Aren Vale dreamed of falling.
Not the endless kind—the dramatic plunge into darkness people talked about after nightmares—but the short, violent drop where your body realizes what's happening before your mind can lie to you.
He woke with a sharp inhale, fingers digging into the thin mattress, heart hammering like it was trying to escape consequences.
For a moment, he didn't know where he was.
The ceiling above him was low and cracked, patched with resin that glowed faintly blue. A repurposed maintenance room beneath the sports complex. Temporary housing for people who didn't quite fit anywhere else.
Then memory came rushing back.
The distortion.
The silence cracking.
The way the world had hesitated when he stepped forward.
Aren squeezed his eyes shut.
"Don't think about it," he muttered to himself.
Thinking about it made his skin itch, like something was crawling just beneath the surface, testing for weaknesses.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat there, elbows on knees, breathing until his pulse slowed. His body ached in a way he recognized—not injury, not exhaustion, but the deep soreness of something strained past what it was meant to do.
He'd felt that before.
Not from powers.
From lifting wreckage with bad leverage. From staying awake too long during disaster rotations. From pushing himself because no one else was there yet.
The room was quiet except for distant hums and voices filtering through concrete. Outside, the world was learning how to exist again. Inside, Aren tried to remember how to be a person.
A knock sounded at the door.
"Go away," he said automatically.
The door opened anyway.
Lysa Kade leaned against the frame, arms crossed, eyes sharp as ever. She held two cups that steamed faintly.
"You're alive," she said. "That's inconvenient. I lost a bet."
Aren snorted despite himself. "You bet on me dying?"
"I bet on you passing out for longer," she corrected, stepping inside. "Drink. It's not poison. Probably."
He took the cup. The smell was bitter and herbal, unfamiliar but grounding.
"Thanks," he said quietly.
She watched him for a moment, then sat on the edge of the opposite bed. "You scared them."
"I didn't mean to," Aren said.
"That's worse."
He frowned. "How?"
"People understand intention," Lysa replied. "They don't understand accidents that change the rules."
Aren stared into the liquid, watching faint ripples fade. "I didn't change anything. I just… stepped in."
She laughed softly. Not unkindly, but not amused either. "That's what scares them."
They fell into silence again.
After a while, Aren spoke. "They looked at me like I'd done something wrong."
"You did," Lysa said.
He looked up sharply.
"You interfered with a Correction," she continued. "That's the system's way of saying this story doesn't work. You don't stop those."
"Someone was going to disappear," Aren said. His voice was steady, but his hands trembled slightly around the cup. "Just… erased."
"Yes."
"And that's acceptable now?"
Lysa held his gaze. "It's normal."
Aren looked away.
Normal.
He thought of the child from the bus. Of the way her parents had clutched her like the world was ending all over again.
Normal was a word people used when they were tired of caring.
"I can't do that," he said quietly.
"I know," Lysa replied. "That's why I came."
—
Word spread fast.
By midday, Aren could feel it in the way conversations stopped when he entered a room. In the way Executors watched him a second longer than necessary. In the way powered individuals gave him space—not respect, not fear, but something closer to uncertainty.
He helped where he could.
Carried supplies. Cleared debris. Sat with people whose abilities had gone wrong and listened to them talk about the lives they'd lost before the sky cracked open.
No interface guided him. No glowing prompts rewarded him.
But when things broke—when a powered healer hesitated, or a barrier flickered—Aren was there, steady hands and calm voice grounding people back into themselves.
He didn't fix the world.
He fixed moments.
And people noticed.
A man with flickering flame-wreathed arms approached him near the ration lines. His fire sputtered erratically, burning too hot one moment, barely warm the next.
"You're the one," the man said.
Aren blinked. "The one what?"
"The one who stopped it," he said, gesturing vaguely upward. "The thing."
"I didn't stop it," Aren replied. "I slowed it down."
The man swallowed. "Can you… do that again? I can't control this. They say if it destabilizes, I'll trigger another—"
Aren didn't let him finish. He stepped closer, ignoring the heat licking at his sleeves.
"Breathe," he said. "Don't fight it. Just… let it exist."
"That's not how—"
"Trust me," Aren said.
The flames steadied, dimming into a controlled glow.
The man stared at his hands, awe and relief mixing on his face. "How did you—?"
Aren stepped back. "I didn't."
That was the truth.
He didn't control powers.
He controlled himself.
And sometimes, that was enough.
—
That night, Lysa brought him somewhere new.
They moved through back corridors and sealed-off stairwells until the noise of the relief center faded into a dull echo. At last, they emerged into a long, low room filled with old terminals and paper records—an archive that had somehow survived the Redaction.
"Not many people know about this place," Lysa said. "The Testament doesn't like records it didn't authorize."
Aren ran his fingers over a dusty console. "Why show me?"
"Because you're going to ask questions," she said. "And I'd rather you ask them somewhere answers still exist."
She activated a projector. Images flickered to life—maps, symbols, timelines marked with events eerily similar to the First Redaction.
"This has happened before," Aren realized.
"Not exactly like this," Lysa said. "But close enough."
She pulled up a file. Most of the text was corrupted, but one phrase repeated again and again.
NULL REFERENCE DETECTED
"That's me," Aren said.
"Yes."
He felt something twist in his chest. "How many times?"
Lysa hesitated. "Enough to know it never ends quietly."
Aren leaned back against a table, processing that. "So what happens to people like me?"
"Usually?" she said softly. "They disappear. Or they're forced into a role that breaks them."
"And you?"
She met his eyes. "I refused."
"What did that cost you?"
Lysa smiled without humor. "Everything I was supposed to become."
Aren nodded slowly. "I don't want power," he said. "I just don't want the world deciding who deserves to exist."
"That," Lysa said, "is a dangerous thing to want."
He thought of the pressure he'd felt when he stepped into the distortion. Of the way the silence had cracked.
"Good," Aren replied.
—
Later, alone again, Aren sat by a narrow window overlooking the fractured city.
Lights glimmered in strange patterns now, constellations rearranged by human intent and system logic. Somewhere out there, people were becoming heroes, villains, legends.
He was becoming… something else.
Aren pressed his palm to the glass.
"What do you want from me?" he whispered—not to the sky, but to the absence behind it.
No answer came.
But for the first time, the silence felt different.
Not dismissive.
Attentive.
Aren exhaled slowly.
He didn't have a story.
No title.
No destiny.
But he had choices.
And tomorrow, the world would test them.
Whether it wanted to or not.