There was no door.
Only a ripple.
A shimmer across the fabric of reality that trembled like a cracked pane of glass. When Darius stepped through it, the world behind him dimmed, and silence devoured the sound of his dominion's war cries, the tremors of collapsing divinity, and even the beat of his own heart.
He had entered the Mirrored Archive.
The sky here was not a sky—it was a lattice of infinite code, flowing like starlight across translucent heavens. Each strand shimmered with potential timelines, forgotten stories, and aborted realities. Books without spines floated like leaves through an invisible current. Time looped, branched, reversed. Space was an abstract notion. Existence here was determined by memory, not mass.
And standing at its center—
A man. Or a being that wore a man's shape.
