The earth below his boots pulsed faintly—echoes of memory, or perhaps the dying breath of a world that had once known solidity. Here, on the outermost border of remembrance, reality itself thinned. A place where even truth could no longer take root.
Aiden drew a slow breath.
His lungs did not fill with air, but with something stranger. Memory. Potential. The last fragments of what could have been.
Nexus appeared beside him in a ripple of soundless light, her eyes a swirl of cold logic and fractured timelines. She was still stabilizing from the last engagement—a reminder that even machine minds faltered in the presence of concept-warping horrors.
"We've reached it," she said quietly.
Aiden nodded. "The boundary?"
She gestured to the space ahead.
It was not a wall, not a gate. Not even a veil.
It was simply… a pause.
An unspoken hesitation in the universe itself.
