The world was rubble, Jason’s ears rang with a sound like endless bells. No, not bells, stone. The crash of the slab had drowned everything, smothered the air, shaken his very bones.His body lay twisted beneath shards of marble and splinters of wood, his chest heaving shallow breaths. Every inhale dragged smoke into his lungs, burning raw lines down his throat.He blinked. Once. Twice. The world came back in fragments. Smoke coiling in the air, A glimmer of ward-light flickering out, A muffled scream, distant.He tried to move, but his body screamed in reply. Pain seared across his ribs, his shoulder, his back. The dagger still lay in his hand, its edge searing hot, branding his palm.He should have dropped it, but his fingers wouldn’t obey. Mine, whispered the shard. Not inside the dagger, not inside the stone, inside him.Jason squeezed his eyes shut. The voice filled his skull, threading through every nerve, every broken muscle. It didn’t plead. It didn’t command. It claimed. You

Silence.Not the silence of stone or death, but the silence of nothing. Jason’s eyes opened to a world that wasn’t a world.Blackness stretched in every direction, pulsing faintly, like the veins of some great beast. The air, if it was air, hummed with a sound too deep for hearing, vibrating in his ribs.He staggered forward, his bare feet sinking into ash that wasn’t ash, glowing faintly violet beneath each step. His body no longer ached, no broken ribs, no burns. He touched his chest, smooth, whole.But the dagger was still in his hand. Always in his hand.Jason swallowed hard. “Where… am I?”The silence answered with a ripple through the void. Then a voice. Home. It came from everywhere, seeping from the air, the ground, the marrow of his bones. He spun, raising the dagger instinctively, though it felt useless here.This is the space between. Where your soul meets mine. Where I remake you. Shapes stirred in the dark. He squinted, and realized they were memories.His father’s face,

The chamber was a storm.Spells crashed against him, fire and lightning and blades of light. Jason staggered backward, throwing up his arm to shield himself. The dagger moved of its own accord.A wave of obsidian fire burst outward, swallowing the attacks, devouring them whole. The flames curved back, striking the Councilors. Their screams echoed as their bodies twisted, burning to ash before his eyes.“No!” Jason’s voice cracked. “Stop! I didn’t”The fire didn’t stop. It leapt from Councilor to Councilor, their faces melting into strangers, then friends, then Elias. His master stood there, robes smoldering, his eyes wide in pain and betrayal.“Jason…” Elias whispered, reaching out a trembling hand. “Why?”Jason’s heart shattered. He stumbled forward, dropping the dagger, his voice breaking. “No! I didn’t want this! I didn’t mean it! I”But Elias collapsed, his body unraveling into cinders, scattered on the ash. Jason fell to his knees, clutching fistfuls of dust, his throat raw from

The world was a heartbeat.Thud.Thud.Thud.Jason drifted in the darkness, each beat pulling him farther, dragging him deeper. His lungs burned for air that would not come. His chest ached, the phantom pain of the dagger lodged in it still echoing through him.I should be dead, he thought. His voice sounded strange even inside his own head, thin, fragile, like it belonged to someone else. Maybe I am. Then came the whisper. Jason, His eyes snapped open.The void remained, endless and black, but a single thread of light cut across it, faint, golden, swaying like a candle in storm. He staggered toward it, though he had no sense of body here, only the raw pull of will.“Elias?” His voice cracked.The thread flickered. A shape stepped out of the glow, tall, robed, familiar. His master’s face softened with the same kind patience Jason had seen a hundred times before, the one that had steadied him on sleepless nights of failure.“Jason,” Elias said again, the name a balm and a blade at once

Jason fell through fire. Not air. Not void. Fire. Endless, suffocating, searing. The heat blistered his skin, cracked his lips, clawed its way into his lungs.His own scream echoed back at him, swallowed by the roar of violet flame that burned without smoke. The shard’s voice was everywhere. Do you feel it? The purity of destruction? The song of the ember? Stop resisting. Let it carry you.Jason curled inward, arms around himself, fighting for breath. Each inhale scorched him from inside. His thoughts flickered like kindling: fragments of his mother’s smile, his father’s hand on his shoulder, Elias’s steady gaze.Hold on to it, he told himself desperately. Hold on to what’s real. But memory itself warped. His mother’s face twisted, hollow-eyed, mouth spilling flame.His father’s voice broke into laughter that wasn’t his. Elias’s hand reached for him again, but this time, when Jason grasped it, the skin peeled away, leaving bone aflame.Jason ripped his hand back with a strangled cry.