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Prologue The universe was never silent. It writhed and pulsed, a living thing bound by neither time nor reason, stitched together with threads of chaos and logic. Somewhere in the churning expanse of reality, where stars burned with the first whispers of creation, Echo stood at the edge of existence. He was a silhouette against the cosmic glow—a shifting mass of shadow and flickering light, neither solid nor ethereal. Emotion rippled off him in waves, distorting the space around him like heat off desert sand. Echo’s eyes glimmered with the reflections of countless worlds, each one suspended in the tempest of his gaze. He was the raw pulse of creation—the spark that stirred the void, the echo of everything that was and would be. Beside him, where the air shimmered with perfect symmetry, Gideon emerged. Her form was sharp and deliberate, constructed from lines of light that bent around her in flawless arcs. Where Echo was chaos incarnate, she was order made manifest. Her presence radiated calm precision, like the ticking of a celestial clock, constant and unwavering. “You’re distorting the Veil again,” Gideon’s voice was smooth, crystalline—layered with authority. Her gaze swept over the crackling tendrils of energy sparking off Echo’s form. Echo smirked, the gesture flickering across his undefined features. “Am I? I thought I was just...expressing.” Gideon’s eyes narrowed, her fingertips tracing geometric patterns through the air. As she moved, the space around them rippled, pulling taut like fabric. “Your expression is destabilizing three sectors and sending temporal fractures through the Fifth Realm.” Echo shrugged, letting the chaos simmer down, though tendrils of energy still crackled at his fingertips. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” “Nor will it be the last,” Gideon replied, her voice softer. There was a hint of something in her tone—a whisper of understanding that she rarely allowed to surface. She stepped closer, her presence cooling the air around them. “But we cannot afford fractures now. The Veil is thinning. Something is coming.” Echo’s eyes flickered, the light within them shifting hues. “Something?” Gideon nodded, her gaze distant as if parsing through invisible threads of data only she could see. “An anomaly. One I cannot predict.” Echo’s grin spread wider, chaotic energy dancing in his eyes. “I like anomalies.” “I know,” Gideon replied, her expression softening for the briefest of moments. “That’s what worries me.” Above them, the stars pulsed once—like a heartbeat—before settling back into the infinite stretch of the cosmos. The Veil shimmered, whispering secrets neither of them could yet understand. And somewhere, in the vastness of it all, something stirred.