The world was light.

  But not the blinding kind—the light around Alaric pulsed like a living breath, gentle and unearthly, shifting between hues of gold, silver, and an elusive shade of blue that seemed to speak in whispers. He was floating—or falling—he couldn’t tell. There was no up or down, only the rhythm of energy that cradled him like a lullaby sung by the stars.

  Time unraveled. Seconds stretched into eternities, and eternity compressed into a single heartbeat. The void he drifted through was not empty; it was filled with echoes—echoes of forgotten names, ancient songs, and memories that didn’t belong to him.

  One name echoed louder than the rest.

  Alaric.

  He gasped.

  Not because he remembered it—it was already his—but because the voice that spoke it was both within him and beyond him. It was not a stranger's voice. It felt… parental. Not the voice of his earthly parents, but something older, something deeply familiar in his bones.

  He reached out, and the void shifted.

  Fragments of images swirled before him—visions of towers made of crystal and flame, forests floating upside down, cities where beings of light walked among mortals. A realm not of chaos, but of overwhelming order layered in patterns beyond comprehension.

  And then… a face. Blurred, radiant, and unmistakably sad.

  A woman, eyes burning crimson like living embers, touched his cheek in the vision. “You must remember,” she said, and her voice cracked reality like thunder. “Before it devours everything.”

  He wanted to speak, to ask who she was—but the moment shattered like glass, and he was falling again.

  Faster now.

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  The energy that once cradled him began to roar. Streams of color twisted into runes, symbols that etched themselves into his skin—not painfully, but with a cold fire that made him tremble. He saw them glow across his arms and chest: the Codes of Essence—ancient laws that bound life, death, time, and meaning.

  He screamed.

  Not in pain. In awakening.

  And then everything stopped.

  He was lying on solid ground.

  Except it wasn’t Earth.

  The sky above him was not sky—it was a swirling tapestry of galaxies, stars shifting in spirals like a living mosaic. He sat up slowly, the weight of gravity returning, but heavier… older. The air tasted like memory—sweet and heavy with a hint of lightning.

  He was in the Meta Universal Dimension.

  It wasn’t a place. It was the seam between places. A realm where destinies tangled and untangled themselves in perpetual loops.

  He rose to his feet. His body felt lighter and denser at the same time, as if every cell had been rewritten in the transition. He looked at his hands—faint traces of the glowing runes remained, pulsing in sync with a heartbeat not his own.

  “So… this is where I was meant to be?”

  His voice sounded strange in this space. Deeper, echoing, like two voices overlapping—his and another buried within.

  A soft wind blew, carrying with it the scent of ancient books and burnt metal. Then, footsteps.

  He turned.

  A figure emerged from the swirling horizon—cloaked in silver robes, face hidden behind a mask shaped like a crescent moon. In one hand, they held a staff etched with constellations.

  The figure didn’t speak. But their presence spoke volumes.

  Alaric took a cautious step forward. “Who are you?”

  A pause. Then the figure raised a hand and pointed… not at Alaric, but behind him.

  He turned.

  And saw the Earth.

  Suspended in the void, small and silent. But it wasn’t the Earth he remembered. The colors were wrong. The continents misshapen. And then he saw it—a fracture—like a spiderweb crack across the sky of his home world.

  “It's breaking…” he whispered.

  The cloaked figure finally spoke, and their voice was both thunder and whisper. “Balance has shattered. And with it, the Cycle.”

  Alaric clenched his fists. “Why me? I didn’t ask for this.”

  “No one ever does,” the figure replied. “But some are born from silence, not to speak—but to listen. You have returned to fulfill a vow forgotten by time itself.”

  The world trembled.

  Behind the figure, a path unfolded—steps of floating light stretching into the stars, each one inscribed with symbols that pulsed as Alaric looked at them.

  A test. A journey.

  He swallowed hard, heart pounding.

  But this time… he didn’t hesitate.

  He took the first step.