Elias gasped as he opened his eyes.
The world around him was gone—no Dreamscape, no fractured reflections, no echoes of the past. Only an endless abyss, stretching in all directions. Weightless. Soundless. Empty.
He was falling—or was he floating? The sensation twisted his mind, making it impossible to tell.
Then, a whisper.
"Elias..."
It wasn't Lyra.
It wasn't him.
It was something else.
A presence stirred within the void, ancient and unfathomable. Shadows coiled like living tendrils, weaving into shapes that resembled faces—thousands of them, shifting, merging, dissolving into nothingness.
The voices returned.
"You seek the truth?""Then descend deeper.""Or let yourself be unmade."
Elias clenched his fists. The dream should have ended. The battle with his Fractured Self should have freed him. But instead, he had been cast here—beyond the Dreamscape, into something far worse.
"Why?" he demanded, his voice swallowed by the abyss.
The shadows laughed.
"Because you are not done yet."
Then, the abyss shifted.
A titanic force surged beneath him, pulling him downward. Elias struggled, but there was no ground, no air, no escape—just the inexorable pull of something immense, something that had been waiting for him.
And then—
A glowing figure emerged from the darkness.
Lyra.
Her form flickered, barely holding shape, her eyes filled with desperation.
"Elias, wake up!" she cried. "It's not real! Don't let it consume you!"
But the abyss had other plans.
A monstrous hand—formed from the void itself—shot forward, aiming straight for Lyra.
Elias roared, surging toward her with everything he had left.
And just before the darkness could consume her—
A blinding flash. A deafening crack.
The abyss collapsed.
And the world changed.