At first, there was only silence.

Not the kind that came from absence, but the afterimage of sound — the way thunder feels long after it fades, still vibrating in the bones.

Doran floated in it, weightless and alone.

The Echo had collapsed inward, its architecture shredded by Evelyn’s loop. The endless corridors of light were gone. In their place drifted fragments — ghost-data, incomplete packets of memory spinning like dust motes in black water.

Her form — if it could be called ...