The world beyond the ruined church peeled open like wet paper, revealing a corridor of gray light that breathed with a pulse of its own. Lilith stepped through first, her jaw tight, her fingers trembling despite how hard she fought to hide it. The air here pressed inward, thick as damp cloth, and every inhale tasted faintly of metal—like blood that hadn’t decided if it wanted to dry.Kaleb followed, flinching when the doorway behind them rippled shut in silence. No latch clicking. No airflow. Just the world sealing them inside.The ground beneath their feet resembled stone at first, but under pressure it gave like cartilage—flexible, wrong. Every step made something beneath it shift, like bones rearranging.Kaleb whispered, barely breathing, “This place wasn’t like this last time.”“It’s deeper,” Lilith said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Adam went farther in. And whatever pulled him… followed.”She didn’t need to explain what “whatever” meant. The air already carried the evidenc

The air cracked.Not thunder, not pressure — something older, something that had learned to mimic sound only after devouring whatever came before sound existed. Adam’s body flickered like a broken constellation, each pulse of light sharp enough to cut shadows apart. Lilith squeezed Kaleb’s hand, both of them bracing themselves as the gray world around them lurched, stretching like a canvas pulled too tight.“The doors will open,” the voice repeated, echoing through the marrow of the world. “All will belong to me.”Adam arched forward, agony ripping through him as the breach behind him widened. Black tendrils curled outward like fingers tasting the air, searching, choosing. The ground trembled in a heartbeat rhythm — not his, not theirs — something colossal waking up beneath reality.And in the sky, the watching thing shifted.Lilith’s breath snagged in her throat. She couldn’t see its form fully, but she felt it: the way the clouds bled inward, the way the gray above dented as if some

The beam of white, devouring light hit Adam like a celestial spear—silent, perfect, merciless. The fractured realm reacted as though stabbed through its core. The sky shattered in a ripple of cracks, each one emitting the sharp ring of broken crystal multiplied a thousandfold.Lilith screamed his name, fighting the pull of the collapsing ground as she threw her weight toward him. Kaleb lunged too, fingers brushing empty air before a shockwave hurled him backward, tumbling across a floor that kept re-forming beneath him in jagged, uncaring slabs.Adam didn’t fall.He hung suspended within the pillar of light, body rigid, head thrown back, mouth open in a soundless gasp. The glow carved through him, not burning, not wounding—claiming. As though the realm had marked him with a brand, and now the brand wanted its due.Lilith crawled forward, hair whipping around her face in the violent wind spiraling from the beam. Her eyes were wet, furious, refusing to accept this. “Adam! Look at me—loo

The world did not snap back into place after the collapse — it shuddered, twitching like something half-alive, half-dead.The liminal layer trembled, its gray horizon buckling in and out like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Buildings that had once been stable silhouettes flickered, stretching too tall, then compressing.Lilith felt the air thicken, not like fog but like breath — slow, labored, hot.“Something’s waking,” she murmured, her voice barely carrying through the static-laced air.Kaleb stood beside her, tense but steady. “Not Adam?”“No,” she whispered. “This is… older.”Cracks spread beneath their feet — not in the ground, but in the layer itself. Like glass that had been struck from the inside.Between the cracks, Lilith could hear something breathing. Long, wet inhales. Quivering exhales. A presence shifting in the dark below.Kaleb grabbed her arm as the ground pitched. “Hey—stay with me. Don’t fall into whatever that is.”She didn’t answer — she couldn’t.Because right then,

The entity expanded its attention like a tide. Its hunger spread through the liminal layer and the fracture both, a slow, irresistible gravity, and the air answered by tightening around every bone in the town. Shadows lengthened their teeth. The watching eyes in the sky blinked in unison, expectant.Then a second sound threaded into the pressure — quieter, lower, older than the world, and not a voice so much as a remembering. It did not shout; it unlatched memory. The sound was like ocean-floor stone grinding on stone, like the first language of the deep. It answered the entity not with challenge but with recognition.It said one name.“Adam.”The word rolled across the fracture as if carved into basalt. The ancient entity paused. Something like a ripple of irritation—then attention—moved through it. It hadn’t expected a reply that old, one originating from a place that remembered before doors. For the first time, the presence felt watched.In the psychic plane, where Adam hung betwee