Salem’s breath hitched the moment he stepped through the shimmering veil separating him from the fractured world he once thought he knew. The air around him crackled with static, thick and heavy—like the buzzing before a storm, but mixed with the taste of old paper and forgotten memories. Fragments of reality drifted aimlessly, like shattered glass suspended in endless twilight, each shard reflecting a version of time twisted or lost.
He blinked against the dizzying chaos swirling before his eyes. One shard showed a younger Salem laughing with strangers whose faces blurred and warped, another revealed a crumbling city swallowed by darkness, its walls crawling with twisting shadows that seemed to pulse with a life of their own. The scenes played out like memories he couldn’t claim, histori
