Lyra woke to silence that didn’t belong. The sanctuary of her realm a place woven from time and echo had always hummed with a low, eternal rhythm.The Loom of Souls stood at its heart, threads of every world weaving and unweaving endlessly, carrying whispers of lives and endings.But now… That rhythm was gone. She sat up from her resting place, her pale hair falling over her shoulders like liquid moonlight.The Loom was still glowing faintly, but its threads once soft and radiant were trembling. Not in chaos, but in obedience to something unseen.Lyra stepped forward, her bare feet silent against the marble floor. The threads recoiled as her hand reached out, as if frightened of her touch.She frowned. “You shouldn’t fear me.”And then the Loom spoke. “We do not fear you, Keeper. We fear him.”The voice was layered, thousands of souls speaking as one. The sound carried through her bones, chilling her deeper than cold ever could.Lyra’s heart skipped. “Who?”The Loom’s center pulsed, a

Adrian floated in darkness. But this wasn’t silence it was a scream. Voices, countless and ancient, echoed through his skull.The First Storm’s fury. The Heir’s cold laughter. Fragments of gods, ghosts of creation, and the pulse of something new trying to be born all collided in his veins.“You were never meant to contain us,” thundered the Storm.“And yet, he does,” the Heir whispered, his tone both cruel and admiring.“A mortal who swallowed gods.”Adrian’s hands shook as lightning burst from his fingertips, splitting the void around him into fragments of color crimson, white, and gold. He hovered between them, body flickering like an unstable star.Every heartbeat was a war. Every breath a negotiation between annihilation and identity. And yet, beneath it all, something human persisted.When he opened his eyes, he stood in a vast circular field of clouds and flame his own mind made manifest. The ground pulsed like veins of light, and above him swirled two colossal figures:The Heir

The wind screamed. Emily’s boots skidded across glass-like stone as the sky above tore open, lightning forming spirals too vast to comprehend.The world Adrian had remade so serene moments ago was now splitting apart, reality folding in on itself like a wounded lung struggling to breathe.At the center of it, the storm raged. Crimson and blue lightning clashed, devouring the clouds, and between those lights two shadows warred.One was Adrian. The other, his reflection, his storm-born remnant, his unpurified rage made flesh.Emily’s chest burned with panic. She could feel their power, like twin heartbeats shaking the air. Each time they collided, the world beneath her feet cracked, the veins of gold that ran through the earth flickering.“Adrian!” she screamed, voice nearly lost to the roar.No answer. Only thunder. Lightning descended like rain, carving trenches around her, searing the ground into glowing scars.She raised her hands, golden flames forming a dome above her head, shield

The world was still bleeding light when Emily rose to her feet. The sky or what remained of it was a fractured mosaic of colors, pieces of the shattered realms glimmering faintly above her like floating shards of glass.Every breath she drew was thick with ash and magic, the air trembling with distant echoes of thunder that never quite reached her.Her boots crunched over broken stone as she moved, slowly, each step heavy with exhaustion. The spark in her palm pulsed again, its rhythm syncing to her heartbeat gentle, steady, alive.“Hold on,” she whispered, clutching it tighter. “You always said storms don’t die they just change shape.”Her voice broke at the end. But the spark flickered, answering her, and that was enough. She began walking toward the horizon or what looked like one.The plain stretched endlessly, a wasteland of ruins suspended between light and dark. Rivers of molten lightning cut through the cracks in the ground, weaving patterns she could almost recognize.They fe

Emily barely had time to breathe before the ground cracked beneath her. The world, if it could still be called that, was collapsing in fragments of color and light each shard reflecting a different memory, a different version of Adrian.The air pulsed with his energy. It wasn’t the thunderous fury of the storms he once commanded it was older, colder, something that bent the rules of time itself.“Adrian!” Emily shouted, voice trembling. Her hair whipped wildly as gravitational shifts tore at her footing.The air smelled like burning ozone and salt. She could feel him, his presence humming through the void but it wasn’t steady. It was splintering.She pushed forward into the tear, ignoring the streaks of energy that burned across her skin. Her hand reached for the light his light just as the world twisted, and she was swallowed whole.Darkness. Not empty, but filled with echoes.Adrian floated in a silent expanse, surrounded by mirrors that showed himself a thousand faces, each holding