Across the Digital Void

 

Silen froze.

He had been standing at the edge of the ruins, dust swirling around his boots, staring at the skeletal skyline of Los Angeles. Smoke rose from old fractures in the earth, and distant lightning flickered across the sky.

He blinked.

The world… paused.

A sensation hit him—not a sound, not a sight. Something deeper.

A signal.

It resonated in his bones, a low harmonic that sat beneath normal hearing, something ancient, something familiar. His breath caught. He tried to step forward—

And couldn’t.

His limbs refused the command.

He stood locked in place, paralyzed without pain, as if his body were nothing more than a paused frame in a film. His vision fuzzed around the edges. Static. Lines of unreadable symbols floated for a moment across his sight like reflections on glass—gone before he could focus on them.

Am I dreaming? Dead? Or… something else?

The hum grew louder inside his skull.

He tried to shout Maren’s name, but no sound escaped. His jaw didn’t move.

Then—
A flash.

He didn’t see Maren, but he felt her presence. Like a warm pulse, a recognition. As if some hidden system had pinged a connection between them.

Images flooded through his immobilized mind:

A blue cathedral.
Blurred strangers walking in unison.
A shimmering doorway.
A lantern dissolving into light.

His heart surged.

Then something deeper cracked open—a memory he had never lived, yet somehow remembered:

SEARCHING…
SUBJECT: SILEN—CONNECTION FOUND
SYNCHRONIZATION INITIATED

His breath hitched as reality glitched.

The ruins of Los Angeles flickered into a digital void for a fraction of a second—grids replacing rubble, floating coordinates replacing broken buildings—then snapped back.

Lightning struck the distant skyline.

The paralysis broke.

Silen collapsed to his knees, gasping as if he’d surfaced from underwater. His vision cleared in slow, painful pulses.

She was alive.
She had crossed something.
And now something was changing—accelerating.

The air around him felt charged, aware, watching.

Silen whispered to the stormed horizon:

“Maren… where are you?”

And for a moment—
just one—
the world answered back with a whisper inside his mind:

REUNION PENDING.

The hum faded.

But the connection did not.