Lahat ng Kabanata ng Vows of convenience Hearts in Collision : Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

(Saphira’s POV)The light didn’t fade.It entered me.Not gently. Not slowly. It tore through my veins like molten glass, rewriting every nerve, every breath, every fragile certainty I’d ever held about who I was. My scream echoed, layered over itself, swallowed by the humming world as the ground beneath me flared brighter.I collapsedbut I didn’t fall.The light held me upright, suspended, my feet barely touching the living surface. Silver veins crawled up my arms, glowing beneath my skin like constellations mapping a future I hadn’t agreed to.“Stop,” I gasped. “Please stop.”The being watched without pity.Without mercy.“Resistance is expected,” it said. “Acceptance is required.”I felt it then the pull. Not just from the light, but from somewhere deeper. The shadow. The threshold. The moment I crossed over and the world decided I was… compatible.Chosen.No. I shook my head violently. I never chose this.“Saphira!”Caelum’s voice cut through the noise like a blade. I twisted my

(Saphira’s POV)The crack wasn’t loud.It was final.Like bone breaking inside my chest.I screamed as the seal ruptured, silver light exploding outward in a violent shockwave that threw Lucien backward and slammed the being into the crystalline spires. The realm howled—an unearthly sound that vibrated through my skull and split the ground beneath us.I dropped to my knees.Pain unlike anything I’d ever known tore through me, sharp and burning, like my soul was being pried open with bare hands. The silver veins under my skin blazed white-hot, spreading across my neck, my collarbone, my ribs.“Saphira!” Caelum shouted.The invisible restraints snapped. He surged toward me, catching me before I hit the ground completely. His arms wrapped around me, solid, real, anchoring me as the world came apart.“Stay with me,” he begged. “Please stay.”I clutched his shirt, fingers curling tight, afraid that if I let go, I would dissolve into light and pain and nothingness.Lucien staggered upright,

(Saphira’s POV)I didn’t disappear.That was the first thing I realized.There was no pain. No tearing. No oblivion.Just… quiet.Not the suffocating silence of fear, but a vast, weightless stillness like floating beneath deep water while the world raged far above. Light surrounded me, warm and endless, carrying echoes of everything I had ever been.I tried to breathe.I didn’t have lungs.I tried to scream Caelum’s name.Sound didn’t exist here.And yet I was still me.Awareness pulsed through me gently, stitched together by memory and emotion. I could feel the seal no longer burning but settling, stabilizing, reshaping itself around my essence.I wasn’t erased.I was anchored elsewhere.A voice reached me not spoken, but known.You chose willingly.The being.Its presence was softer now. Less judgment. More reverence.Such choices are not annihilation, it continued. They are transformation.“Where am I?” I asked, though the question felt more like a ripple than a sound.Within the s

(Caelum’s POV)I didn’t tell anyone.Not the board. Not security. Not the doctors who still insisted the pressure in my chest was grief manifesting as a psychosomatic echo.They didn’t feel what I felt.They didn’t hear her.The shard burned hotter with every hour that passed, responding to something only it and I could sense. I kept it wrapped in lead-lined casing when I wasn’t holding it, though even that barely dulled its pulse. It wanted movement. Direction. Intent.It wanted the door.I stood in the sublevel beneath the towernthree floors below ground, past biometric locks and shielded walls where the last remnants of Lucien’s research had been quarantined. The air smelled like ozone and scorched metal, like a storm that never fully passed.Dr. Eleni Vos looked at me like I’d finally lost what was left of my sanity.“You’re asking me to reopen a sealed anomaly,” she said carefully. “One that nearly tore the city apart.”“I’m asking you to find the seam,” I replied. “There’s a dif

(Saphira’s POV)The door didn’t slam shut.That was the first thing I understood.It hesitated.As if the universe itself had paused, fingers curled around the edge of fate, undecided whether to pull us apart or fuse us into something unrecognizable.The threshold screamed.Not with sound but with pressure. With intent. With the unbearable awareness of being judged.I clutched Caelum harder as the light fractured around us, my feet sliding across the glass-like floor as the seam buckled. The ripples beneath us turned violent, images flashing faster fires, cities collapsing, laboratories flooded with red emergency light.Outcomes.Possible futures.Warnings.“Let me go,” Caelum said into my hair, voice low, ironed flat by resolve. “This place wants equilibrium. I can give it that.”“No,” I snapped, pulling back just enough to glare at him. “You don’t get to martyr yourself because reality throws a tantrum.”A faint smile ghosted his mouth. “You always were terrible at goodbyes.”The th