The door did not open.That was the first lie reality told them.Instead, the wood softened. Not visibly at first—no splintering, no cracking—but the grain began to breathe, pulsing in slow, uneven rhythms, as if something on the other side were pressing its face against it, testing the shape of the world with curiosity rather than force.Lilith felt it before she understood it. A pressure behind her eyes. A tightening in her chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition. She had felt this once before, long ago, in fragments of dreams she never spoke about. The same sensation that told her this moment was not new—it was returning.“Adam,” she said quietly. “That door isn’t a door anymore.”Adam stood unmoving at the center of the nave, shadows sliding along his spine like they belonged there. The hum beneath his skin had grown louder, no longer a whisper but a steady resonance that matched the pulse of the warped wood. His reflection in the polished marb

The air in the liminal space pulsed, thick and almost viscous, as if reality itself had been kneaded into a dough of shadow and light. Adam stood on uneven ground, the warped horizon bending in impossible angles, every step echoing unnaturally, reflecting fragments of his own past across the distorted landscape. Sanchez’s presence lingered like a static charge, his twisted grin frozen in time, and the entity beyond the visible pressed closer, cold and intelligent.Adam’s chest heaved with controlled breaths, each inhalation tasting faintly of metal and ash. Malrick hovered near him, half shadow, half voice, whispering reminders and warnings in rhythms that only Adam could feel. “The longer you linger, the deeper they claim you,” Malrick murmured, voice vibrating beneath Adam’s skin. “Do not forget, this place reacts. You are both anchor and bait.”Adam’s mind raced. Every strategy he had rehearsed, every manipulation, every tactical advantage, now felt trivial. The psychic plane was n

The ground did not merely split—it decided.A sound like a thousand bones snapping echoed through the liminal layer as the surface beneath Adam, Lilith, and Kaleb fractured along lines that did not follow geometry or logic. The break raced outward in branching veins, glowing faintly with a cold, spectral light before plunging into bottomless dark. Gravity lurched sideways. Up became a suggestion. Down became negotiable.Adam barely had time to react before the fracture widened beneath his feet.He caught Lilith’s wrist on instinct, fingers locking around her sleeve as the ground peeled away. Kaleb cried out, scrambling, managing to hook an arm around a jutting piece of warped stone that flexed like cartilage beneath his grip.The unknown symbol above them pulsed violently.Not brighter.Closer.It did not move through space so much as compress it, collapsing distance until its presence loomed overhead, vast and suffocating. Its edges were no longer abstract; they resolved into layered

Adam awoke to silence that was too complete to be natural.Not the quiet of an empty room, nor the stillness of night, but a silence that felt constructed—as though sound itself had been removed deliberately, peeled away layer by layer until nothing remained but awareness. His body lay on a surface that was neither hard nor soft, something that yielded just enough to register weight without offering comfort. When he inhaled, the air entered his lungs without resistance, tasteless and cold, carrying no scent, no warmth, no life.The first thing he realized was that gravity existed here—but only barely.The second was that Malrick was gone.Not withdrawn. Not quiet.Gone.That absence struck harder than any wound. Adam’s mind reached instinctively for the familiar pressure, the ever-present shadow coiled around his thoughts, the voice that had guided, warned, challenged him since the beginning. There was nothing. No echo. No hum. Just an empty cavity where something immense had once res

The first thing Adam noticed was sound.Not the normal rush of it—the layered noise of a city breathing—but a single, low-frequency tremor that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It vibrated through the cracked pavement beneath his back, through the air, through his bones. A resonance, steady and patient, like a heartbeat that did not belong to any living thing.He tried to move.Pain answered immediately, sharp and total, flaring through his limbs like broken glass dragged through muscle. His breath caught, a raw sound tearing from his throat as the world tilted and steadied again.Above him, the sky was wrong.The clouds still moved, but not naturally. They circled a point just beyond visibility, folding in slow, deliberate spirals as though something unseen were turning them by hand. The light filtering through them carried a dull, bruised hue—too gray for evening, too dim for afternoon.Lilith was the first thing he focused on.She was on her knees beside him, one hand braced