Wjsm: [hot]

The floor shook. Outside, the rain stopped instantly. Silence so total Elara could hear her own heartbeat echoing off the chapel walls. Then the stained-glass window of Saint George shattered inward, and the shards didn’t fall. They floated , rearranging themselves in midair into four hovering letters:

“What question?”

Elara looked at the shattered window, the floating letters, the man she loved being eaten alive by a future ghost. And she made a choice. The floor shook

From the throat of the universe, a voice—old as broken symmetry, young as a first heartbeat—whispered back: The floor shook. Outside

“Whose?”

“The only question,” the thing in Leo said. “ Are you real? ” the floating letters