The bead lay in Lilith’s palm like something dredged up from a river that no longer existed. Cold. Slick. Breathing.Not pulsing — breathing.A single whisper curled out of it, feather-light and intimate:“Lilith…”Her throat tightened, but she didn’t drop it. Couldn’t. The sound didn’t come from the air — it came from inside her skull, threading along old wounds, old fears, old dreams she had tried desperately to forget.Kaleb took a careful half-step back, his voice low.“Lilith… what is that?”She couldn’t answer. Words felt like smoke.Something in the bead shifted — a faint shimmer, as though a pupil blinked open beneath its surface.And then everything around them changed.The room didn’t darken — it inverted. The walls stretched upward like pulled shadows, growing tall and thin and wrong. The floor rippled under their feet, turning translucent for a second, revealing an endless drop below as if the church floated above a bottomless pit.Kaleb reached for her, instinctively pull

The air shimmered around Lilith and Kaleb like a mirage, twisting and bending in impossible ways. Shadows stretched at odd angles, and the ground beneath them rippled as though the liminal layer itself were breathing. Every step they took felt heavier than the last, like wading through water that didn’t exist. The world around them was gray and unfinished, an echo of reality, a warped copy. Buildings warped in impossible geometry, streetlights melted into jagged shards of metal, and distant echoes of voices hummed in the void.Kaleb’s fingers brushed against the cracked pavement, as if touching the surface could anchor him. His glasses reflected a distorted version of himself, the liminal layer imprinting a flicker of someone else beneath his skin. “Lilith… it’s like… it’s alive,” he whispered, voice tight with fear. “It’s watching us, and… and it knows Adam’s here.”Lilith’s eyes, glowing faintly with the residual magic from her last fight, scanned the horizon. The tendrils of gray m

The words “Not today” were still leaving Adam’s lips when the sky shuddered—actually shuddered—as though something enormous pressed its weight against the world’s ceiling, straining the thin membrane of reality. A low, resonant hum vibrated through the streets, rattling windows and bones alike.Lilith stumbled back, clutching her ears. Kaleb braced himself against a toppled lamppost. And Adam… Adam stood in the center of the trembling street, his hair whipped upward by an unseen current, his eyes reflecting the warping sky.Malrick hovered beside him—half-shadow, half-form, far more solid now than ever. His shape flickered between a skeletal silhouette and a war-scarred humanoid presence draped in darkness, the air around him bending slightly like heat distortion.“The barrier ruptures,” Malrick murmured, voice rough, ancient. “You have seconds, boy. Only seconds before it widens.”Above them, the sky split.It didn’t crack. It didn’t tear. It opened—slowly, like the eyelid of a colos

The first sign that something was wrong came at dawn.The city was too quiet.Lilith noticed it before anyone else. She stood at the cracked edge of the liminal layer, watching the veil thin with unnatural sharpness. She could see faint, flickering silhouettes of the real world—buildings, streets, the soft morning glow—but something was off. The sunlight didn’t look like sunlight. It was pale, diluted, as if filtered through something sickly.And then she heard it.A low hum, like insects buzzing inside walls.Kaleb stepped beside her, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Is it shifting again?”“Not just shifting,” Lilith whispered. “Something is leaking.”She turned.Adam stood behind them, still pale from the aftermath of being dragged from the Entity’s domain. Malrick hovered close, more solid than ever, as if the ordeal had empowered him too. Shadows trailed behind him like dark, sentient smoke.Adam frowned at the strange dimness. His voice was rough but steady. “No… it’s not leaking.”

Darkness wasn’t the right word.Darkness was absence.This… this was presence.Adam’s eyes snapped open—or he thought they did. There was no sense of a body, no arms, no legs, no breath. Only floating consciousness suspended in a place that pulsed like a sleeping giant’s heartbeat.WHUM.A tremor rippled through the black expanse.WHUM.The void vibrated again… answering him.Then came the whisper.Not sound.Not voice.More like a memory pushed under his skin.“At last.”Adam tried to speak, but the realm swallowed the attempt. Words dissolved. Thoughts thinned. He felt the Vessel inside him—quiet for weeks—begin to stretch like a beast uncurling after centuries.A shape emerged.Not walking.Not floating.Forming.A towering silhouette, tall enough that Adam felt like an ant before a mountain. Twisted limbs like smoke and bone. Dozens of eyes blinking open along its body, each one staring directly into him.The Entity.The real one.Not the fragment inside him.Not the psychic echo