The room buzzed loudly.
A low, trembling sound that seemed to come from nothing itself.
Beatrice lay unconscious beside me, her hair thrown across the tiles like a halo cracked in half.
I couldn't move. My body felt broken — bones shaking, breath shallow. The pressure in the air was crushing what little strength I had left.
The shard.
It wasn't just from the other world.
It was that world — its essence, condensed into a sliver of impossible glass.
When the mana leaked through the broken seal, the shard began to resonate.
The light it gave off wasn't brightness — it was awareness. Awareness that it is where it isn't supposed to be .
And then came the pain.
It wasn't physical anymore. It was deeper — a kind of unraveling, like every thread of me was being pulled into something I couldn't see.
The resonance spread, rippling far beyond our world.
Through the cracks between existence.
Through the thin fabric that kept the gods apart.
And something heard.
Something old.
Something that even gods feared.
The Outer Ones — beings exiled to the edge of everything, cast away because they devoured divinity itself.
One of them had noticed the call.
It was moving closer.
Drawn to the shard buried in my hand.
Drawn to the taste of its power.
And with it, it would devour us.