Sera stood before the Gate like a wick before a flame, trembling but unburned. The silence around her was immense. Not the silence of emptiness, but the kind that came before storms or just after death—the kind that listens.
Lucian stepped beside her, armored not in steel but in resolve. "You know this could be a trap."
She nodded. "It is."
Daen paced behind them, fury simmering beneath his skin. "Then why the hell would we go through with it?"
Sera didn't turn. "Because if we wait, it comes to us. And this world won't survive it."
The Gate pulsed again, like something on the other side was breathing—waiting.
Veilcarin, standing a few paces back, looked a thousand years old in that moment. "There are only two ways through the Reverie," he said softly. "Willingly—or broken."
"I'd rather walk in willingly," Lucian murmured.
Sera looked between them. "You don't have to come."
Daen stopped pacing, eyes flashing. "After everything we've been through, you really think I'd let you walk through a portal to madness without me?"
Sera blinked. "I don't want to lose either of you."
Lucian laid a hand on her shoulder. "You won't. But this—whatever is on the other side—we face it together."
Veilcarin approached, placing a worn hand on a glyph-stone near the Gate. "It must be opened with blood and bond."
The Gate shimmered, the runes lighting up again, winding through Sera's skin like a second heartbeat.
Daen exhaled through his nose and cut a shallow line across his palm. "Then let's give it what it wants."
Lucian followed suit.
Sera, eyes unblinking, pressed her hand to the surface of the Gate. Her blood glowed not red but silver as it met the runes, and a tone rang out—clear, pure, and impossibly loud. The obsidian circle opened like an eye, iris dilating to reveal not darkness but...light. Shifting, liquid light. Colors no tongue had names for. Sounds twisted into shape. It was a door to something deeper than death.
And it was calling.
They stepped forward together.
✦
Crossing the threshold was like being unraveled.
Sera felt herself pulled into a million strands, her memories scattered like starlight, her soul stretched so thin she thought she would tear. Then—coherence. A sudden, jarring sense of form, as if the Reverie had decided who she was and snapped her into place.
When she opened her eyes, she stood on a bridge of glass suspended in a sky with no top or bottom.
Lucian stood to her left, Daen to her right.
They were whole. Real.
And the sky—if it could be called that—was made of memory.
Below them swirled oceans of thoughts not their own. Scenes from other lives played out in flashes. A girl with ash for eyes chasing a wolf through silver fields. A city where clocks ran backward and screamed. A tower built from forgotten names.
Daen swore under his breath. "This is worse than I imagined."
Lucian narrowed his eyes. "We need to keep moving."
Sera felt it too: a tug at the edge of her thoughts, like the Gate was still pulling her forward, deeper. The bridge stretched ahead, winding through impossible spaces, and at its far end stood a shape.
A throne.
It hovered above the glass, not on a dais but suspended in air. Upon it sat a figure cloaked in shadows so thick they bled into the fabric of this place. Not a person. Not quite. It watched them approach, face hidden, but Sera felt its gaze inside her lungs.
"I know you," she whispered.
The voice that answered was neither male nor female. It was ancient and intimate, like a lullaby sung from behind a grave.
"You are me, and I am what you left behind."
Sera took a step forward. "What are you?"
The shadow rose. The throne dissolved behind it.
"I am the part of you born in the fracture. The part that remembers the scream."
Lucian gripped his sword hilt. "The serpent."
"No." The figure tilted its head. "The serpent was only the beginning. I am what it awakened."
Images assaulted them—visions not of the past, but of all possible futures. Worlds burning. Cities floating in dead air. The Gate multiplied, echoing across dimensions. And in each, the same presence—this figure, watching, waiting, feeding.
Daen staggered. "It's not a gate. It's a mirror."
The shadow stepped closer. "You came to seal me. But you do not understand. I am not a door you can close. I am already inside."
Sera clutched her chest. Her heartbeat stuttered. Her skin itched with energy. Her markings—once dormant—now blazed.
"You're part of me," she said. "But I am not part of you."
The figure hissed. "You carry me in your blood. In your breath. You are the flame that will consume the world."
Lucian raised his sword. "Then we snuff the flame."
But the blade shattered before it could even swing.
Time warped. Daen screamed as a thousand memories not his own flooded him—wars he hadn't fought, people he'd never loved. Sera alone remained standing, the weight of the Gate in her bones.
And then she saw it.
A tether.
A thin thread of light that connected her to the figure.
It was not a chain. It was a wound.
A wound that had never closed.
She reached for it, not with her hands but with her mind, her will.
"You're not the Gate," she said. "You're the scar."
The figure shrieked, stumbling back. The bridge beneath them cracked, memory spilling out like ink.
Sera grasped the thread. It burned her. It tried to trick her—showing her faces she missed, futures she'd never have. But she pulled.
And pulled.
Until it snapped.
The scream tore through the Reverie. The throne crumbled. The figure unraveled like smoke.
Lucian gasped, collapsing to his knees.
Daen groaned, coughing memory like dust from his lungs.
And Sera stood alone.
Her markings faded. The bridge healed.
The sky went still.
She turned to her friends.
"It's not over," she said.
Lucian looked up. "But that... thing—"
"That was only one echo," she said. "There are others."
Daen stood, staggering. "Then what now?"
Sera looked toward the horizon. The Reverie had many roads.
"We find them," she said. "We finish this. Before it finishes us."
And so they walked—three echoes, bound not by fate, but by choice—into the shifting wilds of the Reverie, where gods had gone mad and the past was never past.
The Gate remained behind them.
Closed.
But not gone.
Never gone.