Adrian’s body skidded across the living earth, tearing through grass that healed as fast as it broke. Soil rose like waves around him, absorbing the impact only to crack again as Storm-Adrian descended relentless, incandescent, unhinged.The world trembled under their collision. Adrian barely managed to roll aside as a spear of crimson lightning carved through the space he’d occupied.The blast sheared an entire ridge of the newborn landscape, turning mountains into molten glass that cooled within seconds.He staggered to his knees, chest heaving, ribs screaming. The other him didn’t breathe at all. Storm-Adrian hovered above the crater, wings of red lightning fanned wide like a judgment.His voice fractured between thunder and void. “You were never meant to exist alone.”Adrian wiped blood from his mouth, sparks dancing at his fingertips. “I exist because I chose to.”Storm-Adrian’s head tilted a gesture too slow, too fluid to be human. “You call that choice? You broke destiny. You b

The storm did not roar when Adrian crossed the threshold. It fell silent. No wind. No light. No sound. Just a pressure so absolute it felt like the universe pressing its forehead to his and whispering stop. He didn’t.Lightning peeled off his skin in strips, muscles burning like tearing metal. Every heartbeat was a thunderclap inside his skull, driving him forward through a space where direction didn’t exist.Only one thought anchored him. Emily. He reached for her presence like a hand reaching through fire, through star, through death itself. His fingers met nothing. The ache inside him spread like ice under bone.But he kept moving. He would tear creation apart before he stopped. Reality thinned like worn fabric. Then it split. He fell through. Not down. Not forward. Through. And landed in a place no living thing was meant to see.A landscape of broken laws lay before him. Space folded like paper, oceans hung upside-down, stars dripped like molten gold onto a sky made of glass. Ever

Time didn’t move. No breath. No wind. No heartbeat but three, two pounding, one flickering like paper near fire.Emily stood between them like dawn caught between night and sunrise. Human Adrian’s hand hovered open before her steady, warm, fragile.Storm Adrian stood behind a wall of lightning only he could feel burning with the terrifying beauty of a star trying not to collapse again. Two versions. One choice. But before she moved, the realm answered for her.The sky split with a sound like bone snapping through heaven. A third presence entered. Not shape. Not voice. A gravity. Invisible, immense, ancient.The world rippled outward from Emily, and both Adrians fell back a step not by force, but by inevitability. Like tides drawn by a moon that wasn’t there yesterday.Emily gasped and clutched her chest. The golden flame behind her sternum pulsed once, twice. Then burst outward. It didn’t burn her. It consumed reality instead.The realm folded into a cathedral of light and shadow pill

There are choices that don’t decide futures, they create them. The air between the three of them tightened, dense as gravity.Emily stood in gold. Storm Adrian crackled with thunder. Human Adrian breathed like he had lungs and hope again. And reality waited. Neither man moved, though both wanted to.Storm Adrian jaw clenched, lightning bleeding down his arms looked ready to tear the sky open just to close the distance between them.Human Adrian quiet, trembling, painfully human looked like stepping forward might break him more than staying still.And Emily, radiant and terrifying in her stillness, felt both desires crash into her like tides on opposite shores. “Listen,” she whispered.The word alone rippled through space not command, not demand but truth. “I am alive, but not whole. Not separate. I carry you both and if I choose too early, everything we fought for burns.”Storm Adrian’s eyes flared. “You think this is something to choose?”His voice cracked thunder across the meadow,

“Some warnings whisper. Some warnings thunder. And some… arrive wearing a familiar face.”The world held its breath. Lyra stepped from the golden storm as though she had been carved out of the lightning itself.Her boots touched the breathing soil, and the realm reacted instantly grass flattening, winds shifting direction, distant mountains bowing ever so slightly.Not to her. But to the power moving behind her aura. Emily instinctively moved closer to Adrian, her fingers threading through his.Lyra’s eyes deep violet, swirling with prophecy and something newly awakened landed on their intertwined hands. A faint smile tugged at her lips. “You two always did know how to make an entrance,” she said softly.Emily’s grip tightened. “Lyra… you’re alive.”“Barely,” Lyra admitted. “But yes. Alive enough to witness this.”Her gaze lifted to Adrian and in that instant, any trace of humor vanished. The wind sharpened around her, slicing through the air like invisible blades. Adrian straightened