We descend into valleys that weren't here yesterday.
The terrain reshapes itself—rivers carving new paths, flora blooming in unnatural symmetry. It's not decay. It's revision. The world is rewriting its own code, slowly integrating the pattern Liora awoke.
Ashen calls it "Second Genesis."
Kara calls it "unnerving."
I call it beautiful.
But not all changes are welcome.
We reach a settlement—or what's left of one.
Houses melted into the ground like wax. Stone statues in the street, mid-scream. A thick mist coils through the air, humming softly.
"Temporal bleed," Ashen murmurs. "The failed zones are destabilizing faster now."
Navi kneels by a statue. His voice is low. "They were caught in transition... weren't they?"
Liora nods. "The world tried to change faster than they could."
And then the mist responds—twitches, forms faces, mouths whispering fractured voices.
One of them speaks Liora's name.
We retreat into a shattered chapel at the settlement's center, its stained-glass windows glimmering with shifting imagery—memories not our own.
Inside, we find something impossible:
A child.
Alive.
Asleep.
Floating a few inches above the ground, eyes moving beneath closed lids. The air around him vibrates with power.
Ashen scans him, then freezes. "He's not projecting a dream."
"What is he doing then?" Kara asks.
Ashen turns to us slowly. "He's receiving one."
We prepare camp there for the night—wards drawn, weapons close.
No one sleeps easily.
Liora sits beside the child, silent.
The boy murmurs something in his sleep. A single word, over and over:
"Mother."
At midnight, the mist parts.
A figure walks from the edge of the dead settlement—tall, cloaked in roots and ash. Her eyes glow with starlight, and the earth pulses beneath her steps.
She doesn't speak.
But the world speaks for her.
A voice not heard, but felt:
> "The child is the Seed. The next Cycle waits within him. But you, Liora, must choose—
Shield him and become the vessel of balance…
Or awaken him, and risk a world that may not remember what it means to be human."
Liora rises, uncertain for the first time in days.
The figure turns to leave.
But before she vanishes into the mist, she speaks aloud in a voice like breaking dawn:
> "The sky remembers you.
The earth watches you.
The end is no longer coming—
It is here."
The mist collapses.
The boy awakens.
And the stars above us change again.
This time into a warning.
End of Chapter 21