The world was not supposed to breathe after that.And yet it did — shallow, strained, like something trying to remember how to live through another shape.

Elaria stood in the center of what had once been the Vale. The air trembled around her, thick with silver dust and the low hum of broken ley lines. The sky was no longer a ceiling; it was a wound, its edges peeling outward as if the firmament itself was trying to unmake its boundaries.

She could still feel Kael — a flicker in the ...