All Chapters of System Within: Rise Of Frank Williams: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
97 chapters
Chapter 12, The Heart of the Root
The moment Frank opened his eyes, the world was gone. Nothing looked familiar. The ground beneath him shifted like water, rippling beneath his feet yet holding him suspended. Golden veins stretched across the black sky, pulsing slowly like a heartbeat. Every sound, even his own breathing, was amplified until it echoed in infinity.“Elara?” His voice was swallowed before it could reach her. She was beside him, crouched, her hand clutching his. “I’m here,” she whispered, voice trembling. “But… Frank, where are we?”“I don’t know,” he admitted, his own words feeling hollow. “It’s alive.”“Alive,” came the Root’s voice. Soft. Smooth. Tempting. Whispering directly into his mind. “Alive, and waiting for you. I’ve been watching.”Frank froze. The hairs on his neck stood on end. “I know you’re there,”He growled. “I am everywhere. You cannot leave me. You’ve already let me in.”He clenched his fists, golden light tracing the veins of his arms. “Then I’ll shut you out.”Ah, Frank… The voic
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 11: The Human Echo
The first thing Frank felt was “air.” Cold, sharp, unfamiliar it sliced through his lungs like frost. His eyes fluttered open, and the sky above him looked… wrong. It wasn’t blue. It was cracked faint golden lines running through clouds like veins in marble. The world hummed faintly, as if still alive but fractured. He sat up slowly, groaning. The ground beneath him wasn’t stone, nor dirt; it was some strange, translucent surface that rippled faintly with light. His own reflection stared back at him, eyes faintly glowing, veins traced with gold. “…Still me,” he whispered. “Maybe.”“Frank?”The voice made him freeze. He turned. Elara stood a few feet away, pale, trembling, eyes wide with disbelief. Her hair was shorter, her clothes tattered, her hands wrapped in bandages. “Elara.” His throat tightened. “You’re real.” She hesitated. “I think so. You… disappeared. There was light, fireeverything went quiet.”He took a shaky step forward. “How long?”“Three days. Maybe four. The sky
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 13, The Shattered Will
The world had frozen mid-collapse. Light hung in the air like shattered glass, suspended in motion, flickering between gold and crimson. Elara was on her knees beside Frank’s body, his skin burning with alternating flashes of light and shadow that crawled like living roots beneath his flesh. His breath came in shallow bursts, each one sending ripples of energy through the air. “Frank… can you hear me?” Her voice trembled. No response. The ground around them pulsed, alive. Threads of gold burrowed through the stone, curling toward his body like tendrils drawn to heat.“No, no, no,” Elara whispered, pressing her hand against his chest. “Stay with me.”The moment her fingers touched him, she saw it, a flash of another world. Fire. Roots. A forest made of memories. And in its center… Frank, standing between shadow and flame. Frank stood in the forest of the Root, a cathedral of twisting branches that breathed like lungs. The trees glowed faintly, their bark etched with moving faces.
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 14: The World Without Light
Darkness was not the absence of light anymore. It was light, twisted, inverted, breathing softly beneath the earth. Elara woke to its pulse. Her body lay half-buried beneath fine ash that shimmered faintly like embers cooling in the wind. Her throat was raw; her eyes burned. She coughed and rolled onto her side, feeling the ground tremble with a strange rhythm, slow, deliberate, alive. “Frank” she whispered. Only the wind answered, carrying a sound like a sigh through a forest that no longer existed. She pushed herself up. Her palms left prints in the dust, and the dust glowed faintly around them, outlining her hands with a faint golden hue. “No,” she muttered. “Not again.”The sky above her was colorless. The sun hung still, half eclipsed, as though frozen in mid-motion. The horizon rippled faintly, like heatwaves over desert stone, and from within that haze, faint silhouettes moved.“Elara!” a voice called.She turned sharply. A man stumbled toward her, one of the surviving gu
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 15 – The Echo That Wears His Face
“Ash drifts like snow over the ruin of the street, and the air trembles between silence and thunder.”“Frank?” Elara’s voice cracks.The shape standing in the haze doesn’t answer. Its head tilts, slow, deliberate. Gold light burns through the shadow where eyes should be. “Elara.” The sound of her name rolls through the dust,familiar, hollow.“It can’t be you.”“Can’t it?” The figure steps forward. The ground flickers between glass and ash. “You called. I came.”She backs away, pulse racing. “You’re an echo. A trick.”“Maybe.” A smile that isn’t his curves on its face. “Maybe I’m what’s left when love refuses to die.”The wind rises, carrying fragments of voices,his voice, laughing, pleading, overlapping like broken music. “Stop it!” she shouts. “You’re not him!”“I remember the fire,” the echo murmurs. “I remember your hand. You begged me not to go.”“I begged him,” she spits. “Not you.”The air thickens. Heat and chill surge together. Sparks spiral between them, lighting the cr
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 16 – The Return of the Rootfire
The street still smokes. Elara forces herself upright as the crack in the ground widens, red-gold light pouring from it like breath. “Frank!”“He can’t hear you,” the voice answers,soft, echoing from inside the fissure. “But we can.” She staggers back. The light rises in pillars, twisting into shapes that resemble faces,hundreds, whispering the same name. “You shouldn’t exist,” she shouts.“You freed us,” they answered.The air bends. A tremor knocks her to her knees. From the heart of the fissure, a column of flame shoots upward, unfurling like a tree made of fire and roots.“No, no, no,” she gasps. “You’re not real.”A laugh shakes the dust loose from the ruins. “Reality is a matter of agreement, Elara.”“Frank?”The column shudders. A figure steps from it,his silhouette cut from light. Half his face looks like the man she knew; the other half glows with living embers.“You shouldn’t have opened the seal,” he says.“I was trying to save you!”“Then save yourself now.”He lifts a h
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 17 – The Hand of the Root fire
The hand of fire closes around her. Heat sears the air but not her skin. For a heartbeat she feels weightless,then the world inverts. “Frank?”The voice that answers is his and not his. “Elara. Don’t be afraid.”She can’t move. Flames spiral around her, painting the sky in veins of gold. “What are you doing to me?”“Showing you what I see.”Light pours through her eyes. The city reforms and dissolves, buildings replaced by roots of light stretching toward a blood-red horizon. “Stop it!”“You wanted to understand.”“I wanted you back!” she cries.“Then look.”A thousand images flash,memories, lives, moments that aren’t hers. People standing in streets of molten glass, laughing as their shadows burn away. The world reborn in pain and peace at once. “It’s beautiful,” the Rootfire murmurs through him. “It’s order.”“It’s madness!”The grip tightens; her heartbeat syncs with his. Every pulse sends another vision,forests of light, oceans turning to crystal, faces watching her from within
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 18 – The Roots Awaken
Smoke still hangs over what used to be the upper terraces of the city. Elara moves through it, one arm shielding her face. The other clutched around the glowing ember that refuses to go dark. The streets breathe. That’s what it feels like,the ground rising and falling in slow, awful rhythm.“Hello?” she calls. Her voice echoes off the collapsed stone. “Is anyone alive?”A sound answers,a low hum, like a hundred voices whispering the same syllable beneath their breath. It rolls under her feet. “Frank?”Nothing. Only the hum. She stops beside what used to be a market square. The stalls are gone, replaced by coils of root-fire glowing like veins. Where the roots touch metal, the metal blooms into strange crystalline shapes. A figure steps out from behind the ruins. Human, or close enough.“Stay back!” Elara snaps, raising the ember. The figure tilts its head. “You carry his heart.”“Who are you?”“Caretaker,” it says, voice soft, echoing. “We woke when the Seed stirred.”“You mean th
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 19: The Heart of Fire
The roots hum like living instruments beneath Elara’s feet. Each step downward erases a piece of sound from the world above. By the time she reaches the last glowing platform, the city’s noise has vanished, replaced by a low, pulsing heartbeat that shakes the air.A vast chamber opens before her. No walls. Just light. And fire. And in the center, suspended like a god imprisoned in his own dream, is Frank. Or what’s left of him.His body hovers, veins of gold threading through his skin. Roots rise from the molten floor and pierce into him, carrying fire and shadow up his spine. His eyes flicker between human warmth and inhuman radiance. “Frank?” Her voice trembles.“Can you hear me?”His head tilts slightly, as if recognizing a song. Then, a whisper: “Elara…”She steps closer, heat blistering her palms even through the ember she carries. “It’s me. I’m here. You have to fight it.”The voice that answers is layered, part Frank, part something ancient beneath him. “There’s no fight lef
Last Updated : 2025-10-28
Chapter 20 : Ash and Crown
The palace bells never stop ringing. From the highest tower to the cracked marble halls, their sound drowns the air,a shrill warning that the world itself is falling apart.King Aldric stands before the balcony, staring out at what used to be his city. Half the skyline glows with veins of fire. The other half has simply stopped moving, as if time froze mid-breath.“Is that smoke or light?” the Chancellor asks behind him.“Both,” Aldric mutters. “And neither. The city burns but doesn’t die.”The Minister of War storms into the chamber, his armor scorched. “Your Majesty, the barracks are gone. The men say the roots swallowed them whole.”“Then call the reserve.”“There is no reserve!” the minister shouts. “Every signal line is dead,no sound, no birds, no wind!”Aldric turns sharply. “And the scholars? Someone must understand this.”The High Scholar steps forward, clutching a bundle of notes trembling in his hands. “Sire… we studied the energy patterns. They match the Rootfire legends.
Last Updated : 2025-10-28