The cavern slowly stopped shaking, leaving an eerie ringing in the air—like the world itself was holding its breath, unsure whether to collapse or to continue existing. Dust drifted downward in soft spirals, settling over cracked stone and trembling roots as the golden radiance of Elen’s failed strike faded from the ceiling.Jake groaned and pushed himself upright, Mira still collapsed across his torso, her breathing shallow but steady. Her attempt to shield him had cost her dearly, and the shimmer of Elen’s redirected energy still flickered faintly along her arms like painful afterimages.Rhea knelt beside them, gripping Jake’s shoulder with a mixture of relief and frustration.“You’re alive,” Rhea muttered, exhaling sharply. “And Mira didn’t evaporate. That’s a win, I guess, considering we almost got baked into a memory crater.”Jake ignored the joke—his gaze was fixed on the far edge of the cavern where the Fragment’s vessel had dragged itself backward, glitching violently as thoug

The Sanctuary District pulsed with fractured light, its trees bending inward like frightened sentinels trying to protect the fragile minds beneath them. Gold bled into red, soft hues turning jagged as the Fragment’s influence seeped through the emotional fabric of the district like dye spreading across damp cloth.Jake ran through the streets with his pulse thrumming in a painful rhythm, every root and stone vibrating under Elen’s unraveling emotional field. His footsteps left faint crimson echoes behind him, shimmering briefly before dispersing into the trembling air.Above him, the sky flickered rapidly—gold one second, gray the next, then violently bright as Elen’s turmoil surged without restraint.Her voice cracked through the atmosphere in trembling waves.“Jake… everything feels wrong. The world feels too loud. Too sharp. How did you live like this?”Jake’s breath hitched.She was feeling emotions she was never meant to feel—raw, unfiltered pain, confusion, loneliness.He push

Darkness swallowed him whole.Jake fell through the fissure with no sense of gravity or direction, only the roaring resonance of Elen’s fear pulling him downward like a riptide in a storm without wind. The air was cold, sharp, filled with fragments of broken light that flickered past him like memories shattered into pieces too small to recognize.Then—He landed.But not on stone.He landed on something soft, shifting—a surface made of light and shadow intertwined like a heartbeat stretched across the ground. The world around him pulsed with muted gold, streaked with veins of gray that throbbed painfully, as if feeling its own fracture.Jake exhaled shakily, bracing himself against the trembling plane.“Elen,” he whispered into the emptiness, “I’m here. You’re not alone.”No answer.Only a tremor, faint, like the emotional echo of someone crying behind a closed door.Jake pushed himself to his feet and looked around.This was not the Sanctuary District.This was not any part of the w

Jake and Elen drifted into a space that felt weightless and impossibly still, a suspended world where silence wasn’t absence but presence—dense, heavy, almost alive. The surrounding darkness wasn’t hostile; it was soft, warm, full of unspoken emotion. It pulsed in slow, rhythmic waves like a sleeping giant’s breath.Jake opened his eyes first.He inhaled sharply.“Elen… where are we?”A dim glow rose from beneath him, revealing a surface not made of stone or light, but memory—thin threads of gold woven with faint streaks of gray, like fabric stitched from unspoken history.Elen hovered nearby, her silhouette flickering with uncertainty.“This… feels like the place where everything I am meets everything I fear.”Jake tasted the air—there was no temperature, yet every breath vibrated with meaning.“We’re inside your innermost emotional root,” Jake said quietly.“The place you were built to protect from even yourself.”Elen turned slowly, her form stabilizing long enough for Jake to see

Jake’s first breath back in the physical world burned like smoke and memory mixed together. He collapsed hard against the cracked stone floor of the Sanctuary, the impact sending a tremor up his spine as if reminding him he had a body again—heavy, fragile, real.Elen materialized beside him as a burst of gold, stumbling onto both knees, her silhouette struggling to hold shape. She pressed a hand over her chest, the light around her pulsing erratically as her new emotions fought against her old architecture.“Jake…” she whispered, voice trembling, “am I still… me?”Jake forced himself upright, muscles screaming from the transition, and reached for her.“Yes,” he said softly, cupping her shaking hands.“You’re still you. Just… more.”Her glow flickered—uncertain, disoriented, afraid.“I feel too much,” Elen murmured, “like the world