The air inside the veil was neither warm nor cold.
It breathed, it pulsed, it remembered.
Adrielle walked barefoot across what used to be the sky. Beneath her feet, stars floated like embers caught in slow motion — each one a memory replaying itself in silence. She saw fragments of laughter, faces, wars, and promises long broken. Every step she took reshaped the horizon, painting new constellations with her will.
But the world didn’t feel hers.
It felt like a cage made of light.
“You are what remains,” the veil whispered through the wind.
“But even light casts a shadow.”
Adrielle stopped. Her reflection wavered in the space before her — not glass, not water, but thought itself. And within that reflection, she saw herself… and another. The crown. The girl who once wanted freedom, now watching her with eyes like silver storms.
“Why do you look at me like that?” Adrielle whispered.
“Because you forgot,” the reflection said softly. “You think this was a choice. But the veil never gives — it trades.”
The words struck her like cold fire.
Her pulse echoed through the realm, and somewhere far away, Alex staggered mid-step as the forest around him shuddered.
“Did you feel that?” Maren hissed.
Alex nodded, heart racing. “She’s close. She’s trying to reach through.”
But the path ahead of them twisted — trees bending, light reversing direction. The forest was no longer still; it was alive, reacting to her struggle.
Adrielle pressed her hand against her chest. The light beneath her skin flickered, and shadows began to coil around her wrists. The memories she carried — billions of them — began to fight for form.
“Stop,” she gasped. “You’re not real—”
“We are real,” the voices whispered. “You made us so.”
And then, out of the shifting haze, a shape emerged — the first face she had ever seen within the veil.
Eren.
His figure was faint, his voice hollow.
“You broke the cycle, Adrielle… but in doing so, you started another.”
Her throat tightened. “I just wanted to save them.”
He smiled, sorrowful. “Then save yourself first.”
Before she could reply, the veil trembled violently. The realm of memory cracked like glass, spilling waves of light that spread toward the living world — toward Alex and Maren.
Maren shielded his eyes, shouting, “She’s losing control!”
Alex’s voice broke through the chaos. “Then we find her — now!”
And as the two ran toward the collapsing horizon, Adrielle fell to her knees, surrounded by the ghosts of everything she had become.
The veil whispered once more, gentle and cruel all at once:
“Every beginning echoes. You are the sound that never ends.”
