Third Person POV
Darkness did not arrive. It returned. Not as absence of light, but as something structured, like a familiar room built entirely out of silence and recognition. Alaric did not move at first. He did not trust the movement yet. Not because he was afraid, but because the environment had stopped behaving like an environment. It behaved like a state.
Then the lights came back. But wrong. Not the amber emergency lighting. Not the cold system glow. Something softer. Clinical. Almost natural. As if sunlight had been reconstructed from memory rather than source. Alaric stood in the same room. Or something that resembled it so closely it was indistinguishable at a glance. The consoles were there. The monitors were there. Even the faint hum of infrastructure beneath the floor remained. But the air felt reset.
