Darkness.

  Not the kind born of shadow or of nightfall—but the kind that devours. A silence so vast, so unrelenting, it smothered even the shape of thought. Whether my eyes were open or shut, it mattered not. Sight had no dominion here. The world itself had dissolved, swallowed whole by a void without edge or end.

  And then—

  Hss…

  A whisper. A hiss. The sound of something ancient exhaling in the dark.

  Cold coiled around my ankle, slick and terrible. I jolted, twisting, a silent panic rising within me—but the thing only tightened. It dragged me through the nothing, across the unseen.

  Then, they appeared.

  Eyes—twin suns born in the pitch. Golden, unblinking, immense. They did not look at me. They consumed me, with a hunger old as the Solmork’s first scream. I reached for a blade, for anything—only to grasp air. My hands curled into fists of silence.

  And then it came.

  The pressure.

  It did not crush my limbs or my lungs. No—this pain slithered deeper, past sinew and marrow, as though it sought to unmake me. My blood surged, thundering toward my skull. My very soul felt it would split apart at the seams.

  It was as if my bones were splintering inward. Like thread, I unraveled. Like glass, I fractured.

  The agony was relentless. The pain was not new, yet it was crueler. The memory of pain had always been duller than its reality.

  A scream clawed its way up my throat—

  And then—

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  “See… See… See…”

  A familiar voice.

  Barely a whisper, yet it carried through the dark like starlight on a still lake.

  Soft, lilting but not so distant. Etched from the same voice that saved me a year back. It coiled through the torment, parting the pain like dawn through mist. The pain ebbed, retreating like a wounded beast.

  And the void recoiled.

  I awoke with a gasp. The kind that tasted like drowning air. My chest rose and fell in ragged tides, lungs scraping for breath. My throat scorched as though I had swallowed the sun.

  I stumbled to the window and flung the curtain aside—

  Light poured in, brutal and blinding. It struck me like a blade of gold.

  I raised a trembling hand to shield my eyes from the world that had dared to continue without me.

  “Too bright…” I groaned. I felt stretched thin. Unreal. Like my soul had not yet caught up to my body.

  Then—a knock.

  Sharp. Impatient. It rattled the frame like a warning bell.

  I opened the door.

  The bore stood before me, arms folded, his face as unreadable as ever.

  “You rise only now? The sun stands at its peak,” he scoffed.

  Behind him, Chara appeared, a knowing smirk on her lips, subtle but mischievous.

  “You woke up just an hour ago too,” she chimed. I caught the flicker of embarrassment in the bore’s gaze as he turned away, feigning indifference.

  “We came with a question.” she said, her tone light, yet laced with intent.

  I blinked, still tangled in the echoes of the dream.

  She smiled.

  “Would you like to go on an adventure?”

  Before I could answer—

  “We found a map,” the bore added, voice lower now. “To the third continent. The lost one.”

  The wind shifted. Something old had stirred. Or maybe that was just me.

  The third continent.

  The one lost to time, to ruin, to myth.

  My limbs still trembled, my mind still swam—and somehow, something in me smiled. “Lead the way.”