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The light went out — not suddenly, but as if the world itself took a slow, shuddering breath before forgetting how to exhale.When sight returned, it came fractured — flashes of silver and black, fire and mirror, faces illuminated by the glow of something that was no longer the sun.Kael was the first to move. His voice, hoarse but commanding, broke through the stunned silence.“Sound the call! Now!”The old horn — once used only to summon the council during war — rose from the rubble, its tone warped and mournful as it rolled across the mountains. The sound trembled as though even the air resisted its purpose, echoing through both worlds at once.Kairis stumbled to her knees beside the ruined sigil, her hands slick with blood and light. “It’s tearing faster than I can bind it,” she rasped. “The Veil isn’t a wall anymore. It’s a wound.”She thrust her palms into the earth, whispering words too old for the human tongue. Blue light spidered out across the broken floor, racing toward the
The Vale had always been a place of echoes — a bowl of wind and stone where sound returned to you changed.Now, it didn’t echo at all.It breathed.The survivors gathered among the broken pillars, the once-hallowed heart of the council now torn by light that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t sunrise yet, but dawn seemed to bleed through cracks in the sky. The air shimmered as though two different mornings were fighting for the same horizon.Kael stood on the edge of the ruins, his armor blackened by ash. “It’s shifting again,” he said under his breath, watching the cracks of light crawl across the stones.Beside him, Kairis pressed her palm to the earth, murmuring a prayer that refused to answer. “Not shifting,” she said. “Splitting. The Vale’s heart isn’t just wounded. It’s waking.”Across the courtyard, remnants of Draven’s loyalists and Rhovan’s disbanded faction circled each other with the wary quiet of wolves after a kill. No one dared to raise their voice. Every sound seemed to draw th
The lake was not supposed to be awake.It had always been still — an obsidian stretch beneath the Vale’s scarred sky, reflecting what the world chose to show it. But now, the surface rippled like breathing glass, the faint shimmer of moonlight bent at strange, wrong angles, as if two different heavens were fighting for the same sky.Elaria’s boots sank into the wet earth. Her reflection followed, hesitant, fractured into a dozen mirrored shards.“Draven?” she whispered, her voice carried softly by the fog. The air around her shivered — as if even the sound of his name disturbed the fragile fabric of what remained.No answer. Only the pulse — that deep, rhythmic echo she had begun to feel beneath her own skin since the explosion. It beat like a heart that wasn’t hers.She knelt, and the water moved toward her.Not a wave. A reach.For a fleeting instant she saw herself — not as she was, but as the lake remembered her: silver eyes like open wounds of moonlight, hair flowing as if caught
The world came back to her as light—searing, blinding, wrong.Elaria gasped against the weight crushing her chest, her lungs clawing for air thick with dust. The ruins around her had been reduced to nothing but scorched bones of marble and molten glass. The temple’s heart—the place where she had stood face to face with him—was now a smoking crater.Him.Draven.Her pulse stuttered as memory cut through the haze: that voice, that impossible golden light threading through his veins, and the words that didn’t sound like his. Draven is remembering.Lightning forked across the gray sky. The Vale shuddered, trembling down to its roots. She pushed herself upright, coughing, blood slicking her palms.All around her lay bodies—some breathing, some not. Healers crawled through the wreckage, their chants breaking, terrified. Kairis’s voice was a distant echo, shouting orders she could barely process. The air itself was cracked, shimmering where the rift had once been sealed.And in the center of
Elaria woke to silence that wasn’t silent at all.The ruins breathed. The very stones of the Vale pulsed with a low vibration, a heartbeat that wasn’t human. Ash hung in the air like drifting snow; when she inhaled, it tasted of iron and old prayers. The world had gone pale, as if every color had been scraped away in the night.For a moment she didn’t remember how she’d fallen.Only the echo of Draven’s hand tearing free from hers, the light swallowing him whole, and the whisper that had split the air: You’ve freed her.Her own blood burned under her skin now, brighter than any wound. The mark at her wrist—the bond they’d shared—had turned to a thin thread of gold light that pulsed like a vein, fading toward the horizon where the rift had been.“Draven.”The word left her as a breath and a vow.She pushed herself upright, muscles trembling, shards of mirrored glass clinging to her palms. Around her the Vale had collapsed into a labyrinth of half-melted walls and floating fragment
The world had folded in on itself.Draven came to in silence—a kind that felt alive, thick with a pulse that was not his own. The air shimmered like glass on the verge of cracking. When he lifted his head, the ground beneath him rippled as if made of mercury, and the horizon bled light from unseen wounds.He was back in the Vale—or something wearing its skin.The mountains were reversed, peaks plunging into the heavens like inverted spears. The stars burned below his feet instead of above, scattered across the reflective plane like shards of memory. His breath fogged in front of him, silver not white, and his reflection in the mirrored ground looked back not as he was—but as he could have been. A darker thing. Older. Hungrier.“Elaria…”Her name was the first thing that came to his lips. But here, even his voice sounded wrong—like an echo speaking before he did.He turned.Every direction looked the same: endless sky beneath, endless dark above. Only the faint shimmer of movement led








