The air grew cold, not with the chill of winter, but with the frigid void of a vacuum that seemed to suck the very breath from their lungs. Shin could feel his pulse thrumming in his teeth—a rhythmic, metallic vibration that signaled his body was reaching its absolute limit.
"Stop... please," Victor whispered, his knees buckling under the weight of the oppressive atmosphere. His eyes were bleeding from the corners, two red streaks down a face pale with terror. "The glass... it's singing. Can't you hear it?"
Shin didn't hear singing. He heard the sound of a thousand mirrors shattering simultaneously inside his skull. The Silver Feather in his pocket was now burning hot, a searing contrast to the freezing wind that whipped around them.
[The Threshold of the Fortress]
Suddenly, the grey sand beneath them shifted. For a split second, the wasteland vanished. Shin didn't see rocks; he saw his younger self standing in blood-soaked snow, holding a blade made of pure shadow. Victor let out a blood-curdling shriek, clawing at his own face to erase the distorted images the Fortress was projecting into his mind.
Shin grabbed Victor by the throat, hoisting him up. Shin's eyes were no longer just grey; they were swirling with ink-black lightning that seemed to devour the light around them. "Pain is the only thing the Fortress can't fake," Shin muttered, channeling a sharp spark of lightning through the wire binding Victor's wrists. "Focus on the burn, Victor. If you lose yourself to the glass, I'll leave your soul trapped here forever."
They stood now at the foot of the Fortress of Crying Glass. It was a jagged mountain of translucent, weeping obsidian that grew out of the earth like a frozen scream.
"Open," Shin commanded, slamming his hand—pulsing with the Reign of Black Lightning—against the cold, weeping surface.
The black lightning didn't just strike the door; it was absorbed by it. The obsidian turned from black to a deep, royal purple. A crack appeared in the center, bleeding a thick, silver mist.
"Welcome home, little void," a voice echoed from the very air.
The gates dissolved into a thousand shards of light. The suction was immediate. Before Victor could even scream, the abyss swallowed them both.