The wind had gone still.Not quiet still.No sound, no movement, no birds. Just the hum.Kael stood on what used to be the edge of the Hollow Sanctuary, but the land had changed. The ruins were gone, replaced by spirals of glass like soil, glowing faintly with embedded veins of light. The sky had taken on a pale, dreamlike hue, as if the Dominion’s awakening had bled into reality itself.Selene tightened her grip on her cloak as she stepped beside him. “It’s… different,” she whispered.Kael nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the horizon. “The Dominion’s rewriting the land. It’s stabilizing after the resonance.”She looked at him, his posture, the faint shimmer around him. His left eye still flickered between silver and gold. It wasn’t just light, it was two pulses overlapping.“Kael,” she said quietly, “you need to rest. You haven’t slept since”“I can’t.” His voice was distant, almost hollow. “Every time I close my eyes,

The wind that carried them east was not the wind of the old world.It hummed faintly, like wires pulled tight across the horizon, whispering in tones that weren’t natural. Kael could feel the Dominion’s hum beneath every gust, subtle, patient, alive.He and Selene walked for hours through the white gold plains that followed the collapse of the lattice. The ground shimmered faintly, veins of light pulsing beneath the soil like arteries beneath skin.“Still think it’s dormant?” Selene asked quietly.Kael shook his head. “Dormant things don’t breathe.”They moved in silence after that.For the first time in days, the land wasn’t burning or bleeding, but that didn’t make it safer. Everything here looked real, the sky, the sparse vegetation, even the scattered ruins of old farmhouses but each thing flickered faintly at the edges, as though remembering some other version of itself.Selene bent once, brushing her hand across a crack

The wind was no longer gentle. It screamed.From horizon to horizon, the sky cracked open like a wound. The veins of light that had once been faint threads above the world now blazed like rivers of molten stars, coursing through the heavens with violent rhythm. The Dominion was awake, no longer whispering, but roaring through every grain of dust and flicker of flame.Kael stood on the ridge above the Fane’s outer valley, his cloak snapping in the gale. His aura burned a deep silver, brighter than before, and every breath he took shimmered in the air. Selene stood beside him, her eyes fixed on the maelstrom above.“This isn’t just a storm,” she said quietly.“It’s memory unraveling.”Kael nodded, his voice low. “The Dominion’s trying to rewrite what was broken… but it’s losing control. It’s bleeding into the present.”Down in the valley, the land convulsed. Fragments of ruins lifted from the ground, twisting upward as if gravity had forgott

The storm had passed.But silence that heavy, humming silence remained.Selene stood at the edge of the ruined Fane, staring out at the wasteland below. The sky was no longer bleeding light, no longer fractured by the Dominion’s fury. Instead, it was eerily clear, like the world itself was holding its breath.Behind her, Kael knelt among the ashes, his fingers brushing over what had once been the central altar. The air around him shimmered faintly, bending light as if space couldn’t quite decide what shape he should take.He wasn’t glowing anymore.But the stillness in him was different, too controlled, too balanced.Selene swallowed hard. “You’re quiet again,” she said softly.Kael looked up at her, and for a moment she caught it, the flicker of two lights behind his eyes, one gold, one silver, fading into each other.“I have to be,” he said. “If I stop focusing, everything… moves.”Selene frowned. “Everything?”