All Chapters of System Within: Rise Of Frank Williams: Chapter 31
- Chapter 40
97 chapters
Chapter 31: After the Whiteout
Silence. Not the silence of peace. The silence of nothing left to make sound. Elara wakes on her knees, surrounded by a flat horizon of white,no sky, no ground, no air. Only a colorless expanse, endless and soft, like the inside of light itself. She looks down. Her reflection stares back from the surface beneath her. She’s kneeling on glass,or water,or memory. Her voice cracks when she speaks. “Is anyone here?”The sound travels nowhere. It loops around her and fades. Her chest burns. The Rootfire is gone. She feels its absence like a missing heartbeat. “Hello?”Still nothing. She closes her eyes and listens. There’s only the faint whisper of her own breath. Then,so quiet she almost imagines it,another breath, echoing hers. “Who’s there?”The whisper answers, soft, male, familiar. “You shouldn’t be.”Her body stiffens. “Frank?”“That’s not the right question.”The air shivers. The whiteness ripples, forming outlines,faint silhouettes walking, dissolving, reforming. Faces she recog
Chapter 32 – The Shattered Within
Elara falls forever. There’s no ground. No sky. Only shards of color spiraling around her, fragments of places she once knew: a stone corridor, the king’s hall, a child’s laughter, the Rootfire’s glow, Frank’s shadow. All turning, breaking, reassembling.She can’t tell if she’s falling through memory or through herself.“Stop,” she whispers.The echo multiplies. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”Hundreds of voices. All hers. All slightly wrong. “No,” one voice says sharply. “You started this.”Elara jerks her head up. Floating above her, a version of herself draped in white fire stares down, eyes hollow and bright. “You’re not real,” Elara says.“Neither are you.”Another Elara appears,this one burnt, her skin cracked like glass. “We warned you.”“You silenced us,” another says.More appear, encircling her,dozens, hundreds, each a frozen expression of guilt, rage, hope.“You shouldn’t exist,” Elara says.“We are your existence.”“I’m done with illusions.”“We’re not illusions. We’re your conseque
Chapter 33: The Stirring Sky
No one remembers when the sun began to hum. At first it was only a vibration,soft, steady, threaded through the wind like a pulse under glass. Then the light changed. Gold gave way to a pale shimmer, not quite day, not quite night. They called it the Stillhour.The palace stood rebuilt, though no one recalled who rebuilt it. Marble corridors gleamed with veins of silver that glowed faintly in rhythm with the humming sky. Guards whispered more than they spoke; sound carried too far, echoing against nothing. “Did you hear that again?” one guard murmured.“It’s just the wind.”“The wind doesn’t breathe like that.”He pointed upward. Clouds twisted in lazy spirals, converging on a single point over the city. From there, light dripped downward like rain that never fell.In the markets below, people gathered where the fountains used to sing. The water was gone, replaced by a mirror-smooth surface that reflected the sky even when they looked away. Their reflections blinked slower than th
Chapter 34: The Mirrorheart
Light presses against her skin like breath. Then she realizes, she is the light. The world beyond her is a trembling silhouette. She sees streets bending, people glowing, rivers turning into veins of memory.Everything that once was has folded inside her, and she feels it,alive, whispering, begging to be born again.“Where… am I?” Her voice ripples through eternity, echoing in a thousand tongues. “Inside,” another voice answers,warm, patient, terrifyingly familiar.“Inside what?”“Inside yourself. The shape you left behind. The one they worship.”Elara spins,or rather, thinks of spinning,and the universe turns with her. Doors open and close across her body. Through one she glimpses the palace, through another the old market. Through a third, Frank’s shadow flickers, caught between laughter and flame.“You’re the Echo,” she says. “The thing that followed me out of the Root.”“Not followed,” it murmurs. “Completed. You opened me. I am your reflection in the world’s new skin.”“I di
Chapter 35: Ash and Breath
The first thing she tastes is dust,iron, bitter, alive. The second is air. Real, uneven air. Elara opens her eyes and sees a sky the color of faded ember. The horizon trembles like a mirage; ruins lie scattered across red sand, half-buried, half-reborn. Fragments of light glint inside the dunes,shards of her former self. She sits up. Her body feels heavier, smaller. Flesh again. “No more fire,” she whispers. “No more voices.”The wind answers with a low hiss that sounds almost like laughter.“You shouldn’t talk to the wind,” says another voice,close, human.Elara turns sharply. A figure stands a few paces away, wrapped in a cloak of ash-stained linen. The face beneath is shadowed, but the eyes catch the faint light,brown, ordinary, and Therefore unbelievable. “Who are you?”“Someone who didn’t disappear,” the stranger replies. “Not yet.”“There are survivors?”“A few. If we count the ones who still remember how to breathe.”“Where is this?”“Nowhere that used to be. The maps melt
Chapter 36: The Man Who Walked After Light
The world did not end; it just forgot how to move. When the white flare vanished, silence filled the desert. The dunes settled like exhausted lungs. The stranger lay facedown, his fingers buried in warm sand that still pulsed faintly, like a sleeping heart.He pushed himself upright, coughing. The sky above was no longer red but a bruised gray. Where Elara had stood, there was only a pit of glass,smooth, perfect, and cold.“Elara?”The word died without echo. He staggered toward the crater, boots scraping glass. Beneath the transparent surface, shadows coiled like smoke trapped under ice. They moved when he did. “Don’t do this again,” he muttered. “Not again.”A voice,soft, trembling, uncertain,answered from nowhere. “You shouldn’t have stayed.”He froze. “Elara?”“No.”“Then who?”“What’s left.”The glass under his palm pulsed once, like a heartbeat. He pulled his hand back sharply. “Not her,” he whispered. “Can’t be.”By nightfall, the desert began to cool. The wind sang low thr
Chapter 37: The Heart Beneath the Light
Frank fell through light that refused to end. It wasn’t falling, not really,it was being dismantled. Every piece of him, from memory to marrow, was stripped apart and rearranged by something that knew his shape too well. He tried to scream, but his voice split into echoes that argued with each other.“You should have stayed.” “You should have burned.” “You should have listened.”“Enough!” he shouted. The fragments fell silent, condensing into a single presence.Then he saw her. Elara,or what was left of her,rose from the brilliance like a reflection learning to stand upright. Her skin was woven from threads of white fire, her eyes twin storms of gold. But her mouth spoke his words. “You came back,” she said.“I didn’t have a choice.”“You always had a choice. You just never liked the cost.”He looked down; beneath him there was no ground, only shifting light, alive and breathing. His own shadow floated somewhere below, writhing like a trapped animal.“Where am I?”“Inside the afte
Chapter 38: The Pulse Inside the Void
urged in waves, forming corridors of memory. He was running down them,his childhood, his failures, the loneliness stitched through every face he’d ever seen. “Stop it!”“You built me from this,” the Root said. “Every humiliation, every scream. You called it strength. I call it design.”“Then why do you sound afraid?” “Because you’re remembering too much.”He stopped running. The corridor flickered and collapsed into a single room: his old classroom. The smell of chalk, the sound of laughter. He saw his younger self sitting at the back, silent, ignored. Elara stood at the front, smiling gently. “You remember this?” she asked.“Don’t do this,” he whispered.“Why? This is where you decided to disappear.”“You’re not real.”“I was never supposed to be.”Her voice faltered, glitching. The edges of her face began to shimmer, lines breaking apart like pixels losing definition. “What’s happening?”“Correction,” said the Root. “Your memory is corrupted. I’m cleaning it.”“No!”He rushed f
Chapter 39: The War Within the Mirror
The black shatters didn’t fall; they floated,like time had forgotten what to do with them. Frank stood on a plain made of mirror dust. Every surface reflected some version of him: angry, hollow, terrified, laughing. “You shouldn’t exist outside me.”“Then stop me.”“You can’t fight a thought.”“Watch me try.”He moved first. The world folded under his step, every reflection bending away. Energy flared from his hands,white arcs slicing through the mirrors. Each cut exposed flashes of memory beneath: the orphanage, the bullies, the biscuit, the glowing bottle. “You always hit what you don’t understand.”“Better than worshipping it.”The Root formed out of the shards,a silhouette made of light and static, face constantly shifting through all the people he’d ever known. It smiled with her lips, and spoke with his voice. “I gave you an order.”“You gave me silence.”“Same thing.”He hurled a beam of light; it cracked the air like thunder. The Root caught it, twisted it, and flung it bac
Chapter 40 – The Return of the Pulse
A breath. That’s how it began. Air tore into lungs that felt carved from metal. Ozone burned the tongue. When his eyes opened, the world vibrated,every molecule aware of him.“Frank? you’re,are you,”“I’m here.”“Where is here?”He sat up. The floor rippled like molten glass; walls twisted around his outline, reacting to each heartbeat. Dust drifted upward instead of falling. Something inside the air trembled with him. “Something’s wrong with the air.”“No,something’s wrong with you.”Light fractured through shattered windows, breaking into shards of amber, crimson, white,each one pulsing in rhythm with the thing in his chest. Beyond the wall, the city leaned and groaned. Streets curved, towers bowed toward him. “How long was I out?”“Long enough for everything to notice you’re awake.”He rose. The motion sent a tremor through the building; glass hovered midair, caught in indecision. Every sound arrived a heartbeat late, like time trying to catch up.“It’s still inside me.”“No. You