Silence.Heavier than stone, colder than iron.

  Orrny opened his eyes — or so he believed.

  The world had forgotten how to exist,but it still remembered his pain.

  The ground pulsed beneath his bare feet,as if each crack was an exposed artery.

  He took a step,and the soil screamed a name his lips would never say.

  Ashes floated in slow circles,forming faces that vanished when he tried to look.

  The sky, torn by a dead line of light,crackled with a silent breath.

  Amid the ruins, something shimmered —or perhaps it was only illusion.

  He approached and saw a fragment of memorycaught in a twisted corpse: skeletal fingers still trembling.They held something that may never have truly existed:

  a ring, bleeding dark ink.

  Orrny reached out, but his hand passed through the air.The ring turned to smoke and fell,spiraling into the windless void as if ughing.

  Then — a voice tore through the silence:

  — “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  But not even he knew where “here” was.

  The ground turned to sea, and he sank into droplets of shadow,his skin melting into words —disjointed phrases:

  “remember,”“don’t return,”“I am you.”

  He emerged in a gasp,but the world kept sinking.

  Ruins twisted into impossible shapes —towers of bone and gss petals.

  Each breath was a hallucination.Each heartbeat, a broken mirror.

  Something cracked in his chest —not relief, but rebellion.

  Without warning, the ashes formed a circle —and at its center stood Lyssara: neither alive nor dead.Her smile trapped in absence.

  Orrny took a step back.But there was no ground behind him.

  Everything screamed in silence.

  And the chapter endedbefore it began.