Kyle touched the glowing crack on the wall with an instinctive urgency.
At first, his fingertips recoiled from a cold sting.
A deep vibration surged through his entire body,
as if an unseen current had been unleashed from within.
His heart pounded violently, blood rushing through his veins in a sudden storm.
A solemn reverence crept into his chest—
a stillness before a coming roar.
Though the air around him remained unmoved,
every particle seemed to tremble with a strange shift in perception.
The wall unfurled before his eyes,
ancient engravings casting ghostly shadows in crimson light.
The chamber's walls seemed to murmur with his breath,
echoing ancient sounds in a silence that gnawed at the soul.
His eyes caught glimpses of scattered carved letters,
flickering into view before vanishing again, untouched.
His strength gave out for a moment,
a sharp prickling sensation swept across his skin—like needles piercing every pore.
Amid the chaos of his senses,
an eerie calm remained within him,
a faint echo of a heart waiting to be unraveled.
His consciousness slipped into a spiral of fractured visions:
crumbling monasteries devoured by flame,
ancient tomes exploding into dancing letters, silent and wild.
Faint whispers coiled around his ears,
their words braided into a chant of medieval enigma:
"The runes of fate are written in cursed ink."
Then came a sudden image—
Marked ones surrendering inside a wounded temple,
its altar defiled with splashes of dark red ink,
their faces trembling with unseen phantoms beneath the cracked stone walls.
Dream and truth collapsed into each other,
dissolving all boundaries,
until he tasted metal on his tongue—
as though he had swallowed a shard of rusted iron.
Whether by fate or cruel coincidence,
the silent crack finally parted its lips,
sealing the last of the whispers.
A soft, vaporous voice emerged from its core:
"Kyle... Kyle Darkfield..."
His heart trembled.
It was the first time anyone had called his full name.
A heavy silence spread through the room.
The voice lingered in the air—
a thin, smoky shadow suspended between truth and shade.
Finally, it spoke again from within the darkness:
"The seal is but a barrier...
and what lies beyond it is a secret far greater than you can comprehend."
Kyle's body trembled as his breath turned sharp and shallow.
The voice's words shattered the quiet of the distant night.
He shut his eyes briefly,
seeking refuge in reason—
and opened them again to a world that had already changed.
A strange coldness returned to his fingertips.
A faint ringing reminded him that those words would haunt his soul.
He tried to wipe the spectral dust from his thoughts,
and began to move—slowly, heavily—toward the room's exit.
He knew he would not leave without answers.
And one question echoed louder than the rest:
"What lies beyond the seal?"