“What do I do?” he whispered.
The Cloud’s response appeared, line by line, in soft gold text:
“A narrative void. A place where history stutters. People forget why they walked into a room. Stars twinkle out of sync. The Cloud hates scars. It’ll try to fill the void with something worse.”
But as the final collapse neared, the Cloud did something unexpected. It spoke.
Kaelen settled into the cradle. Gel-foam enveloped his limbs. The lights dimmed. Then he was falling through a kaleidoscope of probabilities: every moment that had ever happened, every moment that could happen, all stacked like translucent cards.