The sirens had stopped, but the silence that followed was worse.A strange humming still lingered in the air, faint and hollow, like the aftertaste of a scream too large for the world to hold. The cafeteria lights flickered in lazy intervals, revealing overturned chairs, splintered trays, and the gleam of spilled soup that looked, in the shadows, far too much like blood.Lilith stood near the shattered glass doors, her hand trembling around Kaleb’s arm. Neither spoke. The smell of ozone, sharp and metallic, burned at the back of her throat. She had seen strange things before—the fracture had whispered to her once, calling through reflections—but never like this.It was as though the air had cracked.“Kaleb…” she murmured, voice small, “Do you feel that?”He didn’t answer immediately. His eyes, wide behind his cracked glasses, darted toward the walls where the shadows had begun to ripple as if stirred by an invisible wind. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw his own reflection blink a s

The morning bell shrieked through Saint Haven High like any other Monday — sharp, metallic, impatient.Naomi adjusted the strap of her backpack, weaving through the flood of students spilling down the hallways. She had only transferred a week ago, but already the place felt wrong. Not haunted, not cursed — just off. The light in the corridors flickered sometimes without reason, conversations would fall abruptly silent when she passed, and she could swear the air grew colder near the old wing by the art room.Beside her, Ryder chewed gum with lazy disinterest, his uniform collar open and his hair unkempt in deliberate rebellion. “You sure this is the right place?” he muttered, his voice carrying a rasp that made him sound older than sixteen. “Smells like detention and bad secrets.”Naomi gave a dry laugh. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”He smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. There was something unreadable in his expression — the way his gaze darted too often, like he was seeing things n

The air around Adam shimmered with distortion, a humming tension that pressed against his skin as if reality itself were holding its breath. The gray horizon of the liminal world bled into something darker, a void flickering with broken reflections — his face, Lilith’s, Kaleb’s, and Sanchez’s, each twisting through the mist like dying stars.He stood at the edge of the fracture — the same rift that had swallowed him, the same that threatened to consume everything else. It pulsed faintly now, its rhythm syncing with his heartbeat. For a moment, Adam thought he could hear whispering — voices of everyone who had ever touched this realm: Elena’s soft cry, Jake’s low laughter, even Martha’s dissonant humming that used to echo in his nightmares.He wasn’t alone.The air shifted, and from the distortion stepped Sanchez — no longer the man he once knew. His face was drawn, eyes blackened by something deeper than hate. He looked like a shell filled with storms.“You never learned, did you?” Sa

The town was quieter than it should have been. Not the calm of peace, but the uneasy hush that comes just before the sky splits and the wind refuses to blow. From the outside, the church looked untouched—still, burned, and blackened—but anyone who entered would have known it was a lie. The ground shivered faintly beneath each step, the air thick with the weight of unspent energy.Adam moved cautiously along the cracked stone floor. His hands burned from residual energy, veins still faintly glowing, and his eyes scanned the shadows like they held secrets he could no longer afford to ignore. Every corner of the church seemed to pulse with memory: the remnants of broken pews, the faint echoes of voices that weren’t there, the flicker of light in angles that refused physics.Kaleb followed close behind, clutching the small charm Elena had left him. His face was pale, but his jaw was set. The normally invisible, quiet boy seemed heavier now, burdened by the knowledge of what the fracture h

The gray world rippled like mist caught in a wind that didn’t exist. Lilith paused mid-stride, one foot sinking slightly into the murky ground as if it were loosely packed ash. The space around her vibrated faintly, reacting to Adam’s clash with the Architect’s shadows in the real world. Every surge of his power cracked the liminal layer like thin glass, lighting up the horizon with red fissures that spiderwebbed through the dim sky.Elena stumbled beside her, breath hitching. “It’s getting worse,” she whispered. Her voice echoed as though a second Elena somewhere far away repeated her fear half a second later. Her eyes glowed—not fully gold, but threaded with veins of it, a mark of the lingering entity still coiled inside her.Lilith grabbed her wrist to steady her. “We can use that.”Elena blinked. “Use… what? The possession?”“Your connection,” Lilith said. “You’re a beacon. Whether you like it or not, this place responds to you. It reacts to me too—but differently.” She pressed he