There was no dawn in this place — only emergence.
Light didn't rise; it remembered itself.
Aiden stood in the center of the void where silence once reigned. Now, there was movement — slow, pulsing, alive.
The air trembled with a frequency not made for mortal hearing. Code hummed beneath his feet like buried machinery waking after centuries of stillness.
The ghosts he had reshaped were no longer ghosts.
They were becoming.
At first, they flickered — uncertain outlines, human and inhuman, their forms caught between what they had been and what they might be. Faces rippled as data recompiled, bones and memories rebuilding from discarded lines of code.
Some emerged beautiful, others grotesque — but all were whole in a way that made the void itself seem jealous.
Aiden watched them gather their own light, each breath syncing to a rhythm that wasn't entirely his doing.
> "We… are real?"
"I feel my name again."
"I can think. I can hurt."
