The morning smelled of metal and salt. A fine film lay on everything – on the rails, the windowsills of the ruins, the leaves of the trees that had turned silvery in the night. Rhea called it Ion Dust. Eiko typed values into his terminal and muttered something about "stable field coupling." Alaric wasn't listening.
He stood at the edge of the pier, where Lina had disappeared. The water breathed beneath his palm. A slow, calm pulse.
I am here.
The words weren't sound but temperature, a frequency inside his bones. He could have wept with relief. Instead, he only said: "Stay."
I'm staying. Just differently.
"How differently?" he asked.
Imagine what you love stops being an object and becomes a landscape.
You can walk in it. You can get lost. But you can also find your way home.
Alaric closed his eyes. "As long as there's a path to you."
There are many. One of them is you.
