The sky bled in silence. And the world breathed. Lyra moved through a valley of glass and bones, her steps echoing faintly against a land that remembered too much.The ground beneath her shimmered with trapped reflections memories caught in crystal, showing glimpses of what this place once was before the collapse.Cities floating on waves of light. Oceans turned to flame. Wings that stretched across stars. Now, only echoes. And somewhere deep within it all his heartbeat.She could still feel it. Adrian’s mark pulsed faintly against her palm, guiding her like a compass through the shifting wasteland. Every few moments, the sigil would burn brighter, responding to something in the distance.The pillar of light was closer now. It pierced the clouds like a god’s sword, bleeding stormfire down its length. The closer she got, the more she could hear it the faint hum, deep and resonant, like thunder breathing in sleep.She stopped once, gazing up.The air shimmered. The wind had faces now fl

The earth still burned when Emily landed. Flames licked at the cracked soil, whispering through the skeletons of broken mountains.The air was thick with energy too thick, too heavy. It pressed against her lungs like molten smoke, the scent of lightning and blood mingling with dust.She stood in the heart of destruction, her golden fire dancing wildly, torn by invisible winds. Far in the distance, the horizon pulsed like a wounded heart that was where Adrian was.She could feel it not through sight or sound, but through the ache in her chest that tugged her forward.Each pulse of his energy came as a shock through her veins, hot and cold at once, familiar yet wrong.He’s in pain. No. Worse he’s becoming something that pain cannot reach.Emily’s steps scorched the ground. The storm ahead was no mere weather it was alive. Every gust of wind carried whispers, every flash of lightning carried a shape faces, echoes, memories.The First Storm had always been wild. But this… this was sentien

There was no sky. No ground. Only a vast, fluid expanse of light and shadow, folding and unfolding like breathing glass. Every motion sent ripples through existence itself silent, graceful, endless.Adrian opened his eyes. For a moment, he thought he was floating in water, until he realized there was no sensation of air, no temperature, no sound. Just presence.His own reflection drifted in front of him faint, colorless, and cracked like a mirror struck from within. Each fracture shimmered with threads of red, white, and black light.He tried to move. And reality moved with him. The ripples spread outward, forming continents of memory, clouds of lightning frozen mid-strike, the faint silhouette of Emily’s flame dissolving far away.He spoke softly, his voice small in the vastness. “…Emily?”The world didn’t echo it remembered. Her name spread like ink in clear water, painting shapes into the nothingness.For a heartbeat, he saw her face fading, reaching toward him then gone again, swa

The bridge stretched endlessly before him a path made of fractured light and crystallized flame. Each step Adrian took echoed with the pulse of creation, rippling outward through the sky like heartbeats made visible.Below him, the newborn realm shimmered half-formed valleys, seas of molten gold, cities carved from shifting light. The world was building itself from his essence.But it was unstable. Every breath he took caused the realm to react trees rising from mist, mountains forming, then dissolving into dust when his focus slipped. The weight of power was too raw, too alive.And then… he heard her. The sound was faint, yet undeniable a whisper carried on flame and wind. “I’m here. Always.”Adrian froze. That voice he had thought it lost, buried beneath the chaos and light. But now it resonated within him, intertwining with his heartbeat.The bridge pulsed brighter, responding to the name that lingered on his lips. “Emily…”The moment he spoke it, the realm stopped expanding. Every

There was no sensation of falling only unraveling. Adrian and Emily were stripped from the collapsing world and hurled into the storm’s heart.There was no sky, no ground only endless motion. Lightning raged in silence. Time itself seemed to stagger, then stop, trembling between creation and nothing.Emily gasped, clutching her chest. Her body was losing coherence turning to flame, flickering back to flesh, then flame again. “Adrian!”He stood ahead of her. Or rather, something wearing him did.He was suspended midair, surrounded by countless arcs of white and crimson lightning that formed a shifting sphere around him.His body floated in a cruciform shape, eyes closed, veins pulsing with light that wasn’t entirely his own.Each spark that left him rewrote the space it touched turning emptiness into structures of broken geometry and ancient script.“Adrian,” Emily whispered. Her voice cracked, barely reaching through the distortion. “Please, look at me…”No response. His lightning fla