The air around the local fracture was thick enough to taste, a metallic tang that set Arlen's teeth on edge. It didn't look like a hole anymore; it looked like a wound that refused to scar, weeping ribbons of pale blue light into the dirt.
"Now!" Arlen yelled.
Rowan didn't hesitate. With a roar of effort fueled by his Survivor's Instinct, he hurled the heavy stone shard into the center of the swirling rift. At the same moment, Mira thrust her hands forward, her Echo Sense allowing her to thread her own resonance into the stone, turning the blunt object into a surgical strike against the rift's stability.
The impact didn't make a sound. Instead, there was a sudden, violent vacuum—a pull so strong that Arlen felt the buttons on his coat strain. The blue light of the rift turned a muddy, bruised grey, then imploded.
The shockwave threw them back. Arlen hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of him, but he scrambled to his feet immediately, his eyes darting back to Lysa.
With the local anchor destroyed, the shadow entity let out a low, vibrating hum that made the very ground beneath them shudder. The boy's face it had been wearing dissolved back into a featureless mask of smoke. It jerked violently against Lysa's violet chains, but without the local rift to feed it, the entity's form began to translucent, losing its grip on the physical world.
"It's working!" Mira gasped, pushing herself up from the dirt. "Lysa, hold it! Just a few more seconds!"
But Lysa didn't look like she was winning.
She was slumped on her knees, her forehead pressed against the earth. The violet chains were still there, but they were turning black at the edges. The dark veins on her neck had reached her jawline, and her breathing was a series of ragged, wet hitches.
Warning: Corruption Threshold Critical.
Lysa Status: 42% (Level 3 Instability Detected).
System Note: Anchor integrity compromised.
"Lysa, stop!" Arlen sprinted toward her. "The rift is gone! Let it go!"
"I... can't," she whispered. Her voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. "If I let go... it'll just... drift. It'll find someone else."
The shadow let out one final, piercing resonance—a sound like glass breaking in a cathedral. Then, with a sudden, violent snap, the entity didn't vanish. It shattered.
The violet chains exploded into a cloud of dark sparks. The shadow's essence didn't dissipate into the air; it rushed inward, drawn into Lysa's chest as if her mark were a vacuum.
Lysa's back arched, her mouth opening in a silent scream. A pillar of dark light erupted from her, shooting toward the splintered sky. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the light died, and she collapsed into a heap on the grass.
Silence fell over the ridge, broken only by the distant, rhythmic thrum of the sky fractures.
Arlen reached her first, sliding on his knees into the dirt. He rolled her over, his heart hammering against his ribs. Her eyes were rolled back, her skin as cold as a winter stream. The dark veins hadn't vanished; they had settled into her skin like permanent ink, tracing a map of corruption across her throat.
"Is she...?" Rowan couldn't finish the sentence as he and Mira caught up.
Mira knelt on the other side, her hands hovering over Lysa's chest. Her crystalline blue glow flickered as she scanned for a heartbeat. "She's alive. But her resonance is... it's wrong, Arlen. It's like there's a second heartbeat inside her. A cold one."
Arlen looked up at the sky. The massive fractures were still there, webbed across the horizon, but they had slowed their pulsing. The immediate "Splintering" had paused, but the sky remained a jagged mirror of shadows.
Quest Update: The Shard's Burden.
Objective: Stabilize the Primary Vessel (Lysa Vane).
Current Stability: 8% (Deteriorating).
"We can't stay here," Arlen said, his voice hard. He looked at Rowan. "Can you carry her?"
"Yeah," Rowan said, stepping forward. He lifted Lysa with a grimace, his muscles straining. "She's heavier than she looks. Like she's made of lead."
"That's the Echo density," Mira whispered, her eyes darting around the darkening forest. "The forest is changing, Arlen. The trees... they aren't leaning with the wind anymore. They're leaning toward us."
Arlen looked. She was right. The ancient oaks at the edge of the ridge were tilting their heavy boughs toward the party, their leaves rustling with a dry, papery sound that sounded far too much like whispering.
"Back to Thornwick," Arlen commanded. "We need to get her to a place with a solid foundation. If she fully destabilizes out here in the wilds, the forest will swallow us whole."
They began a grueling descent. The walk that should have taken twenty minutes felt like hours. The ground seemed to stretch and compress under their feet, a side effect of the atmospheric resonance. Every time Arlen looked back, the horizon seemed to have moved further away.
Mira walked beside Rowan, her hand constantly on Lysa's arm, acting as a manual stabilizer. Arlen took the lead, his Tactical Resonance Analysis acting as a compass. He wasn't looking for North; he was looking for the "Path of Least Resistance"—the areas where reality was still thick enough to support their weight.
"Arlen," Mira said quietly as they neared the village outskirts. "Look at the mark on your hand."
Arlen looked down. The geometric pattern of his Class Fragment was glowing a dull, angry orange, clashing with the natural blue. Little flecks of black—the same corruption that had taken Lysa—were beginning to drift under his skin.
"It's the feedback," Arlen said, his jaw tight. "When she absorbed the shadow, we were still technically synced as anchors. I'm taking some of the overflow."
"If you take too much, you'll end up like her," Mira warned.
"I'll take what I have to," Arlen replied.
They broke through the final line of trees and stopped dead.
Thornwick was no longer the village they had left.
A massive spire of blue crystalline light had erupted from the center of the village square, piercing through the roof of the town hall. It pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light that matched the fractures in the sky. Around it, the villagers were gathered—not in panic, but in a strange, rhythmic trance, their eyes fixed on the spire.
In the middle of the square, standing before the crystal spire, was a figure Arlen recognized.
The cloaked watcher from his very first vision.
The figure turned, the shadows beneath its hood shifting. It didn't have a face, only a single, glowing eye that looked like a miniature version of the sky fracture.
"You are late, Tactician," the figure's voice echoed in Arlen's mind, sounding like the grinding of tectonic plates. "The Convergence has already begun. You have brought the vessel, but you have failed to bring the key."
The figure pointed a long, shimmering finger at Lysa, who groaned in Rowan's arms.
"Give her to me," the watcher commanded. "Or watch the Echo consume everyone you have ever known."