~Calista“Follow my lead,” Aerin said.There was no time to argue.He moved.Straight into the open.Fire tore from him in a violent arc, not wild but intentional—spells layered over spells, sigils snapping into existence mid-air before detonating. The altar screamed. The symbols juddered, losing alignment. The careful geometry of the ritual fractured like glass struck at its weakest point.Vyrath turned sharply.For the first time since I had ever known him—He looked surprised.“Who are you?” Vyrath demanded, voice cutting through the chaos. “How did you get in here?”Aerin didn’t answer.He raised one hand and unleashed hell.The blast caught Vyrath full in the chest, hurling him sideways across the altar. Stone shattered. The pull of the void intensified instantly, furious now, greedy. Vyrath skidded toward its edge, boots scraping, claws tearing furrows into the surface as he fought for purchase.“Aerin!” I shouted.“Now,” he said. “Make sure he goes in. I’ll save Laurent.”I did

~LaurentConsciousness returned in fragments.Sound first—distant, warped, like it was travelling through water. A low hum threaded through everything, not loud enough to be noise, not quiet enough to ignore. It vibrated inside my bones, setting my teeth on edge.Then sensation.Weightlessness. Pressure without direction. The feeling of being held and pulled at the same time, as if reality itself couldn’t decide what to do with me.I sucked in a breath—and choked.The air wasn’t air. It burned cold, sliding into my lungs wrong, carrying too much information with it. Colours bled behind my closed eyes. Not images. Impressions. The echo of places I’d never been and moments that didn’t belong to me.I forced my eyes open.The world was folding.Not collapsing—curving. Space bent inward around me in slow, deliberate arcs, like I was moving through the inside of a lens. Light stretched into ribbons, pale and fractured, wrapping around my body as I drifted forward. There was no ground. No s

~LaurentThe city was waking, but not with the usual murmur of ordinary mornings. Elarion exhaled in the soft crackle of rebuilding. I took it upon myself to bring Elarion back to how it was before the whole chaos that Vyrath brought with his emergence. I supervised the walls being repaired, towers being reconstructed, the faint hiss of arcane energy sealing fissures where monsters had torn through. I walked through the streets with a slow, deliberate pace, boots echoing against stone that had once been charred black. Each step carried a weight I had grown accustomed to—the quiet knowledge that the monsters, though not gone, now lived only if I permitted them to.The air smelled of wet stone and iron, the scent of the recent past that clung stubbornly to the bones of the city. I paused, letting my eyes drift across a courtyard where the first of the E-rank students were training under the watchful eyes of instructors I had appointed myself. My system had been patient, my own powe

~LaurentThe alley smelled of smoke and rain. Damp bricks pressed close on either side, narrow and twisting. Sunlight barely touched the cobblestones, leaving everything else in shadow. I paused, a hand brushing against the wet wall, listening.Movement. A subtle shift in the darkness. Not much, but enough.I didn’t panic. Not yet. I had learned to trust instincts sharper than fear itself.“You can come out,” I said quietly. “You’re terrible at hiding.”The shadows moved, slow, deliberate. A laugh echoed—soft, amused, familiar.“Seriously?” the voice asked. “I thought I got better at this.”I tensed. “What do you want?”“I heard you were looking for someone.”“Who told you that?” I asked, frowning.“Just a hunch,” it replied.“That’s a very specific hunch. Is that your power? Super perception?”“A bit,” the voice said. And then the figure stepped forward.Light caught the edges of its form, revealing a monster. Not grotesque, not terrifying at first glance—but definitely not human. It

~Omniscient POVThe inside of the void was alive. Not in any sense one could name or touch, yet it throbbed, an endless pulse of colour and shadow, a place where gravity bent like wet cloth and time smirked behind its hand. Islands of stone floated in impossible arcs, some large enough to harbour forests of twisted, glowing trees, others mere shards of rock spinning lazily in mid-air. Wisps of light twisted like smoke along the edges, dissolving, reforming, bleeding into the ever-shifting black around them.Vyrath tore through the nearest fragment of rock with a howl, claws scraping against the impossible geometry. Shards floated upward, circling him in a chaotic dance before being swallowed into the void. He thrashed again, a tempest in miniature, each movement leaving trails of fractured colour in the air, sparks of his wrath illuminating the swirling darkness.“You’ll tire yourself before you even begin to understand it,” a voice called, clipped, sharp. Calista hovered nearby, leg