There was no wind.
No ground.
No sky.
Only silence — vast, weightless, and waiting.
Aeon walked through it, though there was no direction. His steps left no sound. The world around him shimmered like smoke over still water, bending gently in the presence of thought.
This was the place between.
Not death.
Not dream.
Just threshold.
Behind him, the echoes of Amestris faded — Hohenheim's final light, Edward's resolve, Alphonse's hope. The Shadow's voice no longer whispered, but it had left its fingerprints in every corner of Aeon's soul.
He walked alone now, as always, but there was something different in his posture. Not lighter — only quieter.
He was beginning to remember the weight of what he had cast aside.
Shapes drifted past him.
Not physical objects, but emotional silhouettes.
A rocking chair in a field of ash.
A child's shoe, untied, floating in starlight.
A mirror cracked from corner to corner.
Every few steps, the space shimmered and changed.
Now he stood on a railway platform — but no train came.
Then a hotel corridor — endless and looping.
Then a flooded room, the ceiling just above his head.
Each setting flickered — not memories, not quite dreams, but constructs, built from fragments of past and fear.
"You've done well," said a voice to his left.
Aeon turned.
It was himself — or a version. This one wore the tattered robes of his first world, eyes still filled with naive kindness. The version before divinity. Before silence.
"Have I?" Aeon asked.
The other smiled faintly. "You've endured. That isn't the same."
Aeon nodded.
They walked together for a time.
The space around them began to fold.
Buildings tilted upward from the void — cities without gravity. A bridge curled overhead like a spine. Staircases twisted onto walls. Lights blinked behind windows with no floors.
"A dream?" Aeon asked.
"Not yet," his other self said. "But close."
The sound came slowly.
Music.
Four slow, rising notes.
A countdown.
Aeon paused.
"I've heard this," he said.
"Yes," his other replied. "It's been playing for a long time. You just didn't notice."
The air thickened.
A spinning top appeared on the invisible floor between them, spinning flawlessly. Its sound was almost deafening in the silence — a soft, defiant hum against eternity.
Aeon knelt beside it. "I know this world."
"You created it," the other said.
"No," Aeon said. "I copied it."
A pause.
"Because it felt familiar."
Memory surged.
A bed.
A woman asleep beside him.
His arms holding a small body, warm and safe.
Then — an explosion.
A building falling.
Gunfire and rubble.
Screaming.
And then — silence.
Aeon gasped.
The mirror of himself stepped back.
"You didn't lose her in a story," the other whispered. "You lost her in your world."
The structures around him cracked.
Floodwaters burst through one corridor.
A train plowed across the sky.
Fire swept the walls like a tide.
Aeon clutched his chest — not from pain, but from pressure. Emotion. Unprocessed. Burning.
"I severed it to survive," he said aloud. "I tore it out."
"You severed yourself," the other corrected. "And I'm still here."
From the chaos, a single doorway formed.
It pulsed.
A new threshold.
Aeon stood.
"I'm afraid," he said quietly.
"That means you're ready," his reflection replied.
As he stepped toward the door, the world calmed. The structures froze in place, their chaos arrested — not gone, but waiting.
Aeon looked back once.
"You'll come with me?"
The other shook his head. "I am you. But only part of you. You'll find the rest — when you're ready."
Aeon nodded.
And walked through the door.
He fell.
Not physically — but through layers.
City.
Rain.
A hallway.
A memory.
Another city.
Each one flashed past like peeling pages.
And then—
He landed.
He stood in an alley slick with rain, streetlights buzzing above. The skyline twisted, impossible. Cars parked in vertical angles. Shadows shifted where they shouldn't.
A man in a grey coat walked by and never looked up.
Somewhere in the distance, a melody played again.
Four notes.
And the dream began.