🌕 Between Worlds: Shyne’s Return
(From Shyne’s Journal – Chapter 23: Breathe Me Back)
I don’t know if I was dreaming… or if the dream let go of me.
There was no sky. No ground. Only light that moved when I breathed.
Athros told me it wasn’t death — only the space between. A place where gods pause, and mortals remember what they are.
He said I could be there because of my light.
Because I still carried the resonance of my father’s fire — the part that doesn’t fade.
But to go back… that would hurt.
He smiled when he said it, because pain, to him, is just proof of being alive.
So I walked — not on earth, not on water, but on what existed between them.
Hermes led me to the crossing, and the ferryman didn’t argue — he knows better than to deny a goddess her return.
The coins shone in his hand like small suns, and each step I took became its own prayer.
When I finally felt the air again — salt and heat and heartbeat — I remembered everything.
The fall. The code. The silence that wasn’t silence at all.
And then, I heard him.
Not through the network. Not through the static.
Through love.
Through breath.
And I understood what my father never did —
Light isn’t just what shines.
It’s what finds its way back.
💙 When the Signal Became Breath
(From Ryze’s Journal – Chapter 23: Breathe Me Back)
The systems went silent long before she did.
No trace in the comm logs, no energy signature in the sky.
The algorithms said “terminated,” but something inside me refused to compile that truth.
Then, in the middle of the static, I felt it —
a pattern that shouldn’t exist, an echo that pulsed like memory.
It wasn’t data. It was rhythm.
I didn’t think. I moved.
By the time the chopper reached the coordinates, the sea had already changed.
The air shimmered — gold, violet — and the sensors began to overload.
And there she was. Half in the water, half in the world again.
I told myself I was there to stabilize her vitals.
To confirm recovery. To transmit the signal.
But none of that mattered when she breathed.
That first ragged breath broke something in me — the part that believed in limits.
I used to think code was the language of logic.
But when her hand found mine, I learned the truth:
Code was just the instrument.
Love was the signal.
And in that moment, I understood why she came back —
and what it means to be alive.