The border between waking and dreaming was no longer a line — it was a wound.
Lumeris, once a radiant city of imagination, had become a split reflection: half gilded towers suspended in the dreamscape, half decaying ruins tethered to reality. Every few minutes, the world flickered — switching textures like an unfinished sketch.
People called it The City Between Worlds.
---
⚜️
Eunha stood atop the Celestial Bridge — the last stable structure connecting both halves of existence. Below, streams of fractured light surged where the fabric of both realities bled together.
Her reflection rippled between forms — Countess in one flicker, mortal in the next. The instability wasn't just external anymore; it was in her.
> "How long until the merge completes?" she asked quietly.
Jiheon, beside her, adjusted the resonance stabilizer strapped to his arm. "At this rate? A week. Maybe less."
"Then we don't have time to play politics."
He shot her a look. "You're the one trying to keep both sides from tearing each other apart."
Eunha's eyes hardened. "Because if they do, we all vanish."
---
⚜️
Beneath the bridge, chaos brewed.
The Lucid Front had declared open revolution. Led by Rin, they seized the Dream Archive and transformed it into their capital. To them, this was evolution — the dawn of a species that could dream itself real.
Meanwhile, the Golden Sigil unleashed holy crusaders from their new temple. They called it "purification."
And caught in the middle stood Jiheon's Lucid Guard, a ragtag band of dreamers, humans, and half-awakened souls just trying to hold the line.
Every night, Eunha watched the battles from afar — dream-blood spilling like molten gold over a world that used to feel infinite.
---
⚜️
One evening, Eunha and Jiheon met with the remaining council members of Lumeris. The room was dim — the walls pulsating with fading energy.
> "The stabilizers are collapsing," said Elder Hyun, one of the last original architects of the realm. "If the Crown of Origin isn't reactivated soon, everything falls into recursive decay."
Eunha frowned. "The Crown was sealed after the First Collapse for a reason. It manipulates the dream-core directly — one wrong calibration, and we could erase entire realities."
> "And if we don't use it?" Jiheon interjected.
Hyun's silence was answer enough.
Eunha's gaze shifted toward the glowing projection of the map — the Crown buried deep beneath Lumeris' core, guarded by layers of illusion and memory locks.
> "Then we'll retrieve it," she decided.
---
⚜️
Their descent into the core was like walking through history's memories.
Every corridor shimmered with echoes of old dreams — children chasing butterflies made of light, lovers dancing under impossible moons, forgotten wars replaying in static fragments.
Jiheon watched as one echo — a younger Eunha in her noble attire — drifted past them, smiling faintly before fading.
> "You built this place," he said softly.
> "No," she corrected. "I imagined it. That's not the same."
At the heart of the labyrinth stood a colossal vault — the Crown Chamber.
The door pulsed with veins of light, locked by the signatures of its original creators: Haneul and Eunha herself.
> "It'll only open if you accept both halves of yourself," Jiheon murmured.
> "And if I don't?"
> "Then it'll kill you trying."
She smiled faintly. "So business as usual."
---
⚜️
When she touched the seal, the chamber erupted in cascading visions — her past life as the Countess flashing before her mortal memories. Every sin, every kindness, every rebirth burned through her like molten glass.
> "Eunha!" Jiheon reached out — but she was already somewhere else.
Inside her mind's plane, she stood before Haneul again. Not as an enemy — but as an echo.
> "You came for the Crown," he said, voice soft but edged with pride.
> "I came to fix what you broke."
> "No," he smiled sadly. "You came to finish it."
A golden sigil formed in his palm — the same that had marked her heart the day she defied him.
> "You still think mortals can balance dreams. You'll learn that balance doesn't mean peace."
> "And yet I'll try," she whispered.
When she reached for the sigil, it merged into her — the seal cracking open in the real world.
---
⚜️
The vault split apart with a thunderous pulse.
Inside floated the Crown of Origin — a spiraling construct of golden filigree and glass, rotating endlessly around a heart of sleeping light.
It wasn't just an artifact — it was the source code of reality.
Eunha approached it slowly. "So this is what it feels like to hold the dream of existence."
Jiheon looked uneasy. "Feels like holding a bomb."
He wasn't wrong. Every pulse of the Crown distorted space — the bridge between worlds stretching thinner.
> "If I interface with it," Eunha said, "I can rewrite the realm's foundation — separate dream and reality again."
> "And if you fail?"
> "Then everything collapses into one endless nightmare."
She met his gaze. "Will you trust me?"
Jiheon hesitated only a heartbeat. "Always."
---
⚜️
Before they could begin the stabilization ritual, alarms echoed through the core.
Rin's forces had found them.
The dream-born leader landed in a burst of luminous feathers, her expression torn between fury and heartbreak.
> "You would use that?" she demanded, pointing at the Crown. "You'd separate us again? Condemn my people to fade?"
> "Rin—" Eunha began, but Rin's voice cracked like glass.
> "You promised freedom, Countess! You gave us life — and now you want to erase it!"
> "If I don't, no one will have life!"
Jiheon stepped forward. "Rin, listen—"
But she was already summoning her blade, wings flaring.
> "No. You listen. We won't go quietly back into dreams."
---
The battle that followed wasn't fought with steel — it was fought with thought, will, and imagination itself.
Walls twisted. Floors dissolved. Memories became weapons.
Eunha countered Rin's assaults with manifestations of her past — castles, moonlight, even the echo of her former self.
Jiheon fought to protect the Crown, deflecting waves of lucid energy with the stabilizer's shield.
But Rin's fury was fueled by something deeper — grief.
> "You made us feel," she shouted mid-strike, tears burning like starlight. "You made us love! And now you call that corruption?"
Eunha's eyes glistened. "No, Rin. I call it humanity. But humanity can't survive without limits."
Their clash ended when the Crown itself pulsed violently — responding to their conflicting desires.
The chamber split apart — golden light swallowing them all.
---
⚜️
When Eunha awoke, she was standing on a glass ocean under a dark sky.
Half of her body was dream. Half was flesh.
And in front of her floated the Crown — no longer sealed, no longer dormant.
It spoke in a thousand overlapping voices:
> "Two worlds. Two truths. One must sleep."
She turned — Jiheon and Rin both suspended in time behind her.
> "Then let me bear it," she whispered. "Let me sleep."
She reached for the Crown. It flared — reality fracturing outward like shattered mirrors.
Her last thought before everything went white was Jiheon's voice calling her name — desperate, breaking.
---
When the light faded, Lumeris stood silent.
The war had stopped. The merging ceased.
But so had Eunha.