The darkness no longer felt cold.
It stretched endlessly in every direction, a sea of silence stitched with starlight, yet in the presence of Elysia, it had softened. The void shimmered with faint, dancing motes—wisps of distant galaxies, nebulous clouds that glowed and faded like ancient dreams. Aouli moved without moving, drawn forward not by gravity or force, but by intention. He was no longer drifting. He was traveling.
Elysia floated beside him, a silhouette of quiet light. Her presence was not physical in the way Aouli once understood form. She radiated a calm clarity, like moonlight over still water, each of her movements impossibly fluid, her shape blurring at the edges into the void itself.
"There's no up or down here," she said gently, sensing his hesitance as he tried to orient himself. "No north or south, no sky or soil. Here, direction is only a question of will."
"I don't know which way I will," Aouli said quietly.
Her soft laugh shimmered in the emptiness. "That's why you're not alone."
The silence between them wasn't empty. It throbbed with the residual pulse of Gaia's final breath—a rhythm that still echoed faintly inside Aouli's being. Each moment here, in this liminal space between stars, felt simultaneously like birth and remembrance. He sensed layers to his own presence he didn't understand—sensations that did not belong to him, yet surged through his consciousness like undertows: the crushing pressure of oceanic trenches, the slow breath of forest canopies, the fragile warmth of a child clutching a dying flower.
He was still tethered to Earth, though the planet was gone. That tether wasn't a chain—it was a memory too vast and alive to be erased.
"You said the multiverse," Aouli said suddenly, the word foreign in his mouth, thick with conceptual weight. "I don't know what that means. I barely know what this is."
Elysia nodded, never looking away from the path they were following—though there was no path, only stars.
"You've experienced only a single world," she replied. "A single thread in an infinite tapestry. But each thread, every universe, every reality—it exists side by side. Some so near they whisper into each other's dreams. Others so distant they are barely aware of existence itself."
Aouli tried to imagine it. An endless number of Earths? Endless Gaias? The thought was dizzying.
"Are they all dying too?" he asked, almost afraid of the answer.
"Some thrive," she said. "Some crumble. Some have never known life, while others teem with civilizations so ancient they've forgotten their own origins. Balance exists—but it is delicate. And in many places, it is failing."
She turned to him now, her eyes glowing with a quiet intensity. "That is where you are needed."
Aouli let those words settle. He wasn't sure what 'needed' meant in a cosmos this vast. Was he meant to save planets? Guide civilizations? Or simply learn?
"Why me?" he asked.
"Because you are not a god," Elysia said softly. "And you are not only a memory. You are something new—a consciousness born from grief, love, and the desperate yearning to continue. That makes you uniquely attuned to life's fragility. You understand loss, because it birthed you. You understand wonder, because you carry Earth's dreams. And most importantly—you still doubt. You still feel."
Aouli looked at his hands—shimmering outlines of fingers composed of flowing light, stardust and sorrow braided into being. He didn't feel powerful. He felt like a question that hadn't yet been asked.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he admitted.
Elysia smiled. "That is the only place any journey can begin from."
Ahead, the stars grew denser. They clustered in strange shapes—some geometric, others chaotic, swirling like cosmic eddies. And then, without warning, a tear appeared in the fabric of space, not with violence, but with elegance. It opened like the petals of a flower, unfolding one dimension into another, revealing a corridor of radiant color.
It pulsed gently, waiting.
"This is the first step," Elysia said. "You'll understand more, with each world you touch."
"What will I become?" Aouli asked, the question escaping before he could stop it.
Elysia didn't answer immediately. When she did, her voice was almost a whisper.
"That depends on the choices you make."
Aouli hesitated, then nodded. Together, they moved forward—into the blooming wound in space, toward the cosmic crossroads where fate, chance, and consequence danced forever in quiet orbit.