Golden afternoon light slanted through the tall windows of Dr. Liora Lytton’s office, setting the dust in the air adrift like tiny constellations. The room seemed shaped by centuries rather than design: shelves layered with preserved tablets, annotated codices, and transparent data cubes; a workbench scattered with instruments grown from pale bioceramic; preservation fields humming softly around manuscripts too fragile to touch. It was a place where the past and the future had reached a quiet truce.
Liora moved through the space with the effortless familiarity of someone who had lived inside its logic for years. Her dark hair, loosely tied today, brushed her shoulders when she turned. The ring on her left hand — a simple band etched with worn Thesean script — glinted as she adjusted a panel and softened the glare from outside.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said.
Zael sat opposite her, leaning forward slightly, palms pressed to his knees. The Harmony Restoration Center still felt unreal to him — too orderly, too composed. He missed the noise of the ports and waystations, places where people argued in half a dozen dialects and no one knew his name.
He took a breath. “It’s always the same dream,” he said. “A city by the water. I know the streets, but I don’t know why. And I’m with… her. An earlier version of Aria. Or an earlier me.”
Liora didn’t rush him. “Tell me how it unfolds.”
He did. The heat of the harbor, the haze above the river, the carved stone piers alive with people and ships. His own voice in a language he no longer remembered. Aria’s hand in his. The two of them talking urgently over scrolls. And then — the explosion. The fire. The collapsing warehouse wall. The brief, desperate meeting of their eyes before smoke and darkness swallowed everything.
When he finished, she tapped a hovering glyph, and the room dimmed to a softer amber.
“Dreams usually behave like loose fragments,” she said. “Broken impressions, emotional shadows. They track along the seams between transformations. But yours exhibits structure. Coherence. Repetition tied to a single moment.”
Zael tried to steady his voice. “Is that… dangerous?”
“Unusual,” Liora replied. “Unusual is why you’re here.”
He looked toward the window, where Luminara rose in terraced layers above the strait. “How long am I going to be kept?”
“We don’t keep people,” she said gently. “You can leave at any time. But if you’re still here, I imagine you want answers more than distance.”
Zael lowered his gaze. “I want to go home. And I want to know what’s happening to me.”
Liora nodded. “Then let’s begin.”
The induction device looked older than anything that should have been in a research center: a shallow bronze bowl inlaid with dark stone, connected to a halo-like frame suspended above a recliner. When Zael lay back, the frame lowered until it hovered just above his temples, tingling faintly.
“I’m not pushing your mind anywhere,” Liora said from beside him. “This simply loosens the boundaries between layers of memory. You choose what to follow.”
He swallowed. “And if I choose wrong?”
“There is no wrong. There is only what’s waiting to be seen.”
She touched the bowl. Something inside Zael shifted — subtle, but undeniable. It felt like opening a door he didn’t know he’d been leaning against.
He fell inward.
Time flattened. Then folded. The present thinned into a translucent film, and beneath it other scenes pressed upward like reflections in broken water. He let the dream guide him.
The harbor materialized in vivid clarity: Palembang during the height of the Srivijaya world. The river choked with ships. The gongs. The smell of resin, spice, and sun-warmed stone. Aria beside him — another Aria — studying a palm-leaf manuscript with urgent focus.
He heard himself responding, words indistinct beneath the sudden concussive blast. Fire leapt along the piers. People ran. A wall collapsed, throwing dust and splinters into the air. He reached for Aria — she reached back — and their hands missed by inches.
The moment folded like paper.
Zael gasped awake in Liora’s office, drenched in sweat. The halo frame lifted away.
“That was real,” he said.
“It was an earlier iteration,” Liora replied. “But yes — real. The emotional force of that event left a deep imprint in your pattern.”
“And Aria?”
Her answer was steady. “Her pattern intersected with yours there. Strongly.”
Zael pressed his hands together until they trembled. “How long have those echoes been running through us?”
“Long enough for the archives to register them. Which means long enough to complicate everything.”
Liora led him from her office into the depths of the building. The lower levels of the HRC were quieter, built of stone and steel. When the lift opened, Zael stepped into a cavernous hall lit from above by a soft, diffused glow.
“This is Lytton’s Archive,” she said. “Or at least, the part they let me organize.”
It was less a library than a nested city of memory.
Near the entrance stood the physical artifacts: preserved mosaics from ancient Athens depicting the Ship of Theseus; early Fluxian legal tablets; emblems from Byzantium, annotated to show how the empire evolved into Luminara.
Further in, hovering scrolls — reinforced by invisible preservation fields — displayed bilingual dialogues between early Fluxian thinkers and Buddhist scholars. Notes in the margins argued across centuries. None of it felt like a religion. It felt like a long, careful conversation about the nature of change.
At the far end, Liora activated a slender console. A web of luminous nodes unfolded into the air. Some glowed brightly; others flickered at the edges like unformed possibilities.
“This is your section,” she said.
Zael stared. Labels rippled outward: Palembang. Srivijaya. His identifier. Aria’s. Their lines crossing, looping, branching into faint projections.
“The HRC detected your pattern anomalies before you arrived,” Liora continued. “Your echoes weren’t confined to the past. They reached forward as well.”
He pointed at a lone glowing branch near the edge of the map. “What’s that?”
“The part of the pattern we haven’t lived yet,” she said. “We leave space for the unknown. Fluxian ethics requires it.”
For the first time, Zael felt anchored to something larger than his confusion. If he was an anomaly, he was at least an anomaly the HRC had been waiting to understand.
The testing chamber, however, held no comfort. It was stripped down to essentials: smooth walls, a reclined seat, overhead sensors. When the technician fitted him with neural contacts, he felt exposed.
“Just breathe,” Liora said from the control station. “Let the stimuli pass through you.”
Lights shifted. Patterns pulsed across the walls. The harbor flickered again — but then fractured. Other scenes overlapped: a collapsing bridge in a later century, a storm tearing apart a ship, a quiet room with a failing monitor.
Zael felt himself sliding toward the dream space. The explosion pulsed like a beacon. A voice whispered his name.
When the simulation ended, Liora projected his neural map beside the standard Fluxian diagram. His was denser, more tangled — threads from distant iterations weaving together in ways that shouldn’t have been possible.
“There’s interference,” she said. “A secondary rhythm nested inside your own. Intentional or not, it’s shaping your dreams.”
“Someone?” Zael asked. “The Brotherhood?”
“We can’t assume that,” she replied. “But they might be listening for whatever is speaking through you.”
She summoned Dr. Selan, the HRC’s foremost expert on cross-iteration anomalies. He arrived quickly, studied the data, and exhaled in a long, low whistle.
“What you’re carrying isn’t bleed-through,” Selan said. “It’s a channel. Something is using your pattern to reach… something else. Or someone else.”
Zael absorbed this with slow, bracing breaths. “What do we do?”
“Watch,” Liora said. “Study. Strengthen the boundaries you still have.”
“And hope,” Selan added, “that this hasn’t already spread to others.”
That evening, the two of them walked to the roof garden overlooking the strait. The water shimmered beneath the last fading streaks of light.
“Selan said I’m an exception,” Zael murmured.
“You are,” Liora said. “But exceptions are how theories grow.”
He watched ships trace slow arcs below them. “Do you think I’m being controlled?”
“No,” she replied. “I think you’re being contacted. The difference matters.”
Zael let the silence settle. The idea frightened him — but it also pulled at him with a strange curiosity.
“Whatever this is,” Liora said softly, “you still have agency. What passes through you is not the same as what you choose to do with it.”
He nodded, feeling the balance of fear and resolve shift inside him.
He wasn’t a victim of the anomaly. He was part of the puzzle.
The next incident came in a quiet corridor lined with salvaged reliefs. Zael had nearly reached the stairwell when he heard a faint encrypted chime.
Two figures stood in an alcove. One tall, one small. A device floated between them, symbols streaming across its surface. He recognized the tall silhouette instantly — Aria. Even cloaked, she carried urgency in her stance.
“…window closes soon…”
“…they won’t release him willingly…”
“…signal behaves like a tether…”
He froze, breath tight.
When the transmission ended, the figures separated. Aria disappeared down the stairs.
Later, in the roof garden, Liora listened without interrupting. When he finished, she closed her eyes briefly.
“I’ve been detecting Brotherhood hardware for days,” she said. “I hoped I was wrong.”
“So she’s working for them.”
“Or with them,” Liora said. “There’s a difference — political, philosophical, ethical. We need to understand which.”
Zael felt anger rise, muddled with memory and longing. “What do they want with me?”
“What they always want,” Liora said. “Influence. Leverage. Access to whatever is moving through you.”
He clenched his fists. “And Aria?”
“That,” she said gently, “is the part we must approach carefully.”
The next dream came without induction.
Zael woke — or thought he did — to find the ceiling melting into a star-filled void. He drifted weightless in a vast lattice of silver threads, each connecting nodes of memory: harbor flames, storm-soaked cliffs, monasteries carved into mountainsides, unknown places that carried emotional echoes nonetheless.
A vortex formed ahead, pulling him in. Scenes slowed along its edges. And then he saw her.
Aria stood on the burning pier, but not as she had been. A faint geometric halo outlined her form, flickering with complex symmetry. She lifted her gaze toward him — not toward the scene, but toward him in the present.
“Find the Nexus,” she said. “Before someone else does.”
The world shattered into shards of light.
Zael jolted upright in his bed, shaking. A moment later, Liora’s voice sounded through the door.
“Zael? Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
The door slid open. “The monitors registered something singular. A spike we’ve never seen before.”
He told her everything. She listened, expression sharpening with each sentence.
“The Nexus,” she murmured. “A theoretical convergence point. Purely speculative — until now.”
Zael exhaled, his pulse only now slowing. “Could that be what’s pulling at me?”
“It could be the key to all of this,” Liora said. “And that’s what concerns me.”
She straightened. The uncertainty didn’t leave her face, but her resolve clarified around it.
“We start tomorrow,” she said. “In the oldest part of the archive. And in the places the Brotherhood keeps trying to reach first.”
Zael nodded, exhaustion and determination intertwining in equal measure.
Whatever waited in his dreams, it had stopped being a metaphor. The Nexus was real enough to be found — real enough to be fought over.
And he had just been asked to walk toward it.
