~LaurentThe barracks sat beyond the ash line, a cluster of shadows and broken stone, like a wound in the land. Even from here, I could feel the pulse of movement: monsters pacing, patrolling, sentries shifting with mechanical precision. Not human patterns. Cold. Efficient. Deadly.I crouched behind a ridge of scorched rock, surveying, mapping in my head. Denzel and Kendrix flanked me, silent. Calista lingered behind, tense.“Courier,” I whispered. A figure moved along a narrow path connecting two towers. One of Vyrath’s messengers, light on its feet, unaware it was being hunted.Denzel’s eyes narrowed. “Timing is critical.”I nodded. “We can’t risk being seen. Not yet.”I stepped into the shadows, feeling the stones hum underfoot. Every inch counted. I could hear Denzel’s restrained breath beside me, Kendrix’s silent awareness. We were a unit, but each of us carried different weights—fear, memory, experience.The courier passed close enough that I could see the thin metal strip dangl

~LaurentThe monster lunged again. Fast. Brutal. Its claws arced toward me, aiming for my chest, my throat, the places that mattered most. I rolled through the strike, Shadow Step flickering me through its line of attack. My feet touched the floor behind it. Its momentum carried it past me, and I delivered a palm strike to its back. Sinew compressed beneath my fingers. It staggered but didn’t fall.Not even close.The monster snarled, splitting into three duplicates mid-spin. Shadowed versions of itself, coiling around me, clawing, snapping, a whirl of sinew and teeth. I smiled.I exhaled slowly, letting my eyes scan the chaos. Calculated. Precise. I wasn’t intimidated.“Clones,” I muttered. “Cheap tricks.”I Shadow Stepped between the duplicates, striking one across the shoulder. The shadows around me surged into tendrils, latching onto another. Its body screamed against the pull, tendrils wrapping tighter, shredding sinew with precision.Another clone lunged. I countered with a slas

~Laurent Ivellé spoke first. Her voice was rough, like it had to scrape its way out of her throat before it remembered how to be sound. “Where have you been?” The question wasn’t angry. It wasn’t accusing. It was worse than both—tired, brittle, carrying the weight of time that had passed without me in it. I looked up from where I was adjusting the perimeter, shadows sinking into the roots and stones around our temporary camp. The ash thinned here, the trees bent low like they were listening. Kendrix was a little distance away, standing watch. Denzel and Calista were resting, though I doubted either of them were truly asleep. Ivellé sat with her back against a fallen trunk, knees drawn close to her chest. She looked smaller in stillness. Like the world had taken pieces of her and forgotten to give them back. “I was trapped,” I said simply. “Somewhere that doesn’t measure time properly.” Her brow furrowed. “That’s not an answer.” A ghost of a smile tugged at my mouth. “It’s

~VyrathThe realm I appeared in did not welcome visitors.It never had.The air here was thin in a way that had nothing to do with altitude. Thought felt heavier, slower, as though the world itself resented being perceived. I stepped through the veil anyway, my boots pressing into stone that remembered older laws than Elarion’s—laws that had once dared to believe they were permanent.They always did.The structure before me was not a palace. It had never needed to be. A circular sanctum carved directly into a mountainside, its entrance marked by sigils so old their meanings had eroded into instinct. Warding runes flared faintly as I approached, then hesitated.They recognized me.That hesitation cost them everything.I passed through without resistance. The interior opened into a vast chamber layered in terraces, each ring carved with glyphs meant to suppress intrusion, nullify domination, unravel intent. At the center knelt a single figure bound in light—chains of condensed probabili

~VyrathThe records room did not announce itself.It simply was.One step beyond the corridor’s end and the world stopped pretending it was singular. The walls dissolved into depth—not distance, not space, but layers. Windows hovered where stone should have been, tall panes of suspended clarity drifting in slow, deliberate orbits. Each one framed a different reality, a different set of rules pretending to be natural.Dimensions.Not viewed from afar. Not described. Observed.Some windows showed skies stitched with lightning that never struck. Others revealed oceans folded inward like lungs mid-breath. Cities flickered in and out of existence, half-remembered by the laws that birthed them. In one, I saw a civilization frozen at the moment of annihilation, their shadows still screaming against glass.The room hummed—not audibly, but internally. A vibration that crawled along the spine of thought itself.This was not an archive.It was a threshold.I stepped forward, and the floor accept