The Memory Palace was dying.
Reed felt it in his bones, in the crystalline architecture of shared moments that bound his consciousness to Lyralei's scattered essence. Each memory—their first kiss beneath twin moons, the way she laughed at death itself, the warmth of her hand in his during the darkest siege—flickered like candles in a hurricane as his mortal form failed under the strain of bridging existence and void.
But something extraordinary was happening in the spaces between those memories. Where love met emptiness, where individual consciousness touched the infinite, a new kind of existence was being born.
"I can speak to them," Lyralei whispered, her voice now a harmony of a thousand perspectives, each one a fragment of The Dark that had learned to think. "Reed, I can translate between what they are and what we are. I can make them understand."
