When the light finally dimmed after the Mirror's overload, Ethan expected chaos. Explosions, alarms, screams—some sort of feedback from a system pushed past its threshold. Instead, what greeted him was pure, deafening silence.
He hovered in a vast white expanse—no walls, no floor, no sky. It wasn't nothingness, exactly. The space pulsed with a quiet hum, like a sleeping machine beneath the skin of reality. Time didn't flow here. Gravity didn't tug. Sound was optional.
Then the thoughts came.
They arrived in a swarm, uninvited and overwhelming. Not external voices, but other minds, bleeding into his own. Fragmented identities collided like stars forming galaxies. A thousand personalities danced through him before sorting into something resembling order.
Ethan?
It was Rina's voice—not spoken, but formed in the mental ether. A ripple of familiarity in a sea of distortion.
I'm here, Ethan responded, shaping his consciousness like a sonar ping in the dark.
