At first there was only brightness.
Not white, not gold—something purer, a color without name.The instant Arjun crossed the threshold, sound collapsed. The roar of armies, the thunder of magic, even his own heartbeat—gone.
He expected pain. He found stillness instead.
He hung suspended inside the column, weightless.The world around him stretched into translucent strata: threads of both realities twisting like ribbons of smoke.He saw rivers that ran backward, cities blooming and folding in the same breath, memories of every life that had ever touched the seam.
And through it all, a rhythm—slow, deliberate.Not the pulse of a single heart but the synchrony of two.
His and hers.
Maya.
He whispered her name, but the sound came out as light. The letters floated away, glowing, and joined the current around him.
Every breath he drew bled fragments of himself into the flow:the dorm room smell of instant coffee;the sound of chalk against a board;the warmth of a campfire when his soldiers had still sung his name.
Each memory drifted free, dissolving like ink in water.
He tried to hold one—any one—but they slipped through his fingers.
The light wanted all of him.
Let go, the current murmured. You've carried too many selves.
"I can't," he said, though the words were already losing meaning. "If I let go, who fixes this?"
The world remembers. That is enough.
He laughed—or thought he did. The echo came back in someone else's voice, deeper, older, half-human.Maybe Arathen's.Maybe the voice of the world itself.
Images spun around him like constellations:
Maya kneeling by a broken window, whispering his name.
Aarav reaching for the stars, one hand full of cereal dust.
The general raising her sword against a sky she no longer recognized.
He saw all of them and knew he couldn't choose anymore. The boundary between choice and consequence had thinned to nothing.
He had wanted to belong; instead, he had become belonging itself.
A tremor passed through the light.From outside, distant and muffled, came a rumble—the two skies grinding against each other.
He felt Maya's fear surge through the link like lightning. The connection that had once steadied him now tugged hard, a tether trying to pull him back toward form.
"Don't," he whispered. "If you pull me out, it'll tear us both."
Her voice—soft, shaking—answered through the radiance:Then what do I do?
"Remember me," he said. "Long enough for the world to learn how to forget."
He didn't know if she heard. The light folded over him again, gentler now, cradling rather than consuming.
When he looked down—if down still meant anything—he saw the battlefield far below.Two realities, fused into one impossible landscape: half steel, half stone, half prayer, half scream.
He saw soldiers kneeling, and behind them, shadows of ordinary people staring up through mirrors and glass towers.
For the first time, they all saw the same sky.
And at its center, him—no longer man, no longer myth—just the shimmer of a boundary holding itself together through will alone.
His body began to crack apart, the crystalline lines widening.Inside each fracture bloomed light so bright it showed faces, lives, whole histories—every borrowed heartbeat he had ever carried.
He reached out one last time, fingers dissolving into trails of gold."Maya," he said, and this time the name didn't vanish; it became a shape within the light, a small, steady spark refusing to fade.
He smiled.
If he had to become the seam, at least part of him would remember why.
Outside, the pillar shuddered once and steadied.The armies below fell silent.The two suns slowed in their orbit, hovering as though uncertain what to do next.
And at the core of the radiance, where Arjun had stood, there remained only a faint outline—man-shaped, hollow, filled with starlight.
The silence held.
Then the light began to breathe again.