2025-06-23 14:59:11
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Samuel was walking through a hallway lit by sunlight. The floors were pale marble, veined with gold. Doors lined each side, all closed, but none threatening. It smelled like lavender and warmth. He heard laughter. Sarah’s, Kael’s, even Lin’s.Then the sunlight bled.A shadow crept across the ceiling—too fast, too liquid. It leaked down the walls, pooling over the golden veins until they darkened into black rot. The laughter twisted into static. The hallway stretched, bending like wet paper.Samuel stopped walking.“Not again,” he muttered. “Not another dream.”He turned. The way behind him was gone.Only shadow remained.A whisper floated in: “You’re still resisting.”The voice didn’t come from one direction. It bled from the walls, the floor, from inside his head. Familiar in a way that made Samuel’s skin crawl.“I know what you are,” he said, turning toward the center of the dark. “You’re the Weaver.”Silence, then: a laugh.It wasn’t cruel or mocking. It was soft. Intimate. Like an
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Even after hours of marching through the Cradle Expanse, the air clung to Sarah’s skin like soot-drenched cloth. It stung her throat and turned her breath into vapor. The sky above was thick and copper-colored, dimming the daylight and making her squad uneasy. Every step forward felt like trespassing into a graveyard of forgotten futures.Behind her, six Guardians moved in silence—eyes sharp, weapons humming softly with elemental charge. This was supposed to be a retrieval mission. Simple. In and out.But nothing had been simple since the Eclipse began early.“Are we getting closer?” she asked without turning.“Signal’s erratic,” said Kel, her second-in-command. His voice was muffled by the filter-mask, but the static that followed wasn’t equipment failure. It was the shard. “It’s pulsing. Reacting to… something.”Sarah stopped.They were standing at the edge of what looked like a crater—but it wasn’t. The ground was glassed, melted into a dark concave basin at least three hundred met
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it pulsed with a sickened hue—tarnished gold and leaking violet threads like veins beneath bruised skin. From the spires of the Southern Verge to the skies above the Broken Chasm, it wavered. Uneasy. Like it knew it was being watched from the other side.Joey stood at the edge of the Riftglass Bastion, his fingers curled tightly around the rail. Beneath him stretched an abyss—a trench where the Net met the limits of known space. He had once stared into it and felt fire.Now, he felt ice.And something ticking.A sound beneath reality. A slow, deliberate rhythm. Not mechanical—but cosmic. Like the heartbeat of something dreaming in deep water.“You hear it too, don’t you?” said a voice behind him.Joey didn’t turn. “How long have you been watching?”Lin stepped beside him, still pale from the collapse she’d suffered hours ago. Her hair no longer moved with the wind—it shimmered slightly, disconnected from time. Her eyes had changed too. Now they reflected shards, as if mirrors had grow
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It began with a whisper inside Lin’s skull.She had been sitting still in the Observatory of Nine Threads, fingers pressed against the glowing runes of the Relic Map, trying to trace Joey’s fading signal. The skies outside flickered between crimson and gold. But her mind—Her mind was nowhere near."Lin."The voice was hers. A younger version, from before the Ashborn wars. When she was still a healer. When her hands trembled at the sight of blood. But it didn’t stop there. The voice multiplied."Lin," said a deeper version—hardened, older, ash-streaked. The warrior from the Siege of Pale Hollow."Lin!" cried the desperate mother she might have become, sobbing over a grave that never existed.Then they all spoke at once. A chorus of Lin, every possibility she had been or could have been.She screamed.The Observatory vanished.She stood now in a field of mirrors, each one taller than a man and cracked in a spiral pattern.Each reflected a different her.One showed her weeping, hands st
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Samuel jolted awake with a gasp, the air thick with dew and an unfamiliar scent of lavender and metal. He sat upright, eyes scanning the valley spread before him. It was stunning—green hills rippling like silk under a sky painted in impossible shades of violet and burnt orange. In the center of it all, Mirror Lake shimmered, its surface unnaturally still, reflecting not the sky above, but something else entirely.He blinked. No birds. No wind. No sound. And yet, the hairs on his arms rose as if responding to something unseen.“Samuel?” a soft voice called.He turned sharply. A figure approached—tall, graceful, familiar. It was Kael, but not quite. His eyes were paler, almost silver. His smile held none of the wry humor Samuel had come to know, and his posture was oddly formal, like a soldier meeting a superior.“You’re awake early. We didn’t think the Restoration would stabilize you until evening.”“Kael…” Samuel frowned. “What are you talking about?”Kael tilted his head, confused. “
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“Sarah.”She froze.The torch beside her flickered blue—an unnatural shimmer, like memory set aflame. It wasn’t Void. It wasn’t tether decay.It was something she hadn’t felt in a long time.Echo.She stood, turning slowly.And there he was.Leaning casually against a bookshelf, as if he’d never died.Joey.His echo—half-translucent, hair tousled, the same mischievous smile playing on his lips. But this time… his eyes didn’t sparkle.They ached.Sarah didn’t speak at first.She couldn’t.Joey just said, “You look older.”She swallowed hard. “You’re not supposed to be here.”“Neither is he.”Sarah’s breath caught. “The Echoed King?”Joey shook his head.“No.”He stepped forward, the flickering torches bending away from him like he was gravity in reverse.“You’ve been so busy watching Samuel. Watching Lin. Watching each other.”He leaned in.“You forgot what came before the Gatekeeper.”Sarah frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. He was the beginning. The first echo. The original tether.”
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