LOGINThere was no sound. No air. No breath. Then, pain. Searing, electric pain ripped through her chest as Sera’s body convulsed on the ground.Her lungs dragged in fire instead of oxygen. Her eyes snapped open to a sky that burned red. For a heartbeat, she didn’t know where she was.Then memory slammed into her, Dominion’s laughter, Liora’s voice, the collapse of her mindscape. She pushed herself up, trembling, her skin still glowing faintly with the silver light she had summoned within.The glow faded fast, like dying embers. Her world had changed. The Moon Citadel, the heart of her realm, was gone.What remained was ash and ruin. The marble towers that once reached for the heavens now lay broken, twisted, half-swallowed by a spreading black substance that pulsed like living tar.The banners of her crest, the crescent and flamehung tattered, half-burned, their symbols smudged beyond recognition. And the sky… The sky was wrong. The moon was cracked.Not shattered, cracked, as if something
There was no impact. No sensation of falling, only stretching, like every cell in Jason’s body was being pulled into a thread and woven through fire.He gasped, but his lungs filled with light instead of air. Each breath carried a sound: fragments of Aria’s voice whispering his name in a dozen tones, overlapping until meaning dissolved. Don’t fight the thread… let it choose you.He stumbled forward. The ground was translucent, veins of color pulsing beneath his feet. Above, an ocean of mirrored stars swirled slowly, each reflection showing a different scene: Aria laughing on a rooftop, Aria dissolving into ash, Aria standing over his own corpse.He reached toward one, the rooftop version, and the star flared, burning his fingertips. The vision screamed, “Not this one!” and vanished.Every light recoiled. Jason realized the stars weren’t memories; they were possibilities. And the gate wanted him to choose.He took another breath and nearly collapsed. The air here was too heavy, full of
There was no ground, no sky, only the endless descent. Jason plunged through a corridor of light and shadow, every breath a knife of air that wasn’t air.The void wasn’t empty; it moved, coiling around him like smoke that remembered shapes. Each twist of color formed a memory: Aria laughing beneath the glass trees, Aria dying, Aria whispering don’t look.Every image shattered as he passed through it. You made us, whispered the wind. Now watch what we become.He tried to reach for one of the fragments, her hand, her smile, her voice, but his fingers passed through. When he looked at his hand, it was fading, stretching into a thousand ghost-limbs, each reaching toward a different reflection.Gravity became suggestion; down lost meaning. The fall turned sideways, then inward. He screamed once, and the sound came back as a thousand different tones of his own voice, echoing through every reality he’d touched.Somewhere far below, or above, something hummed. The rhythm felt like a heartbeat
The dawn came quietly. No thunder. No fire. No gods tearing the sky apart. Just the slow, golden spill of light stretching across a world reborn.Adrien watched it from the hilltop, his hands buried in the dew-damp grass. The silence was almost unbearable. Too peaceful. Too real.He kept waiting for the sky to crack open, for the familiar hum of magic to return. But it didn’t. The world breathed like a newborn, soft, uncertain, alive.The girl sat beside him, her knees pulled to her chest, humming a tune that made the air shimmer faintly. Each note seemed to make the sunlight brighter.He turned toward her. “You’ve been doing that since the sun came up. What song is it?”She tilted her head. “I don’t know. It just feels right.”Her voice was gentle, human, but something behind her eyes glowed with impossible depth. Adrien forced a smile. “You said you don’t know who you are. Do you… remember anything?”She plucked a blade of grass and twirled it between her fingers. “Sometimes I dream
Wind whispered through the forest. For the first time in what felt like centuries, Adrien heard real wind, soft, cool, threaded with the scent of pine and wet soil.He inhaled sharply, the air grounding him, reminding him he was alive. But the comfort lasted only a heartbeat. Because standing at the edge of the clearing was Liora.Barefoot. Silent. Watching him. “Liora…” His voice cracked. “You’re alive.”She tilted her head, eyes glimmering, one silver, one red. “Am I?”He stood slowly, every muscle trembling. “What do you remember?”Her lips curved into something halfway between a smile and a wound. “I remember falling. I remember Mother screaming my name. And I remember her hand pushing me back into the light.”Adrien’s pulse thundered. “She saved you.”“She thought she did,” Liora murmured. She stepped closer, each movement deliberate, almost graceful. The shadows bent around her feet, while moonlight clung to her skin like devotion. “But when she gave you her Dream… she left me h
The white void pulsed. Adrien gasped, dragging in a breath that burned like ice. The air shimmered around him, no ground, no sky, just endless light.Yet beneath the brilliance, he could still feel the tremor of two heartbeats, one steady and pure, one jagged and venomous. He turned, and there she was.Sera floated in the center of the void, suspended between two opposing storms, silver flame and crimson fire. Her body twisted, caught in the pull of both forces.Half her face glowed with gentle light, the other darkened with shadow that crawled like ink beneath her skin. Liora knelt a few feet away, clutching her chest, her expression stricken. “It’s starting,” she whispered.Adrien stumbled toward them. “What’s happening?”“She’s dividing,” Liora said. “The Mother and Dominion, they can’t exist in one vessel. The balance is breaking.”“Then how do we stop it?”Liora shook her head. “You can’t stop gods. You can only survive them.”Sera’s voice cut through the void, two voices, layere







