Silence.

  Heavier than stone, colder than iron.

  Orrny opened his eyes — or so he believed.

  The world had forgotten to exist, but remembered his pain.

  The ground pulsed beneath his bare feet,

  as if each crack were an exposed artery.

  He took a step,

  and the soil screamed a name his lips never voiced.

  Ash floated in slow circles,

  forming faces that vanished when he tried to look.

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  The sky, split by a dead line of light,

  cracked with a silent breath.

  Amid the ruins, something glimmered — or perhaps it was pure delusion.

  He moved closer and saw a memory fragment trapped

  in a mangled corpse: skeletal fingers still trembling.

  They clutched something that had never truly existed:

  a ring bleeding dark ink.

  Orrny reached out, but his hand passed through the air.

  The ring unraveled into smoke and fell,

  spiraling through the windless void as if laughing.

  Then — a voice tore the silence:

  "You shouldn't be here."

  But even he didn’t know where “here” was.

  The ground turned to sea, and he sank in drops of shadow,

  his skin melting into words —

  disjointed phrases:

  “remember,”

  “don’t return,”

  “I am you.”

  He surfaced in a gasp,

  but the world kept sinking.

  Ruins twisted into impossible shapes,

  like towers of bone and petals of glass.

  Each breath was a hallucination.

  Each heartbeat, a shattered mirror.

  Something cracked in his chest —

  not relief, but rebellion.

  Without warning, the ashes formed a circle —

  and in its center, stood Lyssara: not alive, not dead.

  Her smile trapped within absence.

  Orrny stepped back.

  But there was no ground behind him.

  Everything screamed in silence.

  And the chapter ended before it began.