LOGINThe earth did not finish opening.It listened.The chasm widened inch by inch, stone grinding against stone with a sound like teeth worrying bone. Heat breathed up from below—not fire, not lava, but something older. Damp. Mineral. Alive.I felt it recognize me again.Not with awe.With memory.My knees weakened. Kael’s grip tightened, anchoring me as the glow beneath the ruins intensified, painting the broken pillars in sickly gold.“This wasn’t supposed to exist anymore,” he said through clenched teeth.“It never stopped existing,” I replied. My voice sounded distant to my own ears. “We only sealed what was visible.”The pulse from below synced fully with my heart now. Not forcing. Not hijacking.Inviting.A whisper brushed the inside of my skull—no words, just an impression so vast it made me dizzy: You came back changed.I staggered, pressing my free hand to my chest. The silver threads beneath my skin warmed, responding like nerves.Kael swore softly. “It’s calling you.”“Yes,” I
The first thing I felt was gravity.Not the crushing, world-ending pull of collapsing realms—but the quiet insistence of down. Of weight. Of a body remembering it belongs somewhere.I gasped.Air tore into my lungs like it had been waiting centuries for permission.The sky above me was wrong.Not broken. Not bleeding light or stitched with divine seams. Just… sky. Pale morning blue, streaked with thin clouds that moved as if they answered only to wind.Wind.I pushed myself upright with shaking hands, fingers sinking into damp earth. Real soil. Cold. Alive with the smell of moss and rain and something faintly metallic—old stone, maybe ruins nearby.My heart slammed painfully in my chest.I was back.Kael.I turned sharply.He lay a few feet away, half-curled on his side as if the ground itself had caught him mid-fall. Dirt smeared his cheek. His chest rose and fell—slow, steady.Relief hit me so hard my vision blurred.I crawled to him, pressing my forehead briefly to his shoulder, g
The silence did not break all at once.It fractured.Hairline cracks ran through it, spreading outward from the core like fault lines in glass. Each fracture hummed with possibility—worlds that might be, futures that could still be written or erased depending on what came next.The presence leaned closer.Not pressing.Inviting.I had faced gods. I had faced annihilation. I had faced the unmaking of everything I thought I was.None of it felt like this.This was not power demanding obedience.This was choice demanding consequence.My knees nearly buckled under the weight of it.Aria, Kael said gently, steadying me through the bond. You don’t have to carry this alone.I met his gaze—really met it, not through echoes or shared instinct but through the fragile clarity of the space we stood in. He was changed. So was I. But what anchored us now was not strength.It was alignment.“I know,” I whispered. “That’s why I’m afraid.”The presence pulsed, as if acknowledging the truth of that.Au
Silence did not fall.It settled.Like ash after a firestorm. Like snow after an avalanche. Heavy. Absolute. Wrong.I floated inside it, suspended in a space that no longer felt like an in-between but not yet like a world. The violent clash of powers was gone—no roar of gods, no grinding of systems rewriting themselves. Just a vast, resonant quiet that pressed against my awareness from every direction.For the first time since the Gate shattered, nothing was pulling at me.No command.No demand.No inevitability.That terrified me more than anything that had come before.“Kael,” I whispered—not aloud, but through the bond.For a heartbeat, there was nothing.Panic flared sharp and sudden.Then—I’m here.His presence returned like gravity snapping back into place. Steady. Grounded. Changed—but unmistakably him.Relief flooded me so hard it hurt.Where are we? he asked.I searched the space around us, extending my awareness carefully. The silence wasn’t empty. It was expectant. As if t
The first thing Auren took from us was certainty.Not power.Not choice.Certainty.The bond twisted—not snapped, not severed, but occupied. His presence slid through the lattice like smoke through a crack, intimate and invasive, carrying with it a familiarity that made my skin crawl.Inside the system, he’d said.I understood now what that meant.Auren was no longer opposing the world.He was embedded in it.The darkness below surged again, but this time it wasn’t chaotic. It organized. Patterns emerged—spirals of force folding inward, rules rewriting themselves mid-motion. The primordial presence reacted instantly, not with fear, but with recalculation.Foreign variable detected.Assessment underway.Kael staggered as the pressure shifted, his domain buckling for the first time since the alternation locked in. Stone fractured beneath his feet, borders blurring at the edges.“Aria,” he said sharply. “He’s not just inside—it’s letting him interface.”“I know,” I whispered.Because I c
The darkness rose like a second horizon.Not fast.Not violent.Inevitable.It rolled upward from beneath the shattered lattice, swallowing light, swallowing sound, swallowing certainty itself. Where it passed, the rules loosened—gravity forgot which way it leaned, time stuttered, memory bled into matter. I felt it brush against the edges of the mortal world and watched entire cities flicker between what they were and what they might have been.The world wasn’t ending.It was being unmoored.Kael braced himself, power flaring outward in iron-deep waves, his domain snapping into place like a wall slammed down in the path of a flood. Stone reasserted itself. Borders hardened. The collapse slowed.But it did not stop.It’s too much, his voice strained through the bond. It’s adapting.He was right. The thing rising wasn’t opposing us—it was learning. Adjusting its pressure against Kael’s resistance, testing my alignment, probing for the weakness between us.And it found one.The bond.Pai







