The first warning was not a sound but a distortion, a subtle warping of the air that sent a faint metallic taste across the horizon. It drifted above the southern ridges like heat rising from cracked asphalt, except it carried weight—an awareness pressing against the senses of everyone attuned to the living world. Even those who lacked Resonant abilities felt the change, pausing mid-step as goosebumps crawled along their arms, triggered by a shift they could not name but instinctively feared.Mira registered the disturbance seconds before the shockwave hit. She straightened sharply, her gaze snapping to the far south where the sky rippled with unnatural tension. The clouds bent inward, as though pulled by a gravitational breath from deep beneath the crust.She whispered, “It’s happening again.”A Resonant guard rushed toward her, eyes wide. “The southern plates are vibrating in fractured sequences. They’re not following Elen’s rhythm anymore.”Mira inhaled slowly and felt the strain r

The dream began the way most dreams begin—softly, without edges, drifting through the mind of a child who still believed the world was a place where everything could be understood if one only stared long enough. Lio had always been quiet, the kind of Resonant boy who listened more than he spoke, sensing the faint whispers of the living earth with more ease than he understood his own thoughts. When other children played near the glowing terraces of the First City, he lingered near the roots, tracing their subtle vibrations with curious fingers.But this dream felt different.It began with light, pale and trembling, flickering like a candle trapped inside fog. Then the light bent inward, collapsing into a tunnel of crimson haze. Lio walked through it instinctively, drawn by a voice that wasn’t a voice, a warmth that wasn’t warm, a call that carried familiarity he could not explain.When the haze cleared, he found himself standing in an enormous cavern lit by threads of dark red luminesc

Fear did not arrive with thunder, nor with the violent crack of earth splitting open beneath careless feet; instead, it arrived like a subtle pressure against the mind, a tightening sensation that crawled beneath the skin and whispered warnings with a voice too ancient to belong to any living creature.The First City of Light woke to this tension, its luminous towers flickering in unsteady rhythms that betrayed the calm façade its architecture tried desperately to maintain. There was no disaster yet, no visible threat on the horizon, but every person who stepped outside felt a tightening in their chest as if the world had decided to breathe through them whether they permitted it or not. This was not panic created by imagination; this was the world’s fear bleeding through its lungs.Mira felt it instantly when she stepped out from the central root-chamber, the ground beneath her boots vibrating with an uneven pulse that matched the thrum of an anxious heartbeat. The sky hovered in a su

The world breathed with an uneven rhythm that morning, creating a low tremor beneath the soil and sending slivers of golden dust drifting through the air like suspended prayers that refused to fall.Mira felt the vibration first as she stepped onto the balcony of the growing city, gripping the organic railing that pulsed faintly under her touch like a living vein rather than carved architecture.“Do you feel that?” she whispered with tension, turning her gaze toward the horizon where the sky bent in pale arcs of luminescent blue that flickered like an unstable heartbeat.Rhea approached from behind with steady steps, her Resonant senses sharpening as she placed her hand against the same railing and closed her eyes with a solemn frown.“Yes, the ground is shifting strangely again,” Rhea murmured softly, “and the world sounds different today.”Mira looked down at the streets below where people glided between structur

The corridors leading into the lower resonance tunnels felt colder than usual, humming with a thin metallic vibration that slithered along the walls like an unwelcome guest searching for a place to latch its teeth into the stone.Mira walked at the front of the group with hurried steps, her breath trembling each time the ground quivered with the distant pulses of the awakening Fragment, its voice echoing faintly through the soil like a broken hymn rising from a corrupted cathedral.Behind her, Rhea followed tightly with two Resonant guards whose eyes glowed with faint golden halos as they attuned themselves to the unstable frequencies that rippled across the tunnel’s atmosphere with unsettling irregularity.“This is worse than earlier,” Rhea muttered sharply, brushing her fingers along the wall where veins of dim red light crawled like living cracks, pulsing with an uneven rhythm that made her stomach twist with dread.Mira nodded grimly as she scanned the flickering veins with her ga