He didn’t fall this time. He was placed. The shattering darkness spat Adrian out onto a new surface soft, warm, almost breathing.He pushed himself up, chest heaving, lightning crawling across his skin like restless serpents. This place wasn’t the glass realm. It wasn’t the abyss. It wasn’t any world he had seen. It felt… internal.A realm made of thought, memory, and the fractures he never dared to touch. He steadied himself. The air smelled faintly of rain. Of smoke. Of Emily’s fire. His heart lurched. “Emily”He didn’t finish. Because when he lifted his head, he froze. The world around him had changed. He stood in the middle of a vast field of blackgrass each blade shimmering with faint lightning.Above him stretched a sky of storm clouds that never struck, only churned silently like something holding its breath. And far ahead…Two figures were standing. One of them was unmistakable: Emily. Or rather what remained of her, trapped in a faint halo of gold, flickering like a candle in

The world of blackgrass trembled. Not from Adrian’s storm. Not from the echo’s restraint. But from Emily, whose fading glow had become the unstable center of the collapsing realm.Her golden light flickered violently, each pulse sending a tremor through the air. The edges of her body dissolved into drifting, weightless fragments.Adrian’s chest tightened painfully. “Emily… stay with me. Please just hold on.”But the moment he reached for her again, his lightning flared in panic, snapping outward like a frightened animal. He froze.The echo stepped between them, shielding her again. “Adrian,” the echo said quietly, “you can touch her when you stop fighting yourself.”Adrian’s hands curled into fists, lightning hissing between his fingers. “She’s dying,” he whispered. “There’s no time.”“There’s no time because of you,” the echo said not cruelly, not sharply, but with heartbreaking truth.Adrian flinched as though struck. Emily’s head dropped against the echo’s shoulder. Her voice was s

The newborn realm held its breath. The air trembled not with power, but with a quiet so vast it felt sacred. The ground beneath Adrian stilled, the cracks smoothing themselves out as if the world were retreating from what it had almost lost.Adrian lowered himself to his knees, Emily still in his arms. Her breathing was fragile but steady.Her skin glowed faintly, touched by that strange mixture of gold and crimson beneath her surface the remnants of the phoenix flame and the storm's mark that refused to let her go.He brushed a thumb across her cheek. “Emily… can you hear me?”Her eyes fluttered slow, heavy and then opened. Not fully, but enough for him to see the soft gold flicker within them. “Adrian… you’re warm…” she whispered.He almost laughed. After everything, after storms, gods, death, void she said that. But maybe that was why he loved her. “I sealed it,” he murmured. “The storm… it can’t tear the world apart anymore.”Emily’s gaze shifted to his chest, where the mark of t

The spear of lightning fell like judgment. The newborn world screamed. Wind warped. Space buckled. The golden sky cracked open as the storm-Adrian’s power descended enough force to cleave continents and silence gods.Emily didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her body trembled, hands pressed weakly into the grass, unable to rise. A thin thread of blood traced down her temple from the earlier shock.Yet her eyes stayed locked on one thing. Adrian. The real one. Her Adrian. And in that single heartbeat before the end, she whispered not fear, not despair. But trust. “Adrian… I believe in you.”The spear struck. But not her. Adrian caught it. His hands rose, fingers clamping around the impossible, stopping it inches above Emily’s collapsing form.Lightning poured down his arms. His skin flayed open under the sheer intensity. Blood evaporated before it touched the ground. His sealed storm screamed inside him.The ground cratered beneath his feet. His spine bowed. Every muscle strained until they rip

The world held still. Not silent, held. As if every blade of grass, every drifting particle of light, every molecule of air was waiting for a verdict that would reshape existence.The fissure in the sky widened with the slowness of inevitability. Not torn. Not forced. Opened like an eye. And something looked back.Adrian’s breath froze in his chest. Emily’s fingers tightened around his hand, knuckles pale, pulse racing in her wrist where his thumb pressed lightly.Storm-Adrian, once unshakeable, staggered back a step. “We have gone too far,” he whispered. “We’ve woken what sleeps between worlds.”Emily’s voice was barely audible. “The Architect… what is it?”Storm-Adrian’s eyes both sets, lightning-blue and abyss-shaded met hers with a terror that made him look suddenly mortal.“The first maker,” he breathed. “The one who forged creation before gods crawled from dust. Before storms learned to speak. Before souls knew how to dream.”The fissure throbbed like a heartbeat. A second pulse