LOGINThe Gate did not shut gently.It resisted.Light folded inward like a wound trying to remember how to bleed, the corridor of brilliance convulsing as if reality itself had reached for the closing seam and hesitated—uncertain whether to obey.Elaria stood at the center of that hesitation.The hollow screamed around her—not with sound, but with pressure, with the sensation of too many endings colliding at once. The threads of light that once drifted lazily through the space now whipped and snarled, wrapping around her arms, her throat, her ribs, as if the place beneath the Vale had finally decided to hold on.The figure wearing Draven’s face stepped fully through the裂, the impossible tear yawning wider to admit him.He did not stumble.He did not strain.He walked as if the Gate belonged to him.“Don’t,” Elaria said, the word tearing itself out of her chest raw and useless. “You don’t get to wear him.”The thing smiled.It was a beautiful smile. That was the worst of it.Draven’s mouth
Elaria did not fall.She arrived.The distinction mattered in a way her body understood before her mind could articulate it. There was no sensation of descent—no tearing rush of wind, no lurch of weight, no scream dragged loose from her throat. One moment the rupture had swallowed her whole, light and noise and annihilation collapsing inward—and the next, she was standing.Upright. Whole. Breathing.As if she had always been here.The ground beneath her feet was not solid in the way stone or earth was solid. It did not resist her weight; it accepted it. It existed because it remembered existing. A certainty rather than a substance. When she shifted, it did not crumble or echo—it responded, adjusting itself to the idea of her presence.She looked down.Beneath a thin sheen like frozen breath trapped under glass, she saw layers. Countless layers. Worlds compressed together like pages pressed in an ancient book—some burned at the edges, some whole, some stained with colors she did not h
The world did not stop falling.It simply chose a direction and dragged Elaria with it.The hands that caught her were not gentle—they were precise, as if they knew exactly which part of her would shatter first if held too hard. She slammed into a chest that felt like stone wrapped in skin, breath knocked from her lungs, vision strobing with white and black and something else—something she had no mortal word for.She wasn’t standing.She was suspended.Held in place by a force older than gravity, older than breath, older than every cycle the Vale had ever survived.The being who held her lowered its face to hers.Her heart stuttered against the bright ache inside her ribs.Because the face was familiar.And not.It wore no borrowed shape like the false-Kael from the rupture’s reflection.This one had no human softness, no illusion of mortality. Its skin shimmered like obsidian holding light. Its eyes were deep wells of fractured memory, each flicker showing pieces of existence—meteors
There was no impact.No fall.No sensation of descent at all.Elaria expected ground—glass—or the open maw of the rupture swallowing her whole. Instead, the world inverted, folding not downward but inward, as though she had been pulled through the skin of reality into the muscle beneath it.Hands caught her.Not Kael’s. Not Draven’s. Not any version of them.These hands were colder—yet burning—with a heat that didn’t touch the flesh but went straight to the marrow. Their grip held no gentleness, only certainty, like they had been waiting for her weight for a very long time.A voice spoke—but it didn’t move air.It moved memory.I have you.Her eyes opened.Not to sky. Not to glass. Not to the collapsing world she’d left behind.But to a chamber that wasn’t a chamber.It had no walls, yet she felt enclosed. It had no ceiling, yet something pressed low over her form. It had no floor, yet something held her suspended as though the concept of gravity had been replaced with intention.And
The world did not fall apart.It peeled.Slowly at first—like paint blistering under too much sun—then violently, as if the air itself were shedding a skin it had worn for far too long. Layer after layer sloughed away, each membrane revealing another trembling sheet of reality beneath it. The sound wasn’t a sound at all but a pressure, a bone-deep groan, like a serpent stretching after centuries of confinement.Elaria felt it before she saw it.The air behind her shifted backward, recoiling like a living thing. The horizon trembled, bowing inward as though pulled by an invisible hook. The threads of existence—threads she had once used, woven, manipulated—twisted like a loom being ripped apart from the inside.Her lungs locked.She didn’t scream.She couldn’t.Her throat held no breath—only light—and even that light wasn’t hers. It pulsed through her like a foreign river, searing down every vein with the brightness of a dying star. It was borrowed. It was stolen. It had been forced int
The world did not return gently.It slammed back around her like a door torn off its hinges, light snapping into bone, breath into fire, memory into a blade. Elaria reeled—no ground beneath her, no sky above her—just the aftershock of the last thing she’d seen:Kael’s hand slipping from hers.Draven’s voice splitting into two.Rhovan’s shadow smiling like someone who’d already written the ending.And then—The world fractured.Now she was inside the crack.Not falling.Not floating.Unhappening.The air tasted like a memory burned too early. Her skin sparked, rewriting itself in desperate loops—her veins glowing, dimming, glowing again, unable to decide which version of her was allowed to exist.“—laria.”The voice curled around her name like a hand catching a breaking glass.She flinched. The sound hurt. Too real.“Elaria. Look at me.”She didn’t trust the voice at first. Too many things in the shattered world wore the voices of those she loved. Too many lies knew how to sound like h







