~LaurentI moved.No thought.No hesitation.Shadow folded around me and tore.I reappeared in front of Vyrath and drove my fist into his face.The sound cracked like thunder.He slid back across the stone, boots carving deep scars, head snapping sideways."Now that punch had teeth," Vyrath smiled, wiping blood off his lips. "You're learning."I didn’t let him breathe.I shadow-stepped again.Behind him.Another punch.Then another.My fists blurred, shadow and blood and fury crashing into him in a relentless storm.Vyrath laughed.Not loud.Not mocking.Amused.“That’s it,” he said as my elbow smashed into his ribs. “That’s the spirit. You're finally fighting more like me."I snarled and slammed my knee into his stomach.“I’m nothing like you!”Blood surged through my veins—hot, violent, alive.Power flooded my limbs.My cloak of shadow thickened, tendrils snapping outward like living things.I hit him again.And again.My claws manifested mid-strike, raking across his chest. Scales

~LaurentI woke up choking on nothing.My eyes snapped open, and for a second I thought I was blind.There was no ceiling.No sky either.Just light.Soft. Pale. Colorless.It pulsed gently, like a living thing breathing around me.I tried to move.Pain answered first.Then resistance.My wrists burned.I looked down.Chains.Not iron. Not steel.Something translucent, etched with glowing runes that crawled slowly along their length, like veins carrying light instead of blood. They wrapped around my wrists, my ankles, my chest—pinning me upright against a stone altar carved from something that looked like glass and bone fused together.The moment I strained, the runes flared.Agony ripped through my nerves.I hissed and went still.The place… it felt wrong.Not empty.Not full.Suspended.Floating platforms drifted in the distance, connected by nothing. Symbols hovered in the air, rotating slowly, rearranging themselves when I wasn’t looking at them directly. The ground beneath me ref

~Omniscient The portal didn’t close gently. It snapped shut. One moment Laurent was there—being dragged backward into nothing, shadows tearing apart around him—and the next, the space folded in on itself with a sound like glass cracking under pressure. Then silence. For a heartbeat, no one moved. Residual energy ripped outward from the invisible portal Laurent had vanished into, throwing everyone back. Stone cracked. Pillars groaned. Dust and ash exploded into the hall in a choking wave. Calista hit the ground hard, rolling once before slamming into a fractured wall. Kendrix skidded across the floor on his side, barely managing to twist before smashing shoulder-first into a collapsed column. Denzel planted his feet, dragged backward several meters anyway, ice digging furrows into the stone. And Ivelle— Ivelle was already on her knees when it ended. Somehow, snapping the neck of a monster wasn’t enough to kill them. The portal flickered. Collapsed inward.

~CalistaMost people believe that to rebuild you need bricks, blocks and maybe people who can actually build but the truth is, rebuilding doesn’t actually start with walls.It starts with silence.The kind that settles after screaming has exhausted itself. After the fires are put out and the wounded are carried somewhere safe. After the city realizes it’s still standing—and doesn’t quite know what to do with that fact.Elarion woke slowly.Boards went up over shattered windows. Rubble was dragged into piles. Makeshift wards flickered back to life along streets that had once been choked with monsters. People moved like ghosts at first—quiet, careful, flinching at every loud sound.But they moved.That mattered.I helped where I could. Reinforcing structures with magic. Stitching fractures in stone the way I once stitched bone and flesh. Every spell felt heavier than it used to. Like the air itself resisted me now.Or maybe it was just grief.We didn’t stop looking for Laurent.We just…

~CalistaUnderstanding didn’t come all at once.It never does.It came in fragments—half-lines in forgotten margins, footnotes arguing with one another, diagrams that contradicted themselves depending on who had drawn them and when. The deeper I went, the clearer one thing became:The time vein wasn’t a spell.It was a wound.A stress fracture in reality caused by too much force applied at the wrong angle, at the wrong moment.Most mages theorized about them. Few had ever seen one. Fewer still had survived stepping through.I read until my eyes burned.Until candle wax pooled thick on the table.Until my fingers were ink-stained and shaking.The problem wasn’t opening a time vein.The problem was surviving what came after.Every source agreed on that.I tried on my own first.Of course I did.I tested detection spells in abandoned courtyards where reality still felt thin. I traced anchor circles and poured magic into them slowly, carefully, watching how the air reacted. Sometimes it s