Silence.

Not the kind born from absence, but the kind that comes before creation. A silence so vast it pressed against thought itself, unraveling Aarian’s awareness like threads in a dying star.

He didn’t fall.

He drifted—weightless and unanchored, mind severed from body, memory decaying into light. Equations fluttered through the dark like dying fireflies: curvature tensors, gravitational shears, the constants of a universe he no longer belonged to.

Was this death?

He reached for a thought, a name.

Aanya.

It shimmered, then disintegrated. Time was meaningless here. The very idea of breath, motion, heat—it all dissolved into spiraling nothingness.

Then came the stars.

Around him, space bloomed. Not Earth’s sky, but something deeper—realms of collapsing galaxies, gravitational tendrils stretching like nerves across the void. He passed through nebulae of thought, drifted beside dying suns, and felt the hum of particles vibrating with knowledge.

In this place, reality was thin. Transparent.

And through that thinning, something watched.

"Curious. This one tore through the veil... not summoned, not chosen."

The presence was not malevolent, but ancient. It didn’t speak in language, but truth. It saw him for what he was a mind that should not have passed through the barrier.

"He carries the echo of another world. And remembers it still."

Suddenly, the stars pulled back. The light bent inward.

Aarian screamed—not in pain, but in compression. His essence, mind, memory—all collapsed into a spiral of light, then funneled downward, downward, downward

---

He was born beneath a sky of lavender suns.

The air was thick with mana, the sound of chanting winds echoing in the distance. He opened his eyes and cried, not from fear, but from the shock of being.

Hands lifted him—soft, warm, unfamiliar.

A woman cradled him against her chest. She spoke a language he didn’t recognize, but the rhythm soothed him. Around her, figures watched in reverent awe. Candles flickered, and floating glyphs spun silently in the air.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. His body was new—frail, unfinished. But his mind…

His mind was still Aarian.

The physicist who had bent reality, who had built the Horizon Engine, who had died alongside the only person who ever understood his silence.

He remembered.

And in those memories, he found fire.

Not revenge.

Purpose.

He had entered a world ruled by magic. And he would learn to shape it—not by incantations or divine favor—but by understanding it.

The laws here were different. But laws they remained. And he would decode them, one by one.

In the candlelight of that foreign chamber, the reborn child’s eyes shimmered—not with tears, but with equations waiting to be solved.

---

Far away, in a place untouched by time, the presence that had watched him whispered to the wind:

"The equation has been rewritten."

"And so begins the paradox."