Light consumed everything.
It wasn't the gentle brilliance of sunrise or the warm flash of power—it was obliteration, the kind of radiance that erased the idea of form, of thought, of time itself.
Hana couldn't tell if she was screaming. The world was all vibration and soundless thunder. She felt the link stretching through her body like threads pulled taut across eternity, the neural lines crackling in and out of existence. Every beat of her heart felt wrong—like it was syncing to a rhythm that wasn't her own.
Then, suddenly—
Darkness.
Not absence, but the slow return of sense. Breath. Gravity. Pain.
She gasped and realized she was kneeling on something that rippled like glass. The world around her had fractured—shards of the Seam hung in the air like suspended fragments of broken mirrors. Through each one, she could see flashes of what had been—streets, faces, memories. Seoul itself twisting, folding, fading.
"Lin?" she called, voice hoarse.
Static.
