The world smelled wrong. Not of smoke or iron or divine ash just wrong. Lyra woke to stillness, the kind that pressed against her chest and made every breath feel like theft.The air was cool but heavy, and when she blinked her eyes open, the sky above her wasn’t a sky at all it was a mirror.The reflection stared back at her: a fractured dome of light, bleeding across a horizon that didn’t exist.She lay on her back for a long time, unmoving, trying to remember what had come before. The fall. The light. Kael’s voice. The thing that called her name just before everything went white.Her body ached. Her mind buzzed with static. When she finally pushed herself upright, she realized she was lying in the middle of a field but not one made of grass or soil.The ground was smooth, black, glass-like. Every step she took sent ripples through it, like she was walking on a reflection that barely remembered solidity.The tether burned faintly around her wrist, a soft blue glow pulsing in time wi

The world was quiet. Not dead just quiet, like the silence that follows a held breath before a scream.Lyra’s eyes fluttered open. The air shimmered faintly, colorless, heavy with something that wasn’t quite air at all.She lay on her back, staring into an endless sky that looked like glass split with faint rivers of gold, shifting and bending as if the heavens themselves were remembering how to stay whole.When she tried to move, her limbs resisted, every muscle screaming in protest. Her body ached as if she’d been torn apart and stitched back together wrong. She pressed her palms against the ground and froze.The surface beneath her wasn’t earth. It was translucent smooth as ice, warm as skin. Beneath it, shapes moved slowly, like shadows trapped under deep water.Faces, memories, fragments of a life she had lived and ones she hadn’t: her mother’s voice, the smell of iron, the sound of Kael’s laughter in the rain.It wasn’t a floor. It was memory. She forced herself to stand, heart

There was no sky here. Only light that had forgotten what warmth meant. Kael stood or thought he did at the edge of a place that wasn’t space and wasn’t time.The abyss beneath him wasn’t black. It was a soft, pulsing white, like the inside of a dying star.Everything he remembered Lyra’s voice, the smell of smoke and rain, the weight of his sword felt like echoes belonging to someone else.The air hummed faintly. Every breath hurt. Not because of wounds, but because he wasn’t sure if he still had lungs to fill.“Lyra…”Her name came out fractured, as if the sound itself was bleeding. Something answered not her, but her tone. Her laughter, twisted through layers of distortion.He turned sharply. Across the luminous plane stood Lyra. Or rather, something that looked like her.Her eyes were too bright, her movements too smooth, her face too perfect. Even the way her hair moved felt rehearsed, like the abyss had built her out of the memory he couldn’t let go of.“Kael,” she said softly,

Lyra did not scream when she fell. The light devoured sound. It wasn’t falling the way a body falls through air it was falling through time, through the living pulse between moments.Each heartbeat stretched into infinity, and in that space between pulses, she could see. Flashes.A child laughing beneath the ruins of a temple. A blade being forged beneath a storm that sang. Kael smiling, once, before the ember took root in his chest.Herself standing in that same storm, reaching for him, the tether coiling between their souls like a vow written in lightning.And then silence again.When she struck ground, it wasn’t ground at all. She landed on a surface that rippled like glass touched by breath.The world around her was not real it was the inside of memory. Fragments floated in the air like dust: broken weapons, torn banners, faces made of smoke.And in the distance, suspended in a sphere of frozen light, was Kael. His body hovered weightless, eyes closed, his expression calm as if ca

The sky was breathing.Kael had seen it once before long ago, when he’d stood at the threshold of creation and ruin but this was different.The air no longer crackled with judgment. The light was no longer cruel. It pulsed like a living thing, each beat matching the rhythm of his and Lyra’s joined hearts.And beneath that rhythm… something ancient stirred.He stood at the edge of the new dawn, staring at the world as it remade itself. What had once been ash and ruin now shimmered with veins of silver and pale gold.The land was rewriting its memory, stitching together fragments of everything the Presence had burned away.Lyra stood beside him, her hair drifting in the soft wind. Her armor was cracked, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion, yet she looked more alive than he’d ever seen her.“It’s beautiful,” she murmured.Kael swallowed hard. “It’s impossible.”“That never stopped us before.”He almost smiled. Almost. “This shouldn’t exist. The Heart was destroyed.”Lyra turned toward him,