STARLIGHT UNBOUND by Deus Ex Machina - HTML preview

Chapter 11

Lucien was falling.

The void stretched infinitely around him, an endless sea of black, punctuated by the distant shimmer of stars. He didn’t panic. He didn’t flail. The fall felt... inevitable.

The stars brightened as he descended —or ascended?—their light shifting, bending into intricate geometric patterns. Shapes he almost recognized, their edges teasing the brink of understanding before slipping away, elusive and fluid.

A voice came.

It wasn ’t a voice he knew, yet it resonated from somewhere deep inside him, vibrating through his bones, his thoughts. The words weren’t spoken aloud; they simply were, clear and insistent, tolling through his mind like the chime of a distant bell:

“The universe is a number or behaves like a number. It is infinitesimally big and infinitesimally small. We exist at a point in the chain where it realizes into matter.”

The patterns surrounding him shifted, folding in on themselves, recalculating, spiraling into infinity. The universe seemed to pulse in response, as if caught in the act of rewriting itself.

Lucien reached out, his fingertips brushing against one of the luminous shapes. The moment his skin made contact, it fractured —

A shattering of light. A soundless implosion.

The stars blinked out.

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