The first thing I felt was the silence.
Not the ordinary hush of night, but a silence so vast it swallowed my breath before I could scream. Then the world cracked open beneath me.
I fell through blinding light, tumbling across memories that were not mine—faces, wars, fragments of lives stitched together by something older than time. When I finally hit the ground, it was not soil I touched, but something trembling, as if the very fabric of reality had grown thin and brittle.
The Dying Reality spread around me like a collapsing stage. Towers of crystal leaned at impossible angles, bleeding light into the sky. Rivers of color surged upward instead of down, their currents breaking apart into floating shards before vanishing mid-air. Above, the heavens were torn by fissures of white fire, each one opening for a heartbeat before sealing shut again, as though the sky itself could not decide whether to exist.
My chest heaved. The air burned cold in my lungs. Somewhere behind me, the Gate sealed with a thunderclap, cutting off any hope of retreat. I was alone here.
The ground lurched violently. A canyon split open a few feet away, spilling not rock but streams of flickering images—memories of children laughing, cities burning, lovers parting in the rain. They poured upward into the storm like offerings to some mad god.
I staggered forward, gripping my head as whispers filled the wind. They spoke in voices I almost recognized—my father’s warning, my son’s laughter, Kael’s shout when the Gate betrayed us. Each word pulled at me, threads tightening around my mind.
This place was not merely dying. It was undoing itself, thought by thought, memory by memory.
In the distance, at the center of this chaos, I saw it: a spire of light rising from the ruins, pulsing like the heart of a colossal beast. Even from here I felt its pull, cold and absolute.
The Memory Core.
And somehow, I knew it was waiting for me.
