The feral Denilson’s hand tightened on the real one’s shoulder not physically, but metaphysically. The grip didn’t press skin, it pressed memory. Jenna felt the pressure ripple outward, bending the air, warping the floor of the Vein until it pulsed like the inside of a throat.The real Denilson staggered under the weight. His knees buckled. Gold light cracked along his spine like breaking glass.“Don’t,” he warned, voice strained. “Jenna, stay”The feral version tilted his head, amused. “You still think you get to protect her.”He flicked his wrist. The Vein reacted. A shockwave of shadow threw the real Denilson to the ground, sliding him across the dark surface like a discarded thought. Jenna ran toward him, The ground split open in a clean, vertical line between them.A wall of mirrored darkness rose like a blade, sharp and gleaming with distorted reflections. Each reflection showed a version of her with different eyes, different wounds, different endings.A hundred Jennas stared ba

The world didn’t end. It detonated into silence. Not absence silence with weight, like a hand pressed over the universe’s mouth. Jenna felt the floor vanish beneath her, felt gravity snap sideways, felt the scream locked in her throat vibrate without sound.Then light. A column of gold ripped upward through the collapsing Vein, shredding the darkness into ribbons. It swallowed her, flung her upward like a dying star gasping for one last burst.Her body hit something soft and dense fog? cloud? memory?, before she tumbled hard onto uneven ground. She choked on air, lungs burning. Her palms sank into soil that wasn’t quite soil, warm and trembling like it remembered being alive.She coughed, blinked away lightspots. “Den?”Silence answered. Jenna pushed herself upright. The space around her slowly stabilized into shape: a stretch of cracked stone, patches of shimmering dust, a horizon that refused to hold still. The remnants of the Ashen Vein drifted above her like smoke from a dying fir

The world came apart the moment Jenna said too late. Not in a burst, not in a single instant of destruction, but in shuddering breaths. As if reality inhaled sharply, then forgot how to exhale.The cavern trembled violently. Gold veins streaked across the stone, pulsing in rhythm with Jenna’s racing heartbeat. The air folded inward, fluttering like paper caught in a whirlpool. Jenna tightened her arms around Denilson, bracing his limp weight against her chest.He was breathing barely, unevenly but breathing.“Jenna” His voice cracked like glass dragged across metal. “Give it back. Give it”“I won’t.”“You can’t” His fingers clawed weakly at her sleeve, a desperate grip full of fear, not for himself but for her. “It’ll tear you apart. You’re not built to hold what the Vein carried.”“Then I’ll break holding you.”He went still, Not out of agreement, out of horror. The gold inside her flared violently, illuminating her veins like molten pathways, turning her skin translucent in flashes.

The word didn’t echo, It landed. Soft, bare. Utterly impossible. Jenna’s heart stopped so abruptly it hurt. “Mom?”The child’s voice was small, quiet like someone tasting sound for the first time. The cavern’s dying light flickered across its face, illuminating features that were both familiar and wrong.A tiny tilt of the head. A soft line of a mouth, Hair the color of starlight dust, shifting between dark and gold. Eyes one Denilson’s deep ember-brown, one glowing Vein gold.Jenna couldn’t move, Her chest locked. Her throat sealed, breath refused to come. Denilson, still on his hands and knees, looked up slowly eyes wide, pupils trembling.His voice was barely audible. “No.”The child turned toward him. Its other eye his gold, fractured one brightened. “Dad?” Denilson flinched so hard he grabbed the stone beneath him, fingers digging into it until it cracked.He looked from Jenna to the child to the collapsing sky, desperately searching for the lie. The trick, the illusion. The tra

The roar didn’t echo, It folded the world. The platform beneath them shivered like something massive pressed its weight against reality’s door, cracking it at the hinges.The horizon newborn, fragile tore open in a jagged line, spilling out a cold wind that smelled like metal, dust, and endings. Jenna pulled Lio closer. Denilson shifted in front of both of them on instinct, body tense, jaw clenched, eyes locked on the widening rift.“Stay behind me,” he breathed.Lio shook their head. “No. I have to help.”“You’re a child,” Jenna said, voice sharp with fear.“I wasn’t born a minute ago,” Lio answered quietly. “I was made from everything you survived. That makes me stronger than you think.”Denilson’s pulse hammered visibly at his throat. Jenna grabbed his hand not to calm him, but to ground herself before she shattered into panic.The First Memory stepped forward, veil fluttering in the unnatural wind. “You three cannot fight the First Fracture.”Denilson shot her a glare. “Then what