At first, Jenna thought the silence meant peace.It pressed around her, soft and endless, like a blanket of glass. She couldn’t feel her body, only the faint hum of something vast beneath her ribs a rhythm that wasn’t hers.When she tried to breathe, the air burned like starlight. Then, she heard it. A single heartbeat not hers echoing from the void beside her.Denilson. She forced her eyes open. The world was wrong. Above her, the sky hung like a sheet of cracked crystal, bleeding rivers of golden mist. Every fragment reflected a different moment in time their first night together, the betrayal, his fall into Nýxoros.They hung there like shards of her memory, watching her bleed into the light. Her body wasn’t solid anymore. Her hands flickered between flesh and radiance. She reached for Denilson or what used to be him.He lay motionless, half-buried in the silver dust that covered the ground. His chest glowed faintly, rising and falling once every eternity but his eye, They were open

There was no sound. No breath, no heartbeat. Only afterlight a pale, trembling radiance, spreading across the blank expanse like a wound remembering how to bleed.Jenna’s body floated within it, or maybe she was the light itself now she couldn’t tell. Her mind pulsed in fragments: Denilson’s name, the ache in her chest, the memory of hands clasping through destruction. Something was missing, Something vast.She called out her voice came as vibration, a ripple through the emptiness. Denilson. No answer, but the void shivered.Shapes began to coalesce in the white silhouettes of mountains, ruins, rivers that glittered like veins of liquid glass. It was as though the universe was being repainted in hesitant strokes. Every shape flickered in and out of being, half memory, half invention.And through it, she heard a faint hum, Low, Constant. Like the pulse of an unborn world.“Denilson,” she whispered again.A figure moved at the edge of the light tall, fractured, his body stitched togeth

The newborn god fled. Branches that had not existed moments ago tore at their skin as the world knitted itself too quickly, reshaping with every panicked breath they took. Forests rose in seconds. Rivers bent and split in frantic, unfinished arcs. The sky flickered like a dying lantern.Because their fear was rewriting the land beneath their feet. Behind them, the creature howled.Not with a mouth it had none but with the sound of matter collapsing. A deep, grinding reversal of existence that clawed at the spine, threatening to pull the fused soul backward and swallow them whole.They stumbled through rising undergrowth, their body still battling its own identity. When they tried to run with Jenna’s stride, Denilson’s weight pulled them the opposite direction. When they tried to leap, the world buckled beneath one foot as if favoring one soul over the other.Jenna, move we have to, I’m trying, Denilson I can’t I can’t hold your, Don’t let go I won’t, I won’tBut the beast was faster.

The silence did not break this time, It congealed. Thick, Wrong. A silence with teeth. Jenna knelt in the center of the clearing, lungs fighting for a breath that did not come easily.The air felt thin, scraped out. The world still trembled as though the rift’s disappearance had left a bruise on reality itself.Her fingertips still reached toward the empty space where Denilson had been warm seconds ago, breathing seconds ago. The ghost of his grip tingled against her palm. And then, as if the memory itself were cruel, the sensation faded.“Den” Her voice cracked, felt like something torn.No answer, Nothing answered anymore. She forced herself upright, though her legs shook so violently that the newborn trees around her quivered in sympathy.This world his world the world built through their fracture, responded to everything she felt. She hated it for that. Hated how alive it was, how easily it mirrored pain.A wind rushed through the incomplete forest, bending the half-formed branche

The feral version of Denilson didn’t move at first. He simply smiled a jagged, sunken grin that showed too many teeth, as if hunger had shaped his mouth instead of flesh. His eyes glowed with a corrupted gold, deeper and older than the Vein itself.Light curled lazily around his fingers, coiling like smoke prepared to ignite into something ruinous. Jenna froze, not from fear but from the weight of recognition this wasn’t a possibility Denilson had rejected. This was a possibility he had survived.The perfect version, the void-eyed one, the fractured childlike echoes every other silhouette stepped back, keeping distance. Even they feared this one. Even they knew what he’d become.The feral version tilted his head. His voice came cracked, like sound forced through stone. “You don’t belong here.”Jenna held her ground. “I’m not here to belong.”He laughed a slow, dry scrape. “No. You’re here to save him.”His fingertip traced the air, and shadows bent toward him like obedient pets. “That