The pendant pulsed against Rina's skin like it was alive.
Every beat matched her heartbeat, until she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
She stood on the edge of the soccer field again — morning mist clinging to her sneakers, sunlight caught in her hair. She didn't remember walking there. The world around her looked the same, but it felt wrong — the air sharper, the colors too vivid, the silence heavy, like the pause before lightning strikes.
And then he stepped out of the mist.
"Niklaus."
He looked different in daylight. Softer. But those eyes — that impossible gold — still held the same haunted intensity.
"You shouldn't have that," he said, nodding toward her hand.
Rina tightened her grip around the pendant. "You mean this? The thing that somehow appeared in my hand after a dream I wasn't supposed to have?"
He flinched but didn't move closer. "It's not a dream."
"Then what is it?" Her voice shook. "Because I saw you there. I knew you. Like I'd loved you for a thousand years, and you told me not to remember you. How am I supposed to pretend that's normal?"
Niklaus exhaled, stepping forward until they were just a breath apart. The air between them buzzed — soft, electric.
"You were never meant to remember," he said quietly. "It's safer that way."
"Safer from what?"
He hesitated, looking away. The light bent around him like the world itself didn't know how to hold him. "From yourself."
Rina blinked. "What?"
He met her gaze, and for the first time, she saw fear in him. "You're not human, Rina. Neither of us are. We're echoes of something older — something the world buried for a reason."
She took a shaky step back. "You sound insane."
"I wish I were."
He reached for her hand, and the moment his skin brushed hers, the pendant blazed to life.
A blinding pulse of light rippled across the field, bending the air. The grass shimmered like glass, and every cell in Rina's body screamed. She tried to pull away, but Niklaus held on, his own veins glowing gold beneath his skin.
"Rina—let go—"
"I can't!"
The light exploded upward, a column of gold and shadow twisting together, wrapping around them like a storm. For a heartbeat, she saw it — the truth behind the world: endless stars, a thousand lifetimes, her own reflection made of light.
Then it all shattered.
When the energy faded, Rina collapsed to her knees, gasping. The pendant was gone.
Niklaus was on the ground too, trembling, blood at the corner of his mouth.
"What—what just happened?" she whispered.
He looked up at her, eyes burning brighter than before. "You've awakened. And now they'll come for you."
Before she could speak, a low hum rolled across the field — not the quiet vibration she'd felt before, but something deeper, darker, like the growl of the earth itself.
Niklaus's head snapped up. "Too late."
A line of black mist slid through the fog beyond the bleachers, forming shapes — figures cloaked in shadow, eyes gleaming white.
Rina's chest tightened. "Who are they?"
He stood, his expression hardening. "The ones who killed us last time."