The silence following the erasure of the termite swarm was not a peaceful one; it was a vacuum, a hollow space where the laws of physics had been momentarily suspended and were now rushing back to fill the void. The sheer magnitude of what Kael had done hung in the air like a physical weight, thick with the scent of ozone and pulverized stone.Kael, usually the picture of stoic, immovable grace, suddenly buckled. It was a sight so jarring that Kei and Lyra both felt a jolt of visceral fear. His right knee hit the smooth, pulverized stone with a sharp, echoing crack. His hand, still white-knuckled around the hilt of his sheathed sword, trembled with a violence that made the metal rattle against the scabbard. His chest heaved, his breathing coming in ragged, desperate gasps—the sound of a man whose lungs had been emptied of all oxygen, or perhaps a man whose very soul had been momentarily hollowed out to act as a conduit for that terrifying, void-like strike."Kael!" Kei shouted, taking

The humidity in the city of Oakhaven didn't just hang in the air; it clung to your skin like a wet wool blanket that had been dipped in exhaust fumes and ancient, stagnant river water. Elias Thorne adjusted the collar of his stiff dress shirt, feeling the grit of a grueling twelve-hour shift at the architectural firm settling into his pores. The neon signs of the downtown district were just beginning to flicker to life, buzzing with a low-frequency hum that seemed to vibrate against his very molars.Oakhaven was a city built on top of old, crumbling secrets—a place where the shadows seemed several inches too long and the wind whistled through the gaps between skyscrapers with a sound that almost resembled human whispering, or perhaps a long-forgotten plea. But Elias, at twenty-six, had no time for urban legends or the eerie atmosphere of the city’s older quarters. He cared about the structural integrity of the Miller project, the looming deadline for the new waterfront blueprints, and

The sky over the Silverneck Estuary was the color of a fresh bruise—deep purples and sickly, jaundiced greys swirling together as the sun sank beneath the horizon, bleeding its last light into the salt marshes. Silas leaned his weary frame against the weathered, salt-pitted gunwale of his skiff, the Maria. His calloused hands, mapped with the scars of forty years at sea, moved with a rhythmic, muscle-memory precision as he mended a jagged tear in his hemp netting.The water here was usually a cacophony of life. On a normal evening, the estuary was a shifting mirror of silver scales and the constant, rhythmic popping of bubbles as the bass and perch broke the surface to feed on the evening hatch of midges. The gulls would be screaming overhead, and the water would hum with the vibration of thousands of tiny fins.But tonight, the water was dead.It wasn't just a lack of noise; it was a vacuum. The surface of the estuary was as flat and polished as a sheet of obsidian, so still that it

In the Age of Scales, when the sky was perpetually bruised by the beat of leathery wings and the sun was often eclipsed by the passage of the Great Wyrms, the world operated on a different set of laws. Reality was not the rigid, predictable thing it would later become; it was fluid, responding to the immense gravitational pull of dragon-mana. During those days, "strange happenings" were not merely anomalies—they were the weather.One such occurrence took place in the soaring spires of the High Peak Valley. It was a Tuesday, though time held little meaning when an Ancient Red could sleep for a century and call it a nap.Without warning, the gravity in the valley simply inverted. The mountain goats, hardy creatures accustomed to the vertical cliffs, found themselves falling upward into the swirling violet mists of the stratosphere. The waterfalls did not crash into the basins below; instead, the water beaded into perfect spheres of sapphire and drifted toward the clouds like a thousand

THE TRUE EVENT:Dash and Cynthia carefully went through the winding tunnels, which surprisingly had no termite through the first moment.It seemed fate smiled at them the instant they decided to save that particular person, who the termite carried off in its mandible, the only problem now would be that there had been no sign of the Termite almost anywhere.It would seem the Day would almost turn into a miserable search, through a pathway which stinked of rotten wood, and damp fresh grasses.Cynthia had to take a pause, she cleaned her eyes, not wanting to take a step further, "... I'm sure this tunnel would continue forever, until we finally stop at a deadend, become tired, before suddenly getting attacked by a viscous Termite, ready to tear us limb by limb. I'm sure no one would want such a thing, and although we are rank S members, we should still be logical in this situation. LOGICAL!!."Dash turned his head, looking at Cynthia from over his shoulder, "... I know you are Afraid—""