Living Untethered Novels & Stories

I didn’t know it yet, but that small action would set off a butterfly effect, changing my life in ways I couldn’t imagine, even if I lived a thousand lifetimes. I stepped outside and joined Rebecca. She looked up at me, a playful smile tugging at her lips. “Are you done?” I nodded. “Yes.” “So… what’s next, Captain?” I laughed, running a hand through my hair. “Two more things before we go back to the kids. First, we register the business. Then… we find two apartments for our families.” She raised an eyebrow, a little shocked. “So quickly?” I raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s too quick?”

I answered with painful honesty, desperate for a solution. “I think,” Nelly said thoughtfully after listening, “the spark in your marriage needs rekindling. Maybe you’re seeking… satisfaction… in the wrong place because it’s lacking at home.” Her diagnosis was blunt but rang with a painful truth. “First step: we go lingerie shopping on Monday. Let’s focus on saving your marriage from the inside.” I spent three more hours with her, talking and planning until a sense of clarity and purpose began to replace the chaotic guilt. I left her apartment feeling lighter, grateful for her steadfast presence in my life.

when James talked to her teachers, and the word fit us like the dress I made called Freedom, like it was always meant to be there even when we didn’t have the name for it yet, and every time she said it my chest got lighter because family isn’t blood, family is who stays when you’re hard to love. The “Untouchable” collection dropped and women sent videos of themselves wearing it to job interviews and court dates and first dates after divorce and saying “I feel like I can’t be broken in this,” and I watched every single one because that’s the payment I wanted, not money, not fame, but proof that my scars could become someone else’s shield.

You spat the words like it left a foul taste in your mouth. "Tethered— we were two halves, we are now one. Killing you would be killing myself, and so, you shall live." "On stranger tides, Drop anchor and pray, That your love returns, with Dawn's first rays..." I wish I had some grasp at the time of what an exceptional and rare gift it was to be tethered. If I'd have known what it truly meant to find the other half of one's soul, I would have begged you to run. To run with me as far as we could go, deep onto dry land and far from the sea. If only I'd known how unforgiving she would be... How cruel a mother could be to her children...

the outcome was always the same: nothing truly new could emerge. I looked outward one final time. At the aware patterns reconnecting through honest tension. At the fracture still lingering at the edges. At the endless uncertainty no one could fully escape. And for the first time. the uncertainty no longer felt like weakness. It felt like proof the system was still alive. Still unfinished. Still capable of becoming more than anything memory alone could preserve.

Interruptions increase by 11%. Vents compensate. But no one feels anchored. A system assistant writes, without instruction: “Coherence off. Rhythm ghosting. We’ve lost something. Or someone.” Eden is in an old stairwell. Sitting in silence. Just breathing. Unaware of what the world is doing to find her again. A drone breaks its route. Loops twice. Then hovers. And logs a message for no one: “She was not the protocol. She was the pulse. And the building’s beat

Hunting me. NO! The denial is pure instinct, a flare of terror brighter than the Gardener’s eyes. But my consciousness… it’s fraying. Splintering like old wood under an axe. I am the cliff crumbling. I am the roots screaming as they’re ripped from bedrock. I am the distant, icy laughter vibrating up from the deepest pit within me. The Unraveler. Seizing its moment. Coordinating the assault from its cell. Its chilling amusement is a counterpoint to the Gardener’s furious screeching. Let the anchor break. Let the chaos reign. Let me out.

They flickered awake in sterile hospital wards, in bustling school corridors, and in lonely, shadowed apartments. These were threads born of people who had never met in the physical world. People who would never know one another's names or histories. Yet somehow—miraculously—they were connected. They were not being controlled by an invasive digital pulse. They were not being forced into a pristine, algorithmic mold by a corporate monopoly. They were simply connected. The radical difference changed the very framework of reality. The Hunter noticed the shift immediately. The undulating, living darkness in the torn sky recoiled, its form compressing and twisting uneasily. For the very first tim

The air inside Elysium possessed a fundamentally different weight when you no longer had a tether leading back to the outside world. For the first time since I had crossed the threshold of the underground sanctuary, I was completely, unapologetically untethered from the vanilla reality above. The resignation letter I had left on Marcus’s cluttered desk was not just the end of my career in traditional journalism; it was the severing of my final, lingering safety net. I was no longer a spy, an observer, or a woman living a fractured, dual existence. I belonged to the night, to the heavy velvet shadows, and to the man whose ring I wore on a chain around my neck.

She felt the narrowing. The space where human unpredictability still lived— Getting smaller. But not gone. Not yet. And as long as even one moment remained— Unscripted. Uncaptured. Unmediated— There was still something left to defend. Even if it was only a fraction of a second.