Mag-log inThe voice that came from Kael’s mouth was not his.It carried his cadence—his breath, his throat, the familiar scrape of sound that had once said her name like a promise—but it was hollowed out, layered with something older and sharper beneath it, like a blade wrapped in silk.“I found a way in.”Aria’s scream tore through the Null.She shoved herself backward, scrambling across the glass-dark floor, dragging Kael with her before she even realized what she was doing. Her hands shook violently as she pressed them to his chest, to the glowing sigil cracked open across his ribs.“No,” she whispered. “No—no—no—”Kael’s body convulsed.His spine arched, claws scraping grooves into the surface beneath him as silver fire and shadow warred across his skin. His eyes—his eyes—flickered between molten gold and something else entirely. Something cold. Something watching her from behind them.Lyris smiled.Not with Kael’s mouth.With the way the shadows bent around his body.With the way the Null
—the moment the darkness closes around her—There is no air.No light.No sense of direction.Only motion.Aria is dragged through the abyss like a ragged thread pulled through a needle made of void. Her screams are swallowed whole, devoured before they even leave her lips. Her body twists, fractures, reassembles. Time breaks apart. Her heartbeat becomes a flicker, then a drum, then a silence that scares her more than anything.Until—Something touches her.Not a hand.Not a creature.A presence.Ancient.Heavy.Recognizing her.Finally, it whispers through her skull. The lost one returns.Aria thrashes. “Let me GO!”But her voice doesn’t echo.It doesn’t exist here.Nothing does.Except him.Except it.The first shadow.The progenitor of gods.The thing that slumbers beneath all creation.You belong to me, the voice murmurs. You are my blood, my legacy, my unfinished will.“I am NOT yours!”You are, it replies calmly, because every realm that collapses, collapses for you.A violent s
There is no falling.There is no rising.There is only unmaking.Her body disintegrates into streaks of light and shadow, her bones unraveling into threads of pure magic, her heartbeat stretching into an echo that does not belong to any one realm. She tries to scream, but her voice scatters into the storm with the rest of her.For one endless, horrifying moment, Aria exists everywhere and nowhere.She feels Kael—far away, spiraling downward toward something that smells like blood and prophecy.She feels Auren’s stolen face—the god behind it twisting through the vortex like a snake made of night.She feels Lyris, burning like a moon about to shatter.She feels… herself.Or what’s left of her.The rupture devours her whole.And then—Impact.Aria slams into a surface so violently her bones re-form on the spot, knitting themselves back together in a burst of fire. Her lungs seize, then fill with cold, metallic air. She coughs, choking on a sound that does not belong to her—A whisper.Yo
The realm does not simply shudder.It buckles—like a living thing punched through the spine.Aria hears the crack behind her, feels it strike her nerves like lightning, and even though Kael had shouted—Don’t look back, Aria, don’t look at him, don’t—She turns anyway.And that is her undoing.Because standing in the fracture between all realms—between time, breath, sanity—is him.Auren.And not Auren.The god wearing him like a hand inside a glove.His eyes are no longer gold. They’re eclipses—black swallowing light, hunger swallowing everything else.A dreadful smile curls his mouth as though he’s been waiting for her gaze… waiting for the moment she met his eyes so he could take something from her.And something is taken.Aria staggers as a chunk of her strength—her soul—yanks sideways, pulled toward him by some invisible thread. Her breath catches, not in fear, but in recognition. The god wearing Auren’s face leans forward slightly, head cocked like he’s tasting the moment.“Mine,”
I didn’t move.I didn’t breathe.I couldn’t.Because the figure standing over me—the one whose shadow stretched long across the ruined earth,the one who had spoken my name like a secret they’d been waiting years to reclaim—was someone I had buried long before I ever knew what it meant to lose anything.My voice scraped out of me.“…No. You’re dead.”The figure knelt slowly, and the movement was so familiar it hurt.A soft smile.Warm eyes.A face I’d memorized in childhood because it was the first kind one I’d ever known.“Not anymore,” he murmured.“Not to you.”I shook my head violently, stumbling backward on trembling arms.“Lyris.”The name cut like broken glass.“You can’t be here— you died the night the pack burned. I saw— I SAW—”He reached for me.His fingers were warm.Too warm.“Aria,” he whispered, “I never left you. I’ve been waiting. Trapped. Held between threads, caught in the tear that formed the night you were born.”My heart stopped.“The night… I was born?”Lyris’
There was no sky.No ground.No air.No breath.And yet Aria existed.Suspended in a space that wasn’t space at all—weightless, bodiless, half-formed and half-remembered.A soul held together only by stubborn will.Her first thought was Kael.Her second was Auren.Her third was—Where am I?A whisper rippled through the void.Where all beginnings end.Aria’s eyes flickered open—and immediately she wished they hadn’t.Because she wasn’t surrounded by darkness.She was surrounded by threads.Endless shimmering threads, stretching in all directions—some glowing faintly, others pulsing violently—all tangled, all alive.Each one whispered fragments of voices.Each one looked like a timeline.A fate.A life.She drifted among them, and the nearest thread brushed her skin.A memory struck her like lightning—Kael’s first shift at fourteen, bloody and terrified.Auren’s birth, a star descending into a cradle.Her own mother whispering her name the moment she was born.Her first breath.He







