The sky no longer bled, but its silence was unnatural. Where once the Spiral Eye had loomed above all things—hungry and infinite—now there was only stillness. Yet in that stillness, something shifted.
Elian had become the Door. The seal. The anchor that held the paradox in check. But even a perfect seal leaks with time.
And not all pieces of the Spiral had been bound.
Some had learned to hide.
---
1: Shards in the Dust
At the far edge of the reconstructed world, in a forgotten city stitched together from fractured timelines, scavengers picked through the ruins. Among them was Hira, a young woman with eyes like scorched silver and an uncanny instinct for avoiding death. She didn't know why the old buildings sometimes whispered when she walked by. She didn't know why her shadow twitched in directions she did not move. She only knew one rule: never go near the black glass.
That day, she broke the rule.
