The Nullification dome shattered like glass, and the sound it made wasn't loud—it was worse than that. It was final. The kind of sound that closes doors that can never be reopened.
I stood in the rubble of what used to be a sanctuary, breathing hard, and tried very hard not to think about what I'd just learned.
I'm a time-bomb. I'm a vessel. I was never real.
The panic hit anyway, like a fist to the gut. My lungs seized. My vision blurred. For a moment, I couldn't breathe through the sheer, suffocating weight of it—thousands of past lives piled on top of me, an ancient king sleeping in my soul, every moment of my existence counting down to the moment when Klaus Lionhart simply... stops existing.
I forced it down. Literally forced it, the same way you'd push a drowning person under water.
