INICIAR SESIÓNThe seam Lyris dragged me through did not feel like motion.It felt like removal.One moment the sky was screaming and Kael’s voice was tearing my name apart—and the next, the world peeled away from me layer by layer, like skin stripped from bone. Sound vanished first. Then light. Then the certainty that I had ever been standing anywhere at all.The hunger came with me.Not chasing.Attached.I gasped—or tried to—and felt no air resist me. Instead there was pressure, immense and intimate, coiling through the core of my being like a second spine.Do not resist, it impressed, not commanding—claiming.You are already shaped for me.“No,” I whispered, though my mouth didn’t move. “You’re shaped around me.”That pleased it.The seam snapped shut behind us with a sensation like sutures being pulled tight through reality. Suddenly there was ground again—solid, cold, humming faintly beneath my boots.I stumbled forward, nearly falling, and Lyris caught me with an arm like steel.“Stay upright
The sky didn’t just open.It was cut.A clean, deliberate incision tore through the upper atmosphere, edges glowing with controlled violence as something descended through it—fast, precise, unapologetically intentional. The rupture stabilized itself around the intruder, reality bending not in protest, but in reluctant cooperation.Whatever this was, it knew the rules.And it knew how to break them without consequence.I felt the hunger recoil.That alone chilled me deeper than fear.The descending figure slowed abruptly just above the collapsing field, boots striking nothing—and then something, as invisible platforms unfolded beneath them like solidified intent.Humans couldn’t do that.Gods didn’t bother.This was something else.The air snapped back into motion as the newcomer landed between us and the chasm, impact rippling outward in a concussive wave that knocked me back a step despite Kael’s grip tightening around my arm.Dust and light scattered.When it cleared, I saw her.Bec
The hunger had a shape.Not a body—an orientation.It turned toward me the way roots turn toward water, the way fire leans into oxygen. The suspended light around us dimmed in response, as if illumination itself were being siphoned into a deeper gravity.The Watcher noticed.That alone told me how dangerous this was.The vast, impersonal attention that had weighed us moments before recoiled a fraction—an infinitesimal adjustment, but enough to send a tremor through the frozen shards of reality.That presence is not catalogued, the Watcher impressed, its certainty fractured for the first time.Kael’s breath came sharp at my side. “That thing… it’s not part of the cycle, is it?”“No,” I whispered. “It’s what the cycle was hiding from.”The hunger pressed closer, and with it came a sensation like remembering something I had never learned. Images flickered across my mind—bones buried beneath continents, oceans laid down like blankets to keep something asleep, gods cooperating not out of w
The first sign that we had been seen was silence.Not the absence of sound—but the removal of it. The roar of the collapsing Gate, the scream of torn sky, the thunder of rupturing earth all vanished at once, as if existence itself had drawn a sharp breath and forgotten how to exhale.Kael’s hand was still locked around mine.That was the only reason I knew I hadn’t ceased to exist.The light froze mid-explosion, suspended like shattered glass in amber. Shards of the Gate hovered around us, each fragment reflecting a different version of reality—worlds where I had died, worlds where Kael had never been born, worlds where Auren ruled unchallenged beneath a perfected sky.And behind them all—Something shifted.It did not emerge.It did not arrive.It simply became present, the way gravity becomes present when you step too close to a cliff.The pressure dropped suddenly, and I collapsed to one knee, dragging Kael down with me. My vision blurred, silver burning across my eyes as the mark
The sky finished opening.Not all at once—slowly, deliberately—like something ancient stretching after a long sleep.The circular distortion above us deepened, its edges sharpening into a vast ring of light and shadow. Within it, layers of reality slid over one another, translucent and wrong. I saw stars that didn’t belong to our sky. I saw landmasses folding and unfolding. I saw memories that were not mine ripple through the air like heat mirages.The Gate was no longer beneath the world.It was becoming the world.The pressure drove me to my knees.Every breath felt borrowed. Every heartbeat echoed too loudly, as if the presence above was counting them, measuring how long I had left before a decision would be forced from my bones.Kael dropped beside me, one knee braced against the fractured stone, his hand gripping my shoulder hard enough to ground me.“Stay with me,” he said fiercely. “Whatever it’s doing—don’t let it pull you apart.”I wanted to laugh at the idea that I was still
The air broke around Auren the way glass breaks around a stone.Not shattered—yielded.The glow from the chasm bent toward him, threads of light bowing as if recognizing a higher gravity. Kael moved instantly, pulling me back a step, his body angling between us and the thing wearing Auren’s face.Too late.Auren smiled wider, and the ground answered.Not to me.To him.The realization cut deeper than fear.“You shouldn’t be able to stand there,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Not after what you became.”“What I accepted,” he corrected gently. His eyes flicked to the chasm, reverent. “You heard it too, didn’t you? The remembering. The accounting. It doesn’t want a ruler, Aria. It wants a continuation.”The presence below pulsed, uneasy now, its attention oscillating between us like a scale that couldn’t settle.Kael’s hand tightened on my arm. “Step away from her.”Auren laughed softly. “You still think this is about possession.”He took one step closer.The stone ring I had raised shuddere







