The rain began without warning.
Not gentle. Not poetic.
It fell like judgment.
Mohamed stood at the edge of the abandoned district, where the city's maps quietly stopped making sense. Streets looped back into themselves. Buildings leaned at impossible angles, as if reality itself had grown tired of obeying geometry.
Selene watched the sky. "This is where it begins," she said. "The first convergence."
Mohamed felt it now—
that pressure behind the eyes,
that subtle vibration in the bones,
as if the world were tuning itself.
"What exactly is a convergence?" he asked.
Selene didn't answer immediately.
Instead, she reached into her coat and pulled out a small object: a cube, black and reflective, etched with the same symbols Mohamed had seen beneath the library.
"A convergence," she finally said, "is a moment where multiple truths overlap. History. Memory. Belief. Geometry. Time."
She looked at him.
"And someone gets to decide which one survives."
The air split.
Not violently.
Precisely.
A line appeared in front of them—thin, vertical, glowing faint red. It widened, unfolding like a curtain being pulled aside.
And they stepped through.
They were no longer in the city.
They stood inside a cathedral of shadows, vast beyond comprehension. Pillars rose like blackened trees, their tops vanishing into darkness. The floor was polished obsidian, reflecting infinite versions of themselves.
At the center: a circular platform.
And upon it—
Them.
Twelve figures.
Samurai silhouettes wrapped in tailored black suits, crimson threads lining the seams like veins. Each carried two swords—one traditional katana, the other unfamiliar, angular, inscribed with symbols that hurt to look at.
Their presence wasn't loud.
It was oppressive.
These were not warriors who sought battle.
They were executioners of inevitability.
Selene whispered, "The Eclipse Order's Inner Axis."
One of them stepped forward.
Tall. Controlled. His movements economical, terrifyingly calm.
A scar ran down over his right eye, cutting through it like a deliberate mark.
Mohamed felt a chill crawl up his spine.
"That's him," Selene said.
"Ryoto Nobunga."
Ryoto's visible eye studied Mohamed with surgical interest.
"So," he said calmly, "this is the anomaly."
His voice carried no hatred.
No arrogance.
Only assessment.
A small figure skipped out from behind Ryoto's shadow.
A little girl.
She wore a black dress with red stitching, hair tied into twin tails, eyes wide and bright—too bright.
She smiled.
"Hi," she said sweetly.
Mohamed's instincts screamed.
Selene stiffened. "Don't look away," she murmured. "That's Aiko."
Aiko tilted her head. "He doesn't look scary," she said, pouting slightly. "I thought the threat would be bigger."
Ryoto didn't look at her. "Appearances are irrelevant."
Aiko giggled. "Good. That makes it more fun."
The word fun echoed wrong in that place.
Ryoto turned back to Mohamed.
"You access memory without keys," he said. "You violate the architecture."
Mohamed clenched his fists. "You build cages and call them truth."
Ryoto smiled faintly.
"A common misunderstanding."
He raised one hand.
The space around them shifted.
Mohamed suddenly saw it.
Civilizations rising and collapsing.
Priests, kings, scholars, conquerors.
Blood on altars.
Ink on forbidden pages.
Children taught lies gentle enough to survive.
"Humanity," Ryoto said, "cannot handle raw truth. It fractures. Always has."
Aiko skipped across the obsidian floor, dragging her finger behind her. Wherever it touched, images appeared—rituals, sacrifices, mass graves hidden beneath temples.
"We just stopped pretending," she said cheerfully.
Selene stepped forward. "You're engineering Doomsday."
Ryoto nodded. "Correction. We're curating it."
The air darkened.
Something else arrived.
Not through a gate.
Not through a ritual.
It simply was.
The shadows bent inward, forming a towering silhouette.
Horns.
A goat-like skull.
A black and red suit impossibly sharp, impossibly clean.
Faromet.
He did not walk.
Reality adjusted around him.
"The first convergence proceeds as planned," he said, voice layered, ancient and modern at once.
Mohamed couldn't breathe.
Faromet turned his head slightly.
"And yet… the variable persists."
Their gazes met.
For the first time, Mohamed felt something unexpected.
Not fear.
Recognition.
"You are not chosen," Faromet said.
"You are… emergent."
Ryoto knelt.
So did the others.
Even Aiko stopped smiling.
Faromet raised one hand.
The cathedral walls shifted, revealing twenty-one empty thrones behind him.
"Twenty-two convergences," Faromet said.
"Twenty-two opportunities to overwrite entropy."
His eyes burned.
"The first requires a test."
The obsidian floor cracked.
A symbol ignited beneath Mohamed's feet.
Selene shouted, "Don't resist—anchor yourself!"
Mohamed closed his eyes.
He didn't fight the memory.
He entered it.
He stood somewhere else.
A desert.
Pyramids—not Egyptian. Older. More precise.
Machines humming beneath stone.
Humans weren't primitive.
They were brilliant.
And they were erased.
Mohamed understood then.
Not everything was lost to time.
Some things were buried on purpose.
The symbol beneath him shattered.
The cathedral trembled.
Faromet took a step back.
Just one.
Aiko's eyes widened.
Ryoto's calm finally cracked.
"Interesting," Faromet said softly.
Mohamed opened his eyes.
Blood ran from his nose.
But he was smiling.
"You're not gods," he said.
"You're archivists who got drunk on control."
Silence.
Then Faromet laughed.
Low. Genuine.
"Good," he said.
"Make the next convergence… entertaining."
The shadows folded inward.
The Order vanished.
The cathedral collapsed into nothing.
Rain again.
The city again.
Selene grabbed Mohamed before he fell.
"That," she whispered, "was just the beginning."
Mohamed stared at the sky.
Somewhere deep inside him, a clock had started ticking.
Twenty-one left.