light stabbed.
He closed them again.
[I've got you,] Arios' voice said, steadier now.
[You tore a piece of the seal. Not large. Enough to hurt.]
Did it work? Shinra asked fuzzily.
[The Breach closed,] Arios said.
[You also scared the anomaly. If it were capable of fear.]
He felt hands under his shoulders.
Someone pressed cloth under his nose.
"Tilt his head a bit," Hana's calm voice said. "Not too far back. We don't want blood going down his throat."
"His color's off," Riku muttered. "Is this normal for him?"
"Nothing about him is normal," Daren said. "But I think he's still breathing."
"Shinra." Yuna's voice cut through clearer than the rest. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," he rasped, though it sounded more like a breath than a word.
"Good," she said. Relief threaded through that single syllable.
He tried to sit up.
Hana's hand pressed gently but firmly on his shoulder.
"You strain yourself more, I'm sedating you," she said. "Stay down."
"Very authoritative," he murmured.
"Learned from the best," she replied.
He heard Riku snort quietly.
"That looked worse than the Hub," Riku said. "Smaller Breach, more blood. Does not seem like a good trade."
"Less structural damage," Hana countered. "More… internal."
"Can you walk?" Yuna asked.
"In a moment," he said.
"Don't rush," she said. "The Breach is gone. Entities too. Locals are… staring, but they're fine."
He heard the murmur of voices at the outer barricade—hesitant clapping, someone crying softly, someone else calling out a shaky "thank you."
He didn't look.
He focused on breathing.
In.
Out.
The noise in his head slowly lowered from a scream to a dull roar.
Arios' presence steadied further.
[Status update,] Arios said.
[You forced a controlled micro-fracture in the seal. Part of your old structural pattern is now closer to the surface. Your memories associated with it will be easier to access.]
That's… not entirely terrible, Shinra thought.
[It is if it accelerates beyond your control,] Arios said.
[The seal is like a dam. Cracks don't stay small forever.]
How long before it gives? Shinra asked.
[…I don't know,] Arios admitted.
[That's what concerns me.]
He opened his eyes finally.
The world stayed in place this time.
Yuna knelt beside him, one knee on the pavement, spear dismissed, expression tight but composed.
Hana crouched on his other side, cloth in hand, streaked red.
Riku stood behind them, scanning the area for lingering threats, though his eyes kept flicking back to Shinra.
Daren stood at the edge of the cleared zone, arms crossed, making a very effective wall between Shinra and the curious stares of the crowd.
"Can you get up now?" Yuna asked.
He tested his limbs.
His legs felt like they'd been filled with sand.
But they worked.
"Yes," he said.
They helped him to his feet anyway.
The world swayed once, then steadied.
The officer from earlier approached cautiously.
"Is it… over?" she asked, eyes flicking to the spot where the Breach had been.
"Yes," Yuna said. "You'll want to keep detectors calibrated for residual traces, but the anchor is gone."
The woman exhaled a shaky laugh.
"I don't know what you did," she said. "But… thank you. Again."
Her gaze landed on Shinra.
Fear flickered there.
And something else.
She bowed, just slightly.
Not to the ground.
Not in worship.
Just a small gesture of respect from someone who had seen too many bad endings and was grateful not to add another to the list.
He inclined his head in return.
Behind her, a boy peeked around a doorway—maybe ten, hair messy, eyes too wide. When Shinra's gaze met his, the boy flinched—
—then, cautiously, lifted a hand in a small wave.
Shinra raised his hand in answer.
The boy grinned, almost too quickly, and ducked back inside.
[Reverence,] Arios said.
[Fear. Gratitude. They keep merging around you.]
They'll untangle eventually, Shinra thought.
[Or knot tighter.]
"We're heading back," Yuna said. "Hana and I will write the report. You—"
"Will be examined by Mizuki," Hana said firmly. "And probably lectured."
"I'm getting tired of those," he said.
"Then stop giving us reasons for them," she replied.
Riku muttered, "I could use a nap on his behalf."
"You did the least physical work," Daren pointed out.
"Emotional labor counts," Riku said.
They started back toward Sanctum.
Shinra took one last glance at the place where the Breach had been.
The street looked ordinary again.
The memory didn't.
He could still feel the hall, the throne, the way his name had almost fully surfaced.
Shi—
The rest was a razor at the back of his throat.
He swallowed it down.
For now.
***
Mizuki did, in fact, lecture him.
Not loudly.
That would have been easier.
"I'm glad the sector is still standing," she said, scrolling through Arios-filtered vitals on her tablet. "I'm less glad you decided to experiment with your seal in the middle of a residential area."
Shinra sat on the infirmary bed, a faint bruise on his temple where he'd hit the ground. His nose had stopped bleeding.
"You would have preferred I let the Breach strengthen?" he asked.
"I would have preferred you not risk tearing yourself open without warning us first," she said. "There's a difference."
"Noted," he said.
She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"You're not a tool," she said quietly. "You're not a god either. Stop treating yourself like something that can be broken and replaced."
"I'm remarkably hard to replace," he said.
"That's what makes this worse," she replied.
Outside the infirmary curtain, he could hear Yuna arguing with Kaizen in low voices about "acceptable risk," "unacceptable surprises," and "we can't ask him not to act."
He tuned them out.
[Mizuki is right,] Arios said.
[I should have pushed back harder when you suggested that stunt.]
You tried, Shinra thought. I ignored you.
[Noted,] Arios echoed, dry.
She finished her scans and stepped back.
"I'm not going to pretend I understand all of what's happening in your head," Mizuki said. "Or with that… thing sealed inside you."
"Arios," Shinra said.
She nodded once.
"But I know patterns," she said. "This is accelerating. You're remembering more. And each time, it hurts more."
"Memories tend to," he said.
"Not like this," she replied. "Most people cry. Or dissociate. They don't bleed."
He didn't have an answer to that.
She closed her tablet.
"For now," she said, "rest. Yuna will keep you off frontline Breach duty for at least a day or two. If Authority complains, they can talk to me."
"They don't scare you?" he asked.
"They scare me plenty," she said. "That's why I plan ahead."
He almost smiled.
She hesitated at the curtain.
"Shinra," she said. "When the seal breaks—because I don't think we can pretend it won't—you'll tell us before you vanish into whatever mess you came from… won't you?"
He looked at her.
At the worry she was not hiding as well as she thought.
"Yes," he said.
She searched his face for a lie.
Didn't find one.
"Good," she said, and left.
He lay back on the infirmary bed.
Stared at the ceiling.
[She's right about one thing,] Arios said.
[The process is accelerating.]
How much time do we have? Shinra asked.
[If you continue interacting with anomalies at this intensity?] Arios said.
[Months. Maybe less. If you stop entirely… longer. But the Breaches won't wait politely for you to be ready.]
"They rarely do," Shinra said aloud.
He closed his eyes.
The throne room flickered behind his lids again.
The hall.
The stone.
The face on the throne—his and not his—leaning forward, about to speak his full name.
Shi—
His head twinged.
He opened his eyes again.
The infirmary's plain white ceiling looked absurdly comforting.
He turned his head, looking toward the curtained doorway, where he could hear Unit 3's voices mixed with Kaizen's laughter and Mizuki's exasperation.
This era didn't know his name.
It didn't know what he had been.
It knew only what he'd done here.
That was dangerous.
It was also… freeing, in a way that even he didn't fully understand yet.
[You're being pulled in two directions,] Arios said quietly.
[Toward who you were. And toward who you're becoming here.]
Yes, Shinra thought.
[Do you know which one you'll choose when you have to?]
He thought of the board with scribbled "thank you" notes. Of Ryou's careful report. Of Arisa's extended hand. Of Yuna on the rooftop, promising to drag him back from any pedestal he started to climb.
"…No," he admitted. "Not yet."
He closed his eyes again.
He didn't sleep.
He just listened to this era breathe around him,
while, somewhere deep inside,
fragments of another one
shifted restlessly,
drifting closer to the day
when his real name
would no longer stay broken in his mind.