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

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

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

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

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