The first thing Elaria felt was pressure.Not pain. Not heat.

Pressure—dense and tidal, like a world trying to inhale her.

She wasn’t certain she existed yet.

Form was still returning to her in pieces: fingertips, then breath, then the faint suggestion of ribs knitting themselves back into a coherent idea of a body. She hovered in the half-place between reality and un-reality—the raw edge where memory became law and law dissolved back into possibility.

Then she heard it again.

Knock.

A ...