Reality didn't ease back into place. It slammed shut around him like it had never once let go of the timeline.
The next second, he was back.
Cold pavement pressed against his boots. Sirens echoed somewhere in the distance.
Greyhaven.
He'd returned.
Zzzzsup.
[ TRANSITION COMPLETE ]
Location: Valenreach — Greyhaven Intersection
Layer Status: Reintegrated
Displacement: Resolved
Residual Distortion: Present
The intersection looked ordinary. Too ordinary — like something had been quietly removed from the world and nobody had bothered to tell the world to stop.
[ PERCEPTION WARNING ]
Reality Sync: 87%
Temporal Offset: Minor
Cause: Post-Distortion Recoil
He stood in the middle of it, motionless. Alone, though it didn't feel that way.
The cracked cube stayed locked in his fist, its broken edges biting into his palm hard enough to draw blood. His eyes wouldn't focus. His body had come back through whatever door reality had used to let him through.
His mind hadn't followed it all the way.
Because Aron was still here.
His arms ached under a weight that shouldn't have been there — heavy enough to hurt, heavy enough that letting go felt physically impossible.
He looked down.
Aron rested against him, peaceful in a way that felt wrong on a body that had bled out an hour ago. No wounds left on him. No blood soaking through his shirt.
Just quiet.
Zekai's arms tightened around him on instinct.
"...I've got you."
He carried him carefully, cradled against his chest.
Something caught against his knuckles—dry, brittle, barely there. A few crushed white petals, still tangled in the seam of his sleeve. He hadn't thrown them away. He'd forgotten they were even still on him.
Two funerals now, and he hadn't managed to bury either bouquet.
Something in him twisted. "...Aron."
Nothing answered back. The weight stayed exactly where it was.
"...You're safe now." His voice barely held together.
Still nothing. Of course there was nothing.
And still some broken part of his mind kept insisting the weight was real. Warm. A shoulder pressed against his chest, solid, human, carrying heat that had no business still existing.
For one flickering second, Aron's outline blurred at the edge of his vision.
Then it snapped back into focus.
He looked away before he had to think about what that meant.
A dead weight. A brother.
His fingers dug in tighter.
"Just hold on." Hollow, worn thin. "I'm taking you home."
People filled the intersection around him, and their voices started rising, overlapping into noise that refused to resolve into words.
"Who is that?"
"He just — he appeared out of nowhere!"
"Was he flying?"
He came down slow, boots meeting asphalt like he'd fallen from somewhere that no longer technically existed.
Then a woman screamed. "Why is he holding his arms like that?!"
Someone else blinked, frowning. "Talking to who?"
He went still.
Another voice cut through. "Is he carrying something?"
"No." A man's voice, flat with confusion. "There's nothing there."
He looked down without meaning to.
Aron was still there. Resting in his arms, exactly where he'd been a second ago.
...
Then why wasn't anyone looking at him?
He took a step forward. Slow. Careful. The way you'd move if you were trying not to wake someone.
The crowd split apart around him — uneasy, unsure why their feet were carrying them backward.
Because from where they stood, his arms held nothing at all.
Silence pooled around him, but it didn't feel like the silence of a man carrying a body. It felt like the silence around something missing.
Nobody stepped closer. Not because anyone told them not to. Something in each of them simply refused to close the distance.
He kept walking. Aron's head stayed tucked against his shoulder, exactly the way it should have been.
"...Sorry." His voice cracked down the middle. "I was late."
The apology left him before he'd decided to say it out loud.
A few people traded uneasy glances. One lowered a phone that had been recording. Another stepped back.
The man wasn't carrying anyone.
And still he moved through the intersection like he was shielding something precious from the entire world.
He turned his head, slow.
Nobody was looking at Aron.
They were looking at him.
Confusion sliding into something worse. Fear.
"Is that... blood on his clothes?"
They weren't looking at a man anymore. They were looking at something they had no framework to understand.
He kept walking. Face blank — not empty, just with nothing left to put on display.
Zzzzsup.
[ SUBJECT STATUS — ZEKAI KRYSTAN ]
Physical Condition: Stable
Internal Damage: High
Mental State: Suppressed Collapse
Primary Emotion: Grief
Secondary: Null Response
Voices kept stacking on top of each other. None of it registered as anything worth hearing. Phones rose all around him, recording.
He didn't react to any of it. He just kept moving.
"Move."
No. No.
He didn't walk so much as arrive. The distance simply wasn't there anymore.
One moment he stood in front of a cluster of onlookers.
The next, he didn't.
From where they stood, he vanished and reappeared ten feet ahead in the same breath — no transition, just a different coordinate.
He'd chosen where he already was.
The crowd caught up a full second late.
"He was just — where did he go?"
"He's behind us — look!"
"How does someone move like that?"
"...Is that even a person?"
Nobody was really seeing him. They were seeing something their minds had no shape for.
His grip closed tighter around nothing. The cube's broken edge cut deeper into his palm. His vision trembled at the edges.
The voices around him thinned into background noise.
"...No."
Aron was here. He was certain of it.
He could feel the weight in his arms. Feel the blood that should have soaked through his own shirt by now. Feel warmth radiating off a body that no longer had any warmth left to give.
He remembered telling him once — when you lose something, you end up gaining something else eventually. That's just how it goes.
He'd never once imagined losing Aron would be the thing that finally proved him wrong.
"No." Weaker this time. Barely a word at all.
His body had made it back across whatever line separated the palace from this street.
His mind was still standing in the wreckage, refusing to leave.
✦ End of Chapter 26 - Return ✦