The Resonator was never meant to survive its second awakening.
Rienne knew this as her hands steadied the crystal core, as its glow flared too bright for human eyes. Her glass arm pulsed wildly, every filament alive with tension. Kael shouted for her to stop, his armor already flickering into half-form, but his voice was drowned in the rising roar. Lyra clutched the Codex to her chest, the words across its pages rearranging themselves as though even the book was terrified.
The air grew heavy, dense enough to crush the lungs. The walls of the archive chamber shuddered. Dust fell like snow from vaulted ceilings.
Then came the rip.
It was not sound, not sight, not even sensation. It was absence given shape—a sudden, wrenching pull that unstitched the world along an invisible seam. The Resonator screamed, a shrill cry beyond any machine's design, and the floor buckled beneath them.
Lyra's candle snuffed out. Darkness swallowed her, save for the blinding white fissure that split the chamber.
The Veil had opened.
She did not fall. She was taken.
The pull seized her bones, dragged her forward without mercy. She clutched the Codex, its cover burning hot against her palms, its pages fluttering though no wind stirred. A glimpse of Kael flared beside her, his armor half-exploding with light as though caught between two worlds. Rienne's scream echoed, cut short as the rift consumed them all.
Then the chamber was gone.
The sky was the wrong way up.
Lyra stumbled onto uneven stone, nearly pitching forward into emptiness. Before her stretched a city inverted—buildings dangling downward like stalactites, spires reaching toward a groundless abyss. Bridges clung impossibly between structures, fractured halfway through. Candles burned in windows where there could be no air, flames dancing sideways, indifferent to reason.
And above—if such a direction still held meaning—loomed the Void. Not blackness, but absence: a hollow where sight itself faltered, where edges of the world seemed eaten away.
Kael landed heavily beside her, his gauntlet striking the ground hard enough to send cracks spidering through the stone. His armor flared whole for one blinding instant, then flickered again, unstable. His eyes were wide, his breath ragged.
"This…" He staggered upright, staring at the inverted cityscape. "This was a fortress I knew. But wrong. Shattered."
Rienne fell to her knees, clutching her glass arm. The prosthetic shone violently, almost blinding. She looked sick, her pale face slick with sweat. "It's not memory," she whispered hoarsely. "It's resonance. Fragments colliding. Layers bleeding through."
Lyra swallowed, forcing her voice steady. "Where are we?"
Rienne looked up, her crystalline eyes catching too much light. "Through the Veil."
The ground beneath them shifted like a living thing. Cracks spidered across it, and Lyra realized with horror that the stones were not stones at all but pages—giant slabs etched with half-words, their letters dissolving as she stared.
The Codex throbbed against her chest, its cover burning like an ember. She risked opening it.
New glyphs sprawled across its pages in jagged strokes:
"Not one world. Many.
Not one self. Countless.
Through the fracture, the Veilbearers see themselves."
Her hands trembled as she read it aloud.
Kael's gaze snapped to her. "Themselves? What meaning is that?"
Before Lyra could answer, something moved at the edge of her sight.
A figure stood on a broken bridge across the abyss. It was Kael—his face younger, unscarred, his armor pristine. He raised his sword in salute, but when Lyra blinked, the figure melted away like ink in water.
Another shape flickered on a balcony above: Rienne, but both arms made of living glass, her body radiant like a beacon. She stared down with hollow eyes, then vanished in silence.
And then Lyra saw herself.
On a fractured tower, hunched over a journal, hair gone white with age. Her hands shook as she wrote, but her eyes—her own eyes—lifted to meet Lyra's. The expression was both pity and warning.
Lyra staggered back, breath gone.
"They're us," she whispered. "Past. Future. Or… things that could be."
Kael snarled, as if to chase the visions away. "Illusions. Nothing more."
But the tremor in his voice betrayed him.
They began to move. Not forward—not backward—but sideways, if such a direction could be named. The city around them shivered, some buildings whole for a moment before collapsing into dust, others reforming where none had stood before. Streets coiled like serpents, leading nowhere, yet always ahead.
Whispers followed them, faint and overlapping. Voices too familiar.
Lyra heard her own laughter, distorted, as though from a childhood she half-remembered. She heard her mother's song, though her mother had never sung. Kael stiffened at phantom cries of soldiers calling him "Lord Commander," names that vanished as quickly as they were spoken. Rienne stumbled as a younger voice—herself before the accident—begged, "Don't build it. Don't build the Resonator."
Lyra clutched the Codex tighter. "It's testing us."
"No." Rienne's voice cracked. "It's showing us."
At the edge of a broken square, they stopped.
The ground ahead had collapsed into the Void, leaving only a narrow spine of stone bridging the gap. On the other side loomed a gate—an archway carved from living crystal, pulsing faintly like Rienne's arm. Its surface shimmered, distorting the inverted city beyond.
Lyra's pulse hammered. She did not need the Codex to tell her: this was a threshold.
Kael drew his blade, though it flickered like flame. "What waits for us there?"
Rienne's glass arm pulsed violently, responding to the gate. Her face was pale, her voice hushed. "Possibility."
They crossed.
The spine of stone trembled beneath each step, flakes breaking away into nothing. Whispers surged louder, a cacophony of lives unled, of choices unmade. Lyra heard herself swear oaths she never spoke, heard Kael die in battles that never were, heard Rienne laugh without bitterness.
The Codex bled ink across its pages, words forming faster than she could read:
"Veilbearers awaken not once.
But infinite.
To pass through is to know:
You are not alone.
You are never one."
Lyra stumbled as the truth pressed down on her—too vast, too heavy. She wanted to throw the book into the Void, to silence it. And yet she couldn't let go.
They reached the gate.
The crystal flared, reflecting not their faces but others'. Kael saw himself crowned in glory, Rienne saw herself shattered into shards, Lyra saw her reflection dissolve into pages scattered on wind.
And then the gate spoke—not in words, but in sensation. A single demand pressed into their hearts: Choose.
Kael raised his sword, snarling. "I will not be toyed with by visions." Yet his hands trembled, and Lyra saw the flicker of longing in his eyes as his crowned self gazed back.
Rienne clutched her arm, tears glimmering in the fractures of her face. "It's not asking us to believe. It's asking us to decide what kind of Veilbearers we will be."
Lyra pressed her palm to the Codex. The ink shifted, settling into a single line:
"Choice is the fracture. Choice is the bridge."
Her voice shook, but she spoke aloud. "Then we go forward. Not as who we were. As who we choose to be."
For a moment, the gate shimmered uncertainly. Then it widened, light spilling through like dawn breaking.
The Resonator's remnants crackled in their wake, its broken hum echoing across the shattered city.
Together—Lyra with the Codex, Kael with his fractured oath, Rienne with her glass-bound guilt—they stepped through.
The light swallowed them.
Behind them, the inverted city groaned, collapsing further into the Void. The echoes of other selves watched in silence, their gazes lingering like shadows on glass.
Ahead lay only the unknown.
But the Veil had thinned.
And the Veilbearers had crossed.