The silver light of a waning moon filtered through the blinds, casting thin stripes across the chaos of the room. Ethan hunched over an old notebook, its pages covered in increasingly frantic scrawls. Around him, the hardwood floor disappeared beneath layers of chalk sigils—some smudged by footprints, others pristine in their geometric precision. Crumpled papers surrounded him like fallen leaves, some bearing char marks where he'd burned their edges in frustrated experiments.
His hands trembled as he dipped a brush into a small pot of silver ink, its metallic sheen catching the moonlight as he traced another glyph onto the notebook's page. The symbol seemed to vibrate beneath his fingertips, the lines shifting subtly even as he drew them, as if the pattern existed in a dimension his hand could only partially access.
"Stay still," he muttered, his voice rough from hours of disuse. "Just stay still this time."
As he completed the final stroke, the silver ink pulsed once, then twice, then began to emit a faint humming sound that resonated with the fillings in his teeth. For a moment, the glyph appeared to lift from the page, hovering a half-inch above the paper—then it collapsed with a soft sizzle, leaving a darker stain than before.
Ethan dropped the brush, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. Progress, but not enough. Never enough. He'd been at this for days now, trying to decode the fragments that flickered through his dreams, trying to isolate the symbols that might stabilize the resonance, that might give him some measure of control over what was happening.
He reached for another sheet of paper, this one filled with charcoal sketches of a different sigil—more angular, with sharp hooks radiating outward from a central spiral. His fingers traced the lines without touching them, feeling the subtle resistance in the air above the symbol, like an invisible magnetic field.
"Come on," he whispered. "Show me what you are."
He pressed his index finger to the center of the spiral. For an instant, light bent around the sigil, creating a momentary distortion in the air—a lens effect that magnified the wood grain beneath the paper. Then it backfired, glitched, sending a shockwave of discomfort up his arm. Ethan gasped, falling backward onto the floor, his vision swimming with afterimages and corruption.
When his sight cleared, he fumbled for his phone, opening the System Interface with an increasingly familiar gesture. The interface glowed softly in the dim room:
[INTEGRATION: 46%]
He stared at the number, willing it to change, to reveal more of whatever system had insinuated itself into his consciousness. As if responding to his focus, the display flickered, the numbers shifting with digital fluidity:
[INTEGRATION: 52%]
The apartment walls seemed to vibrate with a subsonic hum, a resonance that rattled the dishes in the kitchen cabinets and caused the light fixtures to flicker momentarily. Ethan froze, waiting, listening as the sound faded back into the ambient noise of the night.
"Ethan?" Sarah's voice came from the doorway, startling him. She stood there in her bathrobe, Lily peering around her legs with curious eyes. "What are you doing? It's three in the morning."
He glanced around the room, suddenly seeing it as they must—the desperate scrawlings of a man losing his grip on sanity. "I'm... working on something."
Sarah stares at the patterns and recognises them. Not from her work—but from Lily's drawings.
"It's louder today, Daddy," Lily said, her voice small but clear. "The silver wind."
Sarah glanced down at her daughter with a mix of confusion and concern before looking back at Ethan. "She woke up saying she could hear music in the walls. What's going on?"
Ethan shook his head, unable to form an explanation that wouldn't sound deranged. "Just go back to bed. I'll clean this up."
Neither moved. Sarah's expression hardened with determination. "No. Not this time. You've been like this for days, Ethan. Hiding in here, barely sleeping, barely eating. Drawing these... things." She gestured at the symbols covering the floor. "You need to tell me what's happening."
"I don't know what's happening!" The words burst from him with more force than he intended. "That's the problem. I'm trying to figure it out before..." He trailed off, unwilling to voice his deepest fear: before it's too late.
Sarah stepped fully into the room, guiding Lily back toward the hallway. "Go back to bed, sweetheart. Daddy and I need to talk."
Lily hesitated, her eyes lingering on one of the larger chalk sigils near Ethan's feet. "Be careful of the broken places," she said cryptically before turning and padding back to her bedroom.
Once she was gone, Sarah crossed her arms, fixing Ethan with a stern gaze. "Start talking. Now."
Ethan ran a hand through his disheveled hair. "You wouldn't believe me."
"Try me."
He was spared having to answer by the buzzing of Sarah's tablet on the coffee table. She glanced at it, irritated by the interruption, then froze as she read the notification on the screen.
"Oh my God," she whispered, picking up the device and swiping it open.
"What?" Ethan asked, rising to his feet.
Sarah turned the tablet toward him, its screen filled with a breaking news report:
"LOCAL AUTHORITIES BAFFLED AS SEVERAL LONDONERS REPORTEDLY DEVELOP SUPERHUMAN ABILITIES OVERNIGHT"
The anchor's voice continued over footage of emergency vehicles surrounding an apartment building: "...witnesses describe seeing a woman levitate several feet off the ground before collapsing. In a separate incident in Brixton, a teenager allegedly shattered every window on his street during what neighbors described as 'an emotional outburst.' Officials urge calm as they investigate these unusual occurrences..."
Ethan stared at the screen, a cold weight settling in his stomach. "When did this happen?"
"Just now," Sarah said, scrolling through the report. "They're still gathering information. But Ethan, this is impossible. People don't just suddenly—"
She was interrupted by a sharp gasp from Ethan. He had pulled out his system again, his face illuminated by the screen's glow as he stared it:
[INTEGRATION: 68%]
The numbers pulsed, then climbed again:
[INTEGRATION: 69%]
The lights in the apartment flickered violently, then stabilized at a lower intensity. From Lily's room came the sound of soft humming—that same impossible melody with its bent notes and unnatural harmonics. But now it looped in on itself, creating a canon of sound that seemed to fold in impossible dimensions, each iteration starting before the previous one finished, creating a mathematical impossibility of overlapping phrases.
"This isn't just affecting you anymore," Sarah said, her scientific mind grappling with the implications. "Something's happening on a global scale—and it's accelerating."
Ethan slumped against the wall, sliding down until he sat on the floor again. "I started it," he muttered, half to himself. "Or... no. I ended it. This is the echo."
"What are you talking about?" Sarah demanded, kneeling beside him. "What echo? What did you end?"
But Ethan couldn't answer. The room was spinning around him, exhaustion and revelation crashing together like colliding waves. The last thing he saw before consciousness slipped away was the System interface glitching, numbers and symbols scrolling past too quickly to read, and a single notification hovering above them all:
[RESONANCE CASCADE IMMINENT]
The dream seized him immediately, with none of the usual drifting or disorientation. It was crystal clear, more vivid than waking life, the colors deeper, the sensations sharper.
Ethan stood atop a massive obsidian tower that reached impossibly high above a sprawling cityscape. The sky above was not blue but a strange green-gold, streaked with auroral ribbons that danced across the heavens. Beside him stood a boy of perhaps eight years, his bright eyes fixed on Ethan's hands as they traced patterns in the air.
The glyphs Ethan drew shimmered into existence like living things, glowing with inner light, hovering between them like fireflies made of pure energy. They were the same symbols he had been desperately trying to recreate in his waking hours, but here they came effortlessly, perfectly.
"Like this, Lirathan," Ethan heard himself say, though the voice seemed both his and not his—richer, more confident, imbued with power and knowledge beyond his understanding. "Feel the resonance between your intent and the pattern. The glyph is just a physical manifestation of the harmonic."
The boy, Lirathan Duskfall, mimicked Ethan's gesture with smaller hands, his face a mask of concentration. A smaller, fainter version of the glyph appeared before him, wobbling slightly before stabilizing.
"I did it, Master!" he exclaimed, his face breaking into a radiant smile.
Ethan felt a surge of pride so pure and powerful it threatened to overwhelm him. He ruffled the boy's dark hair affectionately. "You're the brightest star I've ever taught," he said, the words feeling right and true on his tongue.
Lirathan beamed up at him, his eyes shining with adoration. "Then one day I'll teach the stars back, Master."
The scene seemed to freeze for a moment, a perfect tableau of mentor and student against the alien sky. Then, something fractured. The image glitched like corrupted data, fragments breaking apart and reassembling. The tower shook beneath their feet. The golden-green sky darkened to a bloody crimson.
And suddenly, there were two Ethans—one still interacting with the boy, and another—him, the real him—watching from a few feet away, unable to move or speak, a ghost in his own dream.
The boy was older now, a teenager with gangling limbs and a face hardened by suffering. His veins had turned black, visible beneath his pale skin like cracks in porcelain. Tears streamed down his face, but his eyes burned with fury.
In his hands appeared a book—massive, bound in what looked like obsidian leather, its pages edged in silver. The Grimoire. Ethan knew its name without being told, recognized it as his own creation even though he had never seen it before. He even remembers part of its content. Lily had muttered a spell from it while he was working on the glyphs; at the time, it sounded like the normal gibberish a normal child her age would use.
But he should have known... she was anything but normal.
Ethan turned his attention back to the scene before him.
"You lied to me," Lirathan spat, his voice breaking. "Like you lied to all of them. You said you'd save us!"
The other Ethan—the Master—floating away from him, his face a mask of anguish. "I tried—I wish I could have, but I have no choice—"
"Then leave this world alone!" Lirathan screamed, opening the Grimoire in desperation to a page covered in glyphs that pulsed with dark energy. He pressed his blackened hand against the central sigil, and power erupted from the book like a tidal wave.
The collapsing tower began to slow its downfall, the great chunks of stone dissolved into nothing trying to form again. Yet, the sky above continued folding inwards like paper being crumpled by an invisible hand. The Lirathan reached out desperately, trying to stop what was happening, trying to save his world and seek vengeance on the master who had looked at him with such affection.
Their fingertips were inches apart when darkness consumed everything.
Ethan woke with a violent jerk, one hand clutching at his nose as warm blood trickled over his lips. His other hand was still tracing the final glyph from the dream into the bedsheet, finger moving of its own accord. A faint echo lingered in the air. The glyph was complete. When he looked down, he saw the faint phosphorescent afterimage of the symbol fading into the fabric.
Behind his eyes, a single word pulsed with each beat of his heart: Resonance.
His phone lay on the nightstand, the screen illuminated with a new notification:
[INTEGRATION: 74%]
[MEMORY FUSION EVENT: CATEGORY UNKNOWN]
Ethan blinked, trying to clear his vision, trying to make sense of the words glowing before him. As he pushed himself upright, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand, a movement in the corner of the room caught his attention.
Lily sat cross-legged on the floor beside the window, her eyes closed, her small body swaying gently in time with the humming that emanated from her—the same melody from the dream, the same impossible harmonies that he had taught to Lirathan Duskfall.
As if sensing his gaze, she stopped humming and opened her eyes, fixing him with a stare that seemed far too old for her young face.
"He was kind," she whispered, "before the breaking."
Ethan stared at his daughter, blood still dripping from his nose, the echo of a future he couldn't remember reverberating through his bones.
"Who was?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.
Lily smiled sadly, the expression so foreign on her childish features that it sent a chill down Ethan's spine.
"You were," she said. "Before you became the Conductor."