There was no light when Elian opened his eyes.
Only sound.
Not sound in the way humans understood it—but a chorus of vibrating time, humming from the marrow of the void. It buzzed in chords unmade by instruments. Every note was a memory that had never been allowed to exist.
He floated—not as flesh, not as mind, but as a pulse.
A quiver in the timeline.
A sliver in causality.
His self—Elian—was unformed, for now. Names held no weight here. Identity was mist, shifting, failing to coalesce into any permanent shape. The first thing he felt was wrongness. A gut-deep fracture that trembled in his not-body. He was a remnant—of a loop undone, a life recalled, a thread plucked from the loom too early.
> "You weren't meant to come back," said a voice.
It had no mouth. It wasn't behind him. It was beneath the silence.
> "You were a knot. We pulled you loose. And now… look what's followed."
Around Elian stretched an inverted reality—a world turned inside out.
