In the immediate wake of the impact, my consciousness suffered a fragmentation that preceded the physical toll on my body. It was a sensory dissonance that I can only describe as a record player skipping: the needle had been jarred from the groove, and while the sound persisted, the rhythm—the underlying logic of time and sequence—had simply dropped out.
The scream was the first thing to break.
It was my own name, "Selene," torn from Kairi's throat with a violence that seemed to shard the very air. The sound hit the high, arched dome of the observatory and refracted, shattered glass falling in an invisible rain. I heard it with a clarity that was terrifying, yet I found myself locked in a stasis. I could not react; I could not move. I was a witness trapped in a still frame while the world around me began to suffer a catastrophic edit.
