The new world was quiet.
Not empty.
Balanced.
Ren Hadrien and Kaela walked across lands untouched by cities or scars. Hills rolled like breaths. Rivers moved like memory. Trees swayed without wind, their leaves humming faintly in the frequencies of thought.
Here, the anomaly wasn't a tear or a gate.
It was woven into the soil.
Kaela called it "the Veil."
She felt it with every step. It didn't whisper anymore—it listened. And when she dreamed, the world responded.
"Sometimes I see them," she said one morning, fingers brushing the petals of a flower that hadn't bloomed until she knelt. "The others. People from different worlds. They're afraid."
"Of the anomaly?" Ren asked.
"No. Of what they've lost."
Days passed in spirals.
Ren taught her how to listen deeper.
How to feel the difference between echo and origin.
How to breathe with a land that remembers.
But it was Kaela who showed him something new—something even the Council hadn't understood.
"They're calling," she whispered one night, eyes wide open under the stars. "Not just to this place… but to us."
Ren frowned. "Who?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she closed her eyes.
And sang.
It wasn't a melody.
It was resonance.
A note made of longing.
Of recognition.
It passed through stone and sky.
And far beyond.
Elsewhere, in a world where time ran backward and oceans floated above deserts, a young girl painting spirals into the sand looked up and heard it.
In a reality made of machines, where consciousness flickered through networks, a synthetic intelligence paused mid-calculation. Its systems synced for a fraction of a second. Then again. Then again. A rhythm.
Across dozens of folds in existence, the same note echoed.
The Call.
And from those echoes, answers began to rise.
A flicker of movement in forgotten forests.
A glint of light on the edge of synthetic suns.
A single word etched into crystal, appearing simultaneously in five timelines:
"Here."
Kaela opened her eyes.
Her skin glowed softly, not with power—but with presence. The resonance she had sent had not dispersed. It had returned—not as one signal, but as many.
"They heard us," she whispered.
Ren sat beside her, watching the stars blink like distant eyes.
"All of them?"
"Not all," she said, head tilted. "Only those who still dream."
He felt it then too—faint but unmistakable.
The anomaly was no longer a voice waiting to be understood.
It had become a language others were starting to remember.
The first bridges had been built in silence.
Now, others would walk them.
The sky shifted slightly.
A rift—not a rupture—bloomed above the horizon. It pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat in the sky. Through it, not chaos, but light filtered.
Within that light, shapes moved.
Not hostile.
Not whole.
Seeking.
Ren stood, Kaela beside him.
"They're coming," he said.
Kaela nodded. "Some lost. Some wounded. Some ready."
"What do we do?"
She turned to him, smiling.
"We answer."
The Veil shimmered gently.
Welcoming.
And as the first of the others began to arrive, drawn by the Call that was never forced, never commanded, but simply felt…
…Ren Hadrien closed his eyes.
And listened.