The first tremor came before dawn.
Not an earthquake, exactly. The floor didn't shake — it breathed.The air swelled once, exhaled, then fell still again.
Maya woke with the instant clarity of a mother who senses danger before sound.
Aarav still slept beside her, his small hand clutching the blanket in a dream. She watched the rise and fall of his chest, counted his breaths. Normal. Steady.
But the room wasn't normal.
Every reflection shimmered: the windowpane, the silver rim of the photo frame, even the faint shine of the refrigerator door beyond the half-open bedroom. Each surface carried a ghost image of something else—stone walls, torchlight, smoke.
And beneath it all, the hum had returned, no longer distant. It was inside the walls, inside her pulse.
She rose quietly, careful not to wake Aarav, and crossed to the window.
Outside, the city lay still, soaked in that gray hour before morning. Streetlights flickered. But high above the towers, faint cracks of light veined the sky like ice breaking apart.
She knew what it meant before she could think it.
He'd tried again.
The ritual — whatever he'd done to reach her — had reached too far.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, startling her. The screen flashed emergency alerts: unexplained magnetic surges, electrical disruptions, "temporary aurora phenomena."People were posting videos already — skies bleeding red over Europe, lightning in rings instead of forks, mirrors fogging with words that no one had written.
Maya didn't need the newsfeed. She could feel it in her bones.
The worlds were convulsing.
She woke Aarav gently."Sweetheart," she whispered, "we're going for a drive."
He blinked, confused. "It's still dark."
"I know."
She packed fast: phone, wallet, his blanket, the photo album she couldn't leave behind. The apartment lights flickered again, turning blue, then white.
As she opened the door, a draft rolled through the hallway carrying the smell of ozone and woodsmoke — both worlds mingling in the air.
Aarav sniffed. "It smells like your stories."
Her throat tightened. "Yes. And that's why we have to go."
They reached the car just as the streetlights went out.
For a few heartbeats, the city plunged into absolute darkness. Then the horizon bloomed with light — not fire, but something stranger.A line of gold stitched itself across the sky, like a glowing scar, pulsing faintly.
Traffic lights flickered back on, but they weren't red or green — they cycled through colors she couldn't name.
Every radio frequency hummed the same low note.
Aarav clutched her hand. "Mama, is it happening again?"
She didn't answer.
They drove toward the outskirts, where the buildings thinned into half-finished suburbs. Maya's plan was simple: get out, get distance, find somewhere quiet until she understood what was happening.
But the farther she went, the more the world warped.
Road signs twisted into runic symbols. Houses flickered between familiar shapes and alien architecture — stone towers, wooden ramparts, collapsed walls.The city skyline behind her bent like a reflection in disturbed water.
She slowed to a crawl. The line of light overhead thickened, tearing wider. Through it, faint as memory, she saw another sky: two moons, red dust, the outlines of tents.
And a figure standing beneath them.
He looked up. Even from miles and a world away, she felt the weight of his gaze.
Arjun.
The windshield cracked with a sound like thunder. Maya swerved to a stop, gasping. Every car around her had done the same.People got out, staring upward.
The sky wasn't splitting evenly anymore — it was folding.
Pieces of one world were falling into the other like embers carried on wind. Patches of alien grass spread across asphalt. Streams of water ran backward down gutters.
Aarav pressed his face to the window. "Mom… it's beautiful."
Maya wanted to tell him it wasn't. That beauty and ending often wore the same face.
Instead she whispered, "Don't look."
The voice came then — not from outside, but everywhere.
You have to close it, Arjun's voice said. It's feeding on the link.
She clenched the steering wheel. "Then stop using it!"
I can't. It's alive now. It remembers us both. I need your help.
"How?"
You're its tether. I'm its wound. Together—
The connection cut, replaced by static so deep it rattled her teeth.
Then silence.
The sky dimmed, and for a heartbeat, everything held still.
Then came the backlash.
Light rained like glass shards, each fragment showing a different world: a market in ruins, a cathedral, a boy chasing a kite, a river flowing uphill.
Maya screamed and covered Aarav with her body as the windshield blew inward.
When she dared to look again, the shards had melted into the road, leaving faint, glowing marks — patterns like maps.
And in the distance, above the hills, a pillar of light rose straight into the heavens, half gold, half silver.
The seam had a body now. A place.
And she knew who stood at its heart.
She turned to Aarav, who was trembling but awake. "We're going to find him."
"The man from the window?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
She looked back at the horizon, at the pillar that pulsed with two heartbeats — one she recognized as her own.
"Because if we don't," she said, "both our worlds end."