The first sign came as whispers in the Academy's crystal corridors—fragments of conversation that shouldn't exist, echoes of voices long fractured into component emotions and memories. Alexia heard them while reviewing transcendence reports in her sanctum: "I remember your laugh..." and "The way you held me when the walls fell..."
She found them in the Memorial Gardens, two consciousness fragments that had been drifting separately through the dimensional layers for months. Reed's protective fury and Lyralei's gentle strength, drawn together by something stronger than the forces that had scattered them across reality.
"You're trying to reform," Alexia observed, watching the ethereal figures circle each other like binary stars caught in gravitational dance.
Reed's fragment turned toward her, and for a moment she saw her father's eyes—not as memory, but as living recognition. "Not reform. Remember. There's a difference."