The city was no longer a place. It was a wound.
Ash fell like dead snow through the bleeding sky, gathering in gutters and coiling around the rusted edges of broken signs that flickered with half-dead neon. Somewhere beneath the crimson horizon, sirens wailed like ghosts mourning a future that never came. Drones passed overhead in slow, predatory loops, trailing beams of cold, skeletal light. Their hum echoed off the skeletal remains of skyscrapers—monuments now colonized by militia war flags and old corporate logos riddled with bullet holes.
Dominic Manon watched all of it in silence from the high, cracked window of his safehouse.
The warehouse had once stored fine art. Now it housed war.
Inside, the space was cold and quiet but alive with preparation. Stacked ammo crates, encrypted comm-rigs, chemical vials and a disassembled sniper rifle populated a steel workbench to his left. A map of the city was pinned to the wall beside it—old paper stained with blood and time, layers of clear film overlays showing guard patterns, heat trails, and entry points in ghostly green. On the far side of the warehouse, a worn black coat hung from a hook, next to a shelf lined with med kits and injectable painkillers. The floor was steel, stained with oil and dried crimson, etched with careful chalk symbols that hadn't faded in years.
Dominic stood before a long mirror, fastening segmented armor over his lean frame. The suit was jet-black, laced with memory-thread and stitched Kevlar—a design of his own, born of trial and necessity. His fingers trembled only slightly as he locked in the final straps. He took a slow breath and tied back his shoulder-length black hair. The ritual calmed him. Anchored him.
He studied his reflection.
His features remained striking—symmetrical, regal even—but hollowed now by time and torment. Pale skin, jaw rigid. The eyes were the most changed: grey-blue, sharp, but distant, always on the edge of calculation. They were eyes that had stopped blinking at blood.
The scar across his right rib—a gift from his first mission—tugged slightly as he moved. Just above his collarbone, a faint tattoo in code ink shimmered: not decorative, but a memory lock. One of many.
"They took everything. I let my innocence die so my rage could live. For five winters, I became the storm they should have feared. Now... it ends."
A soft chime crackled from a rigged old radio on his workbench, catching a faint pirated signal:
"This is Day 773 of the Global Antium Search. Satellite arrays in Quadrant Seven went offline last night. An unregistered pulse was recorded in the Himalayas. Officials are investigating whether this could be another Antium leak—though, again, no direct trace has been confirmed..."
Dominic shut it off. Lies. All of it. The ones who really knew weren't speaking to the world. They were too busy carving it into pieces.
He turned to the far wall where a small memorial sat atop an ammo crate—four relics, each with a story.
A folded photograph: his family at a gala, years ago. A time when innocence was still allowed to exist.
A black feather: found by chance, but it started everything.
A blood-stained scarf: the last thing his closest ally ever wore.
And a ring—his father's.
He clenched his jaw and closed the case.
---
Flash memory:
A cave, dimly lit by torchlight. Dominic, barely seventeen, collapses into the arms of a man cloaked in winter camouflage and grief-worn silence.
"Grandfather…" he had whispered, voice ragged.
He had fought so hard to stay composed—but his armor cracked with a single embrace. The sobs tore through him like blades, months of rage and heartbreak igniting in one final, helpless moment. His grandfather said nothing. Just held him as the boy shattered.
Another memory:
Months later—Dominic, older now. Running through blizzards with a rifle strapped to his back. Throwing knives at moving targets. Crawling through mud to sabotage a drone nest. He trained with mercenaries who spoke in scars and punches, hackers who treated the world like a chessboard, and ex-agents who'd burned their own identities just to exist.
Each one taught him something. Each one left a piece of their darkness in him.
Another memory:
A moonless night. A kill that wasn't planned.
The target hadn't even seen him.
A quick throat-slice—efficient. Blood had splashed his gloves. Warm. Real.
Dominic had stared at the body for hours afterward, his face expressionless, his mind numb.
The man's eyes had stared back. Even now, they appeared in dreams. Never blinking.
The explosion. The shout. The blood spray on the inside of his goggles.
His comrade's hand slipped from his as they fell. The younger boy's last words had been Dominic's name.
He whispers it now before every sleep.
Dominic knelt before a metal crate and opened it. Inside: a black mask made of layered mesh and carbon fiber. Sleek, featureless. Ghost-like.
He slid it on. The heads-up display flickered to life: infrared, heart-rate scans, comm-feed scramblers. Everything checked out.
Tonight was the night.
He stood and slung a matte-black rifle over his shoulder, holstered a blade at his thigh, and tapped a final sequence on a nearby console.
A series of digital glyphs appeared on a cracked screen, pulsing with the dull glow of something unnatural. A frequency mapped from resonance—a ghost-note, one that let him slip past their machines.
The world outside was burning slowly.
Tonight, Dominic Manon would start the fire that finally mattered.
"It all ends tonight…"
The Hollow Ark loomed above the city like a monolith abandoned by God.
Rising from the foundation of an old biotech conglomerate, the tower wore its facade like a mask—clean white panels, polished chrome edges, and sterile insignias bearing the name of the International Biomedical Advancement Coalition. To most, it was a medical research hub working on neuro-therapy and prosthetic enhancement. But Dominic knew better.
He had seen what they buried beneath the ark.
He crouched now in the shadows across from the tower's south face. The rain had turned colder, sharper—half-sleet, half-ash. The wind howled through fractured billboards above him, causing the digital remnants to stutter: frozen smiles of pharmaceutical models, looping on a glitch.
Dominic exhaled once. His breath fogged behind his mask.
He sprinted up the side of a long-forgotten parking structure and leapt—arms catching the twisted ribcage of a neon sign six stories up. It groaned under his weight but held. Above him, the tower's flank was studded with sensor rigs and automated defense nodes, wrapped in rain-slick silence. Its windows were one-way mirrors of reinforced polymer, bulletproof and scrubbed with anti-signal coating.
But nothing was invisible to him anymore.
Dominic climbed.
His gloves, laced with micro-cling filament, gripped the cracked seams between structural panels. His boots magnetized briefly to embedded metallic ridges. The higher he went, the colder the air. Water sluiced from the building in thin rivers, streaking down his armor. The city lights grew smaller. The tower's heart pulsed with red energy from within—faint, rhythmic, like a sleeping monster.
A camera hummed past its rotation arc. Dominic paused, hanging silently between two flickering holo-ads. He pulled a small canister from his belt, twisted the top, and sprayed a shimmering mist across the camera's eye.
Liquid light disruptors: black-market vapor laced with micro-prisms. For sixty seconds, it painted a dead zone—blindness disguised as static interference.
He moved.
Twenty floors up, he reached a vent access panel. He tapped a code into a wrist-worn disruptor—its wires exposed, humming faintly with unstable energy. It sparked as it interfaced with the panel's trip-laser grid, sending false return signals down the system. Somewhere in the building's security net, a system now believed the hallway was still untouched.
He slipped inside.
The ventilation shaft was narrow. Filthy. Buzzing with old heat. But it led where he needed to go: Sublevel 3.
The hollow gut of the ark.
He dropped silently from the shaft into a maintenance corridor, his boots whispering against the floor. The hallway smelled of bleach and something less innocent—burned flesh, faint and buried beneath layers of sterilization.
Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
Dominic moved like a wraith. The floorplan was burned into his mind. His steps were measured, deliberate, rehearsed a hundred times. Every blind spot was a friend. Every echo a warning.
Ahead, a guard rounded the corner—a low-level contractor in an Ark security coat, reading a data-pad. Dominic pressed flat against the wall, waiting for the pattern.
When the guard passed, Dominic struck.
A length of reinforced wire looped over the man's throat—tight, silent. He thrashed for two seconds. Three. A final twitch.
Dominic hoisted the body into a janitor's closet and left it there, eyes wide and empty. No ceremony. Just necessity.
He advanced.
At a T-junction, another patrol. This one wore an upgraded mask—optic sensors embedded, tuned to thermal. But Dominic had prepared.
He snapped a capsule against the wall—a flash of mist spread across the corridor, glittering faintly in the ambient light.
The guard flinched, mask flickering with overload. Reflexively, he raised his rifle—
Too slow.
Dominic surged forward through the mist, grabbed the barrel, twisted, and drove a blade into the man's throat. Blood sprayed, warm and sudden, soaking into Dominic's armor at the edges. He eased the body down.
This one didn't get a closet. Just the floor.
He didn't look away.
The blood here was intimate. Cold. Quiet. It wasn't rage anymore. Rage was a storm.
This was purpose.
He reached the outer perimeter of the central lab and crouched behind a thermal shielding wall. Overhead, sensor arrays pulsed with cold blue light—triggering heat scans and pressure fields every twenty seconds in perfect rhythm.
Dominic waited.
His fingers hovered over the disruptor on his wrist—its casing scorched, wires soldered with scavenged copper and ambition. The device wasn't meant to last more than a single run. It trembled under its own unstable loop, whining softly.
Timing was everything.
The moment the pulse fired, he moved—sliding beneath the array as it cycled back, his disruptor emitting a shortwave burst that fed the system forged biometric data: a stolen fingerprint sequence from a dead technician, harvested during a raid six months prior. The system paused, hesitated—
Green.
The retinal sweep came next. He raised a reflective lens over his eye, etched with the copied retinal pattern of a minor Ark contractor—smuggled out of a black-site morgue.
The scanner accepted the mimic. Just barely.
He exhaled only once he was through.
The doors hissed open. Inside, the central lab gleamed with synthetic perfection—glass walls, sterilized panels, vials of glistening tissue under soft blue light. No sound. No alarms.
Yet.
Behind reinforced glass, deep in the vault past biometric redundancies, was the reason this place lived and breathed.
The reason they murdered his family. Buried his childhood. Hunted his silence.
Dominic stepped forward.
The corridor groaned like something ancient trying to forget its own sins.
Dominic stepped into the abandoned lobby, boots cracking over shattered marble and curled propaganda leaflets that fluttered like brittle leaves. The air here was cold and stale, embalmed by decades of silence and rewritten truth.
Above him, chandeliers hung like dead suns, their light long extinguished. A row of massive portraits lined the curved wall—heroes once, or so the world had claimed. Now their eyes were gouged out, their smiles slashed by knife or claw. The largest frame bore the face of Dominic's mother, once a scientist praised for her humanitarian breakthroughs, now rebranded in black spray paint with the word "DECEIVER."
The image shimmered behind cracked glass.
Dominic stared at it. For a moment, his reflection layered over hers—older now, harder, shadows in his eyes that hadn't been there before.
"Mom…"
The silence answered with cruelty.
Suddenly, a speaker crackled from a corner alcove—hidden, corroded by mold and years.
"In remembrance of the fallen traitors who nearly cost us the Ark. Let history judge their legacy—"
Dominic didn't hesitate. He stepped to the wall and drove his heel into the speaker. A crunch of circuitry, a dying stutter of falsified eulogy—and then silence again.
Near the base of the shattered display lay something small, out of place. He crouched, brushing glass aside.
A child's toy. Worn cloth. A little lamb stitched with uneven thread. One ear half-torn.
His sister's—June's
It sat there like a ghost with button eyes. Time slowed. Memories surged—her giggle echoing down this very hall, their game of tag beneath the old chandeliers, the way she used to whisper secrets to that toy when afraid.
Dominic closed his eyes.
Then he heard the boots.
Heavy. Tactical. Approaching fast.
He dropped the lamb and moved. Lights buzzed above—the backup grid kicking in. His fingers brushed the belt at his hip, and with a flick, he dropped every switch along the corridor.
Darkness swallowed the hall whole.
A second later, the security team burst through the far doors—three men, armored, rifles sweeping. Too loud. Too slow.
The first never saw him.
Dominic lunged from the shadows, slamming the man's head into the steel support beam with bone-cracking force. The body crumpled like wet cloth.
Gunfire erupted. Dominic vanished behind a pillar, then ducked into a maintenance gap, feet silent on forgotten tiles. He moved like smoke.
The second guard crept forward, eyes scanning. A wire snapped behind him. A mechanical whirr.
A spring-blade trap, jury-rigged during Dominic's recon days. The blade punched up through the man's gut and pinned him against the wall, gurgling.
The last one shouted into a headset, panicked. "Unit down! We need reinf—"
A flash-bang exploded at his feet.
Blinded. Disoriented.
Dominic was on him in seconds.
He tackled the soldier to the ground, wrenched the weapon away, and drove his knee into the man's chest. As the soldier gasped, Dominic gripped his throat in a vise.
But paused.
The man blinked, dazed, mouth open in fear.
Dominic leaned in.
"Did she beg? My mother?"
The man whimpered. Blood flecked his lips. "I... I wasn't there. I swear. I just—"
Dominic's grip tightened. The man's voice dropped to a rasp.
"Then you know what comes next."
One swift motion—pressure, a crack, and then nothing. The body twitched once and lay still.
Dominic rose slowly, heartbeat like thunder in his ears. The darkness around him seemed to hold its breath.
As he turned back toward the main corridor, his eyes caught a flicker—low on the wall, behind an old propaganda plaque.
A strange map, embedded into a digital panel barely powered. He stepped closer, brushed dust from the glass.
Lines. Coordinates. Symbols.
It wasn't military, not corporate. The symbols were familiar—Antium. The old research glyphs, the same ones that had been classified before the theft.
Something pulsed faintly as his fingertips grazed the screen.
A hum in his blood. A flicker behind his eyes. No message. No vision. Just… a presence.
He didn't understand it, but he pocketed the drive behind the panel.
Better to study it later.
Behind him, the corridor was a war-museum of grief. Portraits. Blood. Memories.
Ahead, the Vault.
The door hissed open like a breath held too long. Crimson light spilled over Dominic as he stepped into the surveillance nexus—an octagonal chamber humming with broken machines and flickering screens.
The walls pulsed with low frequency—like the thrum of a buried heart. Terminals blinked erratically, casting dancing shadows across the metallic floor. The scent of scorched circuitry mixed with something older—rust, blood, and time.
Screens lined the room, glitching between decades of archived footage. Surveillance logs. Family dinners. Scientific meetings. Military black-sites. Dominic's breath caught when one feed stabilized—an old, grainy clip.
It was him.
Sixteen. Just entering the manor gates, the same day the world collapsed.
He stood on that screen—naive, smiling, unaware that the next hour would tear the stars from his sky.
"Dominic…"
The voice spilled from overhead speakers, low and distorted like it had clawed its way through miles of static. Familiar. Wrong.
"You should have stayed dead. You would've made a perfect martyr."
Dominic's gaze didn't waver from the screen.
"I chose to become a reckoning instead."
He shut off the monitor with a flick of his wrist. The silence that followed lasted only a second.
From the far end of the chamber, a door slid open.
Footsteps.
Heavy. Metallic.
A silhouette emerged through the haze—a man wrapped in armor too smooth, too unnatural. A gauntlet pulsed with faint bioluminescence. His voice, when he spoke, trembled with something not quite human.
"It's been a long time, Dom."
Dominic's blood ran cold.
"Rykal."
Once his family's bodyguard. Dominic's personal protector. A man who used to read him war stories like fairy tales.
He was different now.
Augmented.
Antium tech fused into his nervous system. Veins glowed faintly beneath skin that no longer looked real. His eyes had no whites—only rings of polished obsidian. His voice vibrated unnaturally, as if spoken through an old cello.
"You don't understand what they were hiding. Your parents weren't protecting a cause. They were protecting a secret."
Dominic's eyes narrowed. "They were protecting people. That's all that ever mattered."
Rykal stepped closer. "They defied Antium. You think that makes them noble? Antium doesn't punish traitors. It erases them. They died for shielding something it wanted forgotten."
The room seemed to constrict around them. The light dimmed.
Then, Rykal charged.
They collided in a crash of bone and metal, Rykal's fist glancing Dominic's ribs with a seismic crack. Dominic spun with the force, slamming a knee into the augmented chest—only to feel it reverberate like striking armor.
Blades hissed from Rykal's wrist. He lunged, slashing downward—Dominic ducked, rolled, grabbed a loose conduit and jammed it into the back of Rykal's knee. Sparks erupted. Rykal staggered, but didn't fall.
Dominic moved for the shadows, bleeding now from a stab along his side.
Rykal followed slowly, deliberately.
"You weren't supposed to survive, Dominic. I warned them the boy was too clever."
"Then you should've finished the job yourself."
They clashed again—Dominic ducking behind a rusted pillar, hurling a jagged monitor into Rykal's path. It shattered against his arm, barely slowing him.
Dominic found a loose beam hanging from the overhead supports—its bolts half-melted.
Another lunge. Another blade. Pain seared through Dominic's shoulder.
He grit his teeth. Pulled a wire. The beam groaned above.
As Rykal raised his arm for the final strike, Dominic dropped.
The beam fell like divine judgment.
The sound—metal on bone. A wet, final crack.
Rykal collapsed beneath it, legs twitching.
Dominic dragged himself forward, crimson leaking from his side, jaw clenched through pain.
He knelt beside the broken form.
Rykal wheezed. One eye crushed, the other struggling to focus.
"You… don't know what's coming…"
Dominic leaned close.
"I don't care. You stood by. That makes you worse."
He snapped the remaining spinal connectors with a swift wrench. The body stilled.
Dominic staggered to his feet. The chamber was silent again.
But in the shattered reflection of a screen, he no longer saw a ghost. He saw the weapon he had become.
One step closer to the truth.
The final door opened not with violence, but with reverence.
Dominic stepped into silence.
The boardroom stretched before him like the hollow belly of a dead god—once-gilded, now fractured. The marble floors were scorched and split, veins of soot running through once-white stone. The air was still, heavy with the scent of ozone and ruin.
At the far end of the room stood a throne—not of gold, not of power, but of blackened steel. Forged from welded remnants of broken weapons and chair legs bolted into ruin, it rose like a monument to ash.
And in it sat Lucien Voss.
No guards. No defenses. Only the man himself.
His suit was immaculate. Not a wrinkle. Not a drop of sweat. Silver hair combed neatly back. Eyes glinting with something colder than madness—certainty.
He smiled.
"Dominic. You've done beautifully."
Dominic said nothing. Blood ran slow from the gash along his ribs, the shoulder wound burned raw. His breathing was controlled—but shallow. He didn't stop walking.
"You're here," Voss continued, voice gentle, measured, "because I let you live."
Dominic froze, halfway into the room. His voice came like a low blade across the frost.
"You massacred children."
Voss's smile didn't fade.
"Your family was in the way. They believed Antium should remain hidden. Preserved. Like a relic. They feared what it could do."
"So you killed them."
"I ordered them gone. But they were only the first."
Something in Dominic faltered. His voice dropped to a whisper.
"First?"
Voss stepped down from the throne, the hum of prosthetics hissing softly beneath his sleeves.
"Your bloodline didn't end that night. A few slipped through. They went underground. They're the reason I couldn't reach Antium—until after."
Dominic's chest rose and fell faster. "I never knew…"
"You weren't supposed to."
Voss paused.
"Two years after your family's murder, I found Antium. But not because of your father's secrets. Because his brother's guardians failed. They still guard its core. Still keep its purpose buried beneath ceremony and fear."
The truth hit like an aftershock. His family hadn't just died for defiance—they'd died for something real. And now... someone else from that blood still lived.
"You should be grateful," Voss said, softly. "Without their deaths, you'd never have become this. A reckoning."
Dominic's breath caught.
"You made me a weapon."
"No. I made you a mirror."
Then came silence.
Then the fight.
Dominic moved first. Blade out. Side burning. He lunged, a streak of motion through dust and ruin.
Voss blocked with augmented precision—inhumanly strong, but slow. Dominic spun under a wide strike and slashed across his torso, drawing sparks and blood.
Voss grunted, stepped back. "Still holding back, Dominic?"
"Not anymore."
Their duel tore through the room. Marble cracked beneath boots. Monitors exploded in a staccato of glass. Dominic fought like a dying storm—unforgiving, unpredictable. Voss answered with brute force and relentless counters.
A punch to Dominic's gut drove the air from his lungs. A thrown chair clipped his jaw. But he endured. Adapted.
"You wanted a monster," he growled. "You built one."
"No," Voss snarled, blood on his lips. "I unleashed one."
In the end, it was gravity that chose sides.
Dominic ducked, caught a hanging light rig with one hand, swung, and kicked Voss square in the chest—just as a support beam above, already loosened in the chaos, groaned and gave way.
It crashed down.
Voss didn't move fast enough.
The beam pinned him with a sickening crunch of metal and flesh.
Dominic limped over, chest heaving. Blood smeared across his face. His shadow loomed over the dying man.
Across from him, Voss stirred.
Not a groan. Not a cough. Just—movement. Barely perceptible. A twitch of a finger. A turn of the head.
Dominic tensed.
Voss's eyes opened. Blood dripped from his temple, lips cracked open with a grin that reeked of finality.
"You think this was the end," Voss croaked.
Dominic didn't speak.
Voss's trembling hand reached beneath the throne—beneath the layers of blackened steel and forgotten ambition—and pressed against a small, half-hidden glyph carved in ancient design. Not technology. Not human.
Something beneath it pulsed.
"You killed a man," Voss whispered, as a faint hum rose from deep below.
"But touched a god. Let's see how much of Earth survives with you."
The glyph ignited—a sharp flash of ultraviolet, veins of light crawling outward like cracks in the skin of the world.
Dominic lunged forward—"What did you do!?"—but it was too late.
The floor began to breathe.
No. Pulse.
A heartbeat beneath the earth.
He stumbled back as the glyph synced with something buried far deeper—a node, alive with impossible energy. A fusion reactor of antimatter bound to Antium frequencies—never meant to be awakened.
The hum deepened.
The walls vibrated. The throne began to crumble.
Dominic's vision shattered like glass struck at every angle. Time rippled.
He saw things he shouldn't have seen—
His mother, laughing in a garden that no longer existed.
A version of himself, aged, cold-eyed, reaching toward the stars.
A city burning with green fire.
A tower rising from oceans that had no name.
His chest constricted. He dropped to his knees, clutching his skull.
> "That wasn't a bluff..." he gasped.
"That sound—it's tearing the seams of the world."
Reality itself screamed.
He looked to his left—
And saw himself.
Not a reflection. Not a hallucination. A shadow-self, walking beside him, untouched by the quake.
"You thought vengeance would fix you," the shadow said in a voice like wind and wire.
"You thought killing him would silence the storm."
"You've only opened the gate."
"This is Antium," Dominic whispered.
"I can't escape this."
The light intensified.
The world around him folded inward like burning pages.
He ran—no direction, no logic—just instinct. But behind him, the pulse became a roar. Windows shattered. Marble exploded into dust.
The glyph flashed one final time.
Then—
White.
Silence.
Detonation without heat.
There was no fire.
No screams.
No ash.
Just… silence.
A second stretched into infinity.
Then came the pulse.
Not a sound. Not a light.
A pressure, like the heartbeat of the universe.
The tower where Dominic fell—vanished.
No smoke. No debris. Just a sphere of blinding white that faded like breath on glass.
The world paused.
And then it began.
Ripples Across the Earth
Seas surged outward from coasts in perfect rings.
Tides reversed themselves.
Fish leapt from the depths as if fleeing a thought too vast to hold.
High above, birds screamed in unison.
In the skies over Iceland, a storm twisted into impossible geometry—clouds blooming like fractal flowers.
In Kenya, elephants knelt and refused to rise.
In Paris, streetlights flickered Morse code in no known language.
In Seoul, a woman woke up speaking a dialect no one had heard in 40,000 years.
A child in Lagos coughed up sparks—then gasped as the air around him combusted into fire that bent to his will.
In Tokyo, a girl walking to school brushed against a window—and slipped through it like smoke, her body briefly becoming less real than the glass itself.
In Rio de Janeiro, families woke from shared dreams—each claiming the neighborhood strays had spoken to them. In perfect Portuguese. In prophecy.
In New York, subway graffiti began glowing—responding to thoughts.
In Johannesburg, a deaf boy began humming in his sleep—a tune that could rearrange metal filings into constellations.
In the wild, evolution lost its leash.
Wolves grew second spines and hunted in silence.
Birds sharpened beaks to tear steel.
Deep beneath the waves, predators with eyes like suns rose to the surface, hungrier than ever.
And then, as if the universe cleared its throat—
The stars began to whisper.
Some understood.
Most didn't.
Some wept blood and never spoke again.
Others rose into the air without wings. Without gravity. Without permission.
And others—too many—collapsed into themselves, minds unraveling under the sudden pressure of becoming more than human.
Earth trembled.
Tectonic plates pulsed, not cracking, but breathing—as if the planet had awoken from a long slumber.
Magnetic fields danced erratically, satellites blinked out one by one, and compasses pointed nowhere. Or everywhere.
And in the ruins of the tower—where no dust remained, where Dominic had vanished without farewell—
A new era began.
Not marked by fire.
But by evolution.
The Age of Superpowers did not arrive with fanfare.
The Era of Super Powers have begun......
Dominic
The silence after the explosion was not absence—it was transformation.
Where Dominic had stood, there was nothing. Not bone. Not blood. Not ash. Only a faint ripple in the air, like a scream swallowed by time itself.
And yet—
He was still aware.
Not as body. Not as breath.
But as being.
Drifting.
A heartbeat echoed. Once. Then again. Louder—not from within him, but from the world itself. A pulse in the fabric of space.
Dominic floated weightless in a place that did not obey logic or gravity. The light here had no source. Shapes folded in on themselves. Stars pulsed with memory instead of heat. Geometry twisted into spirals that refused to end.
"Is this death?" he whispered, or thought, or felt.
"It's so beautiful."
Behind him, the reality he had known unraveled like a discarded mask. Before him, stretched corridors of glass—each pane a door, each door a whisper. Languages bled through them, words not his own, voices not bound by time.
One called his name.
Not "Dominic."
But the essence of it.
He passed through them—doors of glass, doors of flame, doors made of breath. One showed his family at the dinner table, unbroken. Another showed him as a child painting in a sunlit studio. One pulsed with pain—bloodied hands, a sword, fire.
None of them let him linger.
He spun through timelines—shattered, like stained glass flung into the cosmos. Every memory felt alive, watching him, judging him, guiding him.
And then: silence.
A waiting room of stars.
Dominic's consciousness—what was left of it—gathered like smoke given
form. He was no longer drifting. He was falling. Deeper. Faster—toward something.
A center.
A single point of convergence that glowed like a newborn atom splitting itself into possibility.
He braced for impact.
There was none.
Just…
A heartbeat.
His own.
Slower.
Stronger.
The marking of a New Beginning After An End......