As the light faded, Lumis and Eili found themselves standing in a place that defied comprehension. The ground beneath their feet shimmered like liquid glass, reflecting a vast expanse of starlit darkness above. The air was heavy with silence, broken only by a faint, rhythmic pulse—a sound that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere.
Eili took a cautious step forward, her shard glowing faintly, its light swallowed by the void surrounding them. “Where are we?” she whispered, her voice barely audible, as though the air itself suppressed sound.
Lumis knelt and touched the ground. The surface rippled beneath his fingers, sending faint waves outward, each carrying fragments of light that dissipated into the darkness. “This is no ordinary place,” he said. “It’s as if… we’re standing inside a memory, or perhaps between them.”
Ahead of them, a narrow path formed, carved from the void by lines of dim, golden light. The lines pulsed gently, beckoning them forward.
Eili hesitated, gripping her shard tighter. “What if it’s another trick? Another illusion to keep us trapped?”
Lumis straightened and met her gaze, his expression calm but resolute. “Maybe it is. But we can’t stay here. The longer we wait, the more this place will take from us.”
Reluctantly, Eili nodded, and they stepped onto the glowing path. With each step, the pulse in the air grew louder, resonating with the rhythm of their hearts. Shadows flickered at the edges of their vision, too fleeting to be real but too persistent to ignore.
As they moved deeper, the path began to twist and fracture. Fragments of light spiraled upward, forming hazy visions—images of people and places neither of them recognized. A child playing in a field of golden grass. A tower crumbling into the sea. A pair of hands reaching for each other but never meeting.
Eili stopped, her breath catching as one image lingered longer than the others. It was of her, standing alone, her shard broken at her feet. Her face was etched with anguish, and her surroundings were nothing but darkness. “What is this?” she asked, her voice trembling.
Lumis turned to her, his own shard glowing brighter as if in response to her distress. “It’s testing us again,” he said, stepping closer. “This place feeds on our doubts. We can’t let it.”
Before Eili could respond, the path ahead split into two. Each branch glowed faintly, but one shimmered with an inviting warmth, while the other pulsed with a cold, foreboding light.
Lumis looked at the divergence, his jaw tightening. “It’s forcing a choice.”
Eili’s eyes darted between the two paths. “How do we know which one is real? What if neither of them is?”
Lumis closed his eyes, clutching his shard until it pulsed in unison with the rhythm around them. “We follow the shard,” he said finally. “It hasn’t led us astray yet.”
Eili nodded, trusting his conviction. Together, they stepped onto the colder, darker path, its surface crackling underfoot like ice. The moment they committed to the path, the other branch dissolved, leaving only the void behind them.
As they pressed forward, the pulse grew into a deafening roar, and the shadows around them coalesced into forms—figures with hollow eyes and jagged outlines, their movements disjointed and unnatural.
“They’re watching us,” Eili whispered, her voice tight with fear.
“No,” Lumis said, his grip tightening on his shard. “They’re waiting. For us to fail.”
The path narrowed until it became barely wide enough for them to walk side by side. Ahead, a faint glimmer of light appeared—a door suspended in the void, its frame etched with the same symbols they had seen on the obelisk.
“This is it,” Lumis said, his voice steady despite the chaos around them. “The next step.”
Eili swallowed her fear and reached for his hand. Together, they approached the door, the roar of the void reaching a crescendo as the shadows surged toward them. Just as the first tendrils of darkness reached them, Lumis and Eili stepped through, their shards blazing with light.
The door closed behind them, and the void fell silent.