The moment Adam crossed the school gates, the pressure intensified.It wasn’t dramatic. There was no sudden wind, no thunder cracking open the sky. It was subtler than that—more insidious. Like walking deeper into water without realizing how far the ground had dropped away beneath his feet.He stopped at the sidewalk, backpack slung over one shoulder, eyes fixed on nothing. Cars passed. People laughed too loudly nearby. The world kept moving, ignorant of the fact that something ancient had shifted its attention fully onto him.Malrick stirred.Not with words.With weight.It settled into Adam’s chest, not like possession, not like control—but like a second gravity layered beneath his own. His breath hitched for a fraction of a second before he mastered it. He had learned, painfully, how to hide these things. How to let the storm rage inward while his face remained calm.Lilith paused a few steps behind him.“You’re not okay,” she said.Adam didn’t turn. “I never am.”“That’s not what

The fall did not end.Adam had expected impact—pain, collision, some definitive moment where descent surrendered to consequence. Instead, the sensation thinned, stretched, became something less physical and more conceptual, as if gravity itself were reconsidering its obligations.He drifted.The gray around him was not empty. It was unfinished. Shapes suggested themselves and then retreated, half-ideas aborting mid-creation. The horizon folded in on itself, repeating like a thought trapped in a loop. Sound existed only when it wanted to, arriving late, leaving early.Adam’s body felt distant, like an echo of something he used to inhabit.Malrick remained with him, but no longer merely within. The presence hovered closer to coherence now, its outline sharpening in fits and starts, as though the fracture were giving it permission to exist more honestly.“This is the liminal layer,” Adam said, his voice carrying oddly, multiplied and softened at once. “But deeper.”This is beneath the dr

The fracture did not stabilize.It hesitated.That hesitation was worse.Adam stood at the center of the gray, Malrick’s presence fused to him like a second nervous system—every thought echoing twice, every sensation sharpened and deepened. The pain had not vanished. It had become useful, a burning clarity that cut through fear and doubt alike.The Entity loomed, vast and unfinished, its shape stuttering as the fracture struggled to reconcile incompatible truths. Where it had pressed forward with inevitability before, now it circled—not physically, but conceptually—testing boundaries, probing the limits of this new configuration.Adam felt its attention like cold fingers rifling through the margins of his mind.You have altered the equation, it pressed, curiosity edging into irritation. This vessel was not meant to resist integration.Adam swallowed, blood still trickling from his nose, voice hoarse but steady. “I’m not your solution.”Everything becomes a solution eventually.Malrick

The realm Adam stood in did not announce itself with fire or thunder. It did something worse—it waited.The ground beneath his feet was neither solid nor soft, but a compromise between intention and memory. It shifted subtly, like something alive choosing not to move too much. Above him stretched a sky without distance, a dim, bruised gray that pulsed faintly, as though it were breathing in time with his heart. Every pulse made his chest ache, not with pain, but with recognition.This place knew him.Adam took a step forward. The sound his foot made was wrong—too intimate. Not an echo, not a scrape, but a dull thud that seemed to answer from somewhere inside his skull. He stopped immediately, jaw tightening, shoulders drawing inward as instinct screamed at him not to move again.You are already inside, Malrick’s voice murmured—not beside him, not behind him, but threaded through his thoughts like an old scar being pressed. Movement here is a declaration.Adam didn’t answer. He had lea

The bell’s echo refused to die.It lingered in the air like a held breath, vibrating through the bones of the church, through the dust lodged in its corners, through Adam’s chest where something old and coiled shifted in response. The sound should have faded. Sound always did. But this one stretched, thinning into a frequency more felt than heard, until Adam had the uncomfortable certainty that it wasn’t traveling outward at all.It was traveling inward.Lilith sensed it too. Her shoulders stiffened, her fingers curling against the pew as though bracing against a sudden drop. The stained glass above them trembled—not visibly, not enough to draw the eye, but enough that the colors seemed to smear, bleeding into one another like wet paint.Kaleb swallowed hard. “That bell,” he said quietly. “That didn’t feel like… sound.”Adam didn’t answer immediately. His attention was split, stretched thin between the physical space of the church and the pressure building behind his eyes. The Door—th