The basement was damp, the ventilation was subpar, and the ambient essence in the air was so thin it felt like trying to breathe through a wet blanket. The only redeeming qualities of the bunker were the advanced security system, the heavily reinforced door, and the fact that Sunny was currently asleep in the pod in the corner, his heart rate resting at a slow, steady sixty beats per minute.
Cielle sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of the room. The Neighborhood Menace, entirely unbothered by the lack of luxury, was curled into a massive, furry orange boulder against her thigh, snoring away.
Cielle was bored.
Sunny had mandated a "rest day" following their recent, highly profitable, and physically exhausting escapades in the Dream Realm. He had cited physical fatigue, mental strain, and the need to let the heat die down after they had aggressively scammed another Legacy out of a small fortune.
Cielle understood the logic. Rest was a vital component for ones soul… body and essence recovery.
However, sitting in a dark basement for eight hours with nothing to do was severely understimulating.
With nothing else to do, Cielle closed her eyes and turned her focus inward. If she could not explore the physical world, she would explore the conceptual one. Now that she thought about it, she had not truly taken the time to analyze her own Soul Sea.
Sunny had described his Soul Sea once, during a rare moment. He had called it a vast, dark, suffocating ocean, illuminated only by a chilling black sun, with the shadows of everything he had ever killed staring back at him from the depths.
Cielle's Soul Sea was not like Sunny's.
As her consciousness sank beneath the surface of her physical body, the damp smell of the basement vanished, replaced by the scent of rain, burning starlight, and stone.
She opened her eyes in the conceptual space of her soul.
It was not just an ocean. It was a cathedral upon one.
An infinitely vast, colossal cathedral made of pristine white marble and veins of liquid gold. It was entirely ruined. The massive pillars, thick as skyscrapers, stretched upward into an endless, star-filled void instead of a ceiling. The floor was paved with reflective, polished stone that mirrored the cosmos above. There were no walls, only the crumbling, majestic arches of a sanctuary that felt as old as the universe itself, drifting silently in a sea of glittering nebulas.
In the center of the nave, positioned on a raised dais of white marble, was a throne.
Cielle walked toward it, her footsteps making no sound in the absolute, oppressive silence of her own soul. The sheer scale of the place would have driven a normal Awakened mad with insignificance.
She reached the dais and turned, sitting down on the massive throne of starlight and stone.
The moment she sat, her Awakened ability fully synchronized with her consciousness. Information flooded her mind, not through words, but through the innate understanding of her own essence.
Her aspect, the [Seraphic Domain], possessed an Awakened ability simply titled: The Sanctuary.
It was not an offensive strike. It was not a physical buff.
It was the authority of a ruler.
Because her soul was inherently special, it possessed a gravitational pull. The Sanctuary allowed her to manifest this conceptual pocket dimension and temporarily anchor the consciousness of other living beings inside it. She could pull their minds across space, time, and the barrier between the Waking World and the Dream Realm, provided she had a sufficient tether.
Although she had never tried this ability, it was a reasonable time to do it now.
Cielle tilted her head, analyzing this new data. A tether.
A tether was a connection forged by essence, blood. If someone held a piece of her essence, or if their soul had deeply interacted with hers, a conceptual string was formed.
Sitting on the throne, Cielle concentrated, letting her perception expand through the ruined cathedral.
Slowly, the dark, starry void around the pillars began to shimmer. Two distinct, glowing threads materialized, floating in the conceptual ether, leading out of the cathedral and into the infinite distance of reality.
Cielle narrowed her eyes, observing the threads.
The first thread was thick, radiant, and swirling with the golden light of fate. Cielle analyzed it and immediately identified the source.
It was Cassie.
By witnessing Cielle's fate and the highly entwined nature of her and Sunny's souls, Cassie had inadvertently burned a temporary bridge between their spirits. The tether was strong, sustained by Cassie's own divination powers.
Cielle looked at the second thread.
This one was thinner. It reeked of foolishness.
It took Cielle 1.4 seconds to match the signature. It belonged to Lloyd, the young, arrogant Legacy from Clan Valor.
Two weeks ago, Sunny had concocted a highly legal, highly profitable scam in the Sanctuary. They had found an ordinary obsidian knife. Sunny had woven a terrifying, fake history about it, while Cielle had forcefully injected a tiny sliver of her own essence into the blade for hours to make it radiate an aura of supreme, overwhelming power. They had sold it to Lloyd for an astronomical sum of Soul Shards.
Lloyd was currently carrying that knife, completely unaware that he was holding a direct homing beacon to her ability.
Cielle sat back against the cold marble of the throne.
'If I pull the threads,' she hypothesized, 'their consciousness will be forcefully extracted from their physical bodies and anchored here. Their minds should remain intact, provided I do not exert lethal pressure.'
It was a completely unhinged, deeply dangerous thing to do. Sunny would have immediately told her to stop, citing the immense dangers of exposing her existence to a Clan Valor Legacy and an Oracle who can see other's runes.
But Sunny was asleep. And Cielle was bored.
'Experimentation is the foundation of advancement' Cielle rationalized smoothly.
Without any further hesitation, Cielle raised her right hand. Her fingers brushed against the conceptual fabric of her soul as she grabbed both the golden threads.
And, with effortless strength, she pulled.
Across the city, in the quiet luxury of her home, Cassia was meditating.
Her gift was a restless, serpentine thing, never quite silent. Even now, with her eyes closed, the faint threads of fate coiled at the edges of her perception, whispering of shifting currents and distant storms. She exhaled, centering her mind, trying to find the elusive stillness she so desperately needed.
Then, the darkness shattered.
There was no warning. No violent tearing of space, no sensation of a Nightmare Gate opening, no dizzying pull of the Spell. It was simply as though the foundation of reality dissolved beneath her. An irresistible force grabbed her very consciousness, bypassing her physical body entirely, and dragged it across the abyss.
In another part of the city, inside a cramped, squalid apartment that smelled faintly of cheap alcohol and profound despair, Lloyd Frontera was losing his mind.
He was pacing frantically, clutching an ordinary-looking obsidian knife in his trembling hands. The floor was littered with past-due bills, empty instant noodle cups, and torn sheets of desperate calculations.
"Six hundred " Lloyd hissed, his face twisted into an ugly, furious sneer. "Six. Hundred. Soul Shards! For a rock! That pale, dead-eyed, silver-tongued rat scammed me! He looked me in the eye and stole my future!"
Lloyd kicked a chair, sending it clattering against the wall. He was a Legacy! He was supposed to be rich, untouchable, basking in the glory of the Frontera name. Instead, his branch of the family was drowning in debt, and he had just spent his last secret cache of funds because he got greedy for a supposedly transcended artifact. He had spent six days trying to unlock the knife's latent power, only to realize it was exceptionally good at cutting vegetables.
"No," Lloyd snarled, his eyes bulging with determination. He pointed the knife toward the stained ceiling, his voice trembling with spite. "I refuse to die poor! I am going to turn this around! I will find that scammer, I will break his legs, I will take back my fortune, and I will become the wealthiest—!"
The floor vanished.
Lloyd's shout was cut off instantly as gravity inverted, and he plummeted into the void.
***
They arrived at the exact same moment.
Lloyd landed hard on his hands and knees, the breath knocked out of his lungs. Cassie materialized a few paces away, her posture instantly shifting into a guarded crouch, her hands gripping her phantom echo of quite dancer.
The air was heavy and completely silent.
Cassie's blue eyes snapped open. Though she was blind in the physical world, her sight perceived the space around her with terrifying, overwhelming clarity.
She wasn't in the Waking World. She wasn't in the Dream Realm. She was standing in a cosmic ruin, an impossibly vast, crumbling cathedral of pristine white marble drifting in a sea of glittering nebulas. The massive pillars stretched upward into an endless, star-filled void. The reflective stone beneath her feet mirrored the cosmos above.
'Where am I?' Cassie's mind raced in a rising panic, her thoughts accelerating as she tried to process the sheer scale of the space. 'How did I get here? Not even a Sovereign can pull someone's consciousness across realms without a conduit. What kind of domain is this? Is this a hidden layer of the Dream Realm? No... no, the essence here is too pure. Too isolated.'
She sensed another presence nearby. A young man, practically hyperventilating on the floor.
Lloyd scrambled to his feet, dusting his knees, his mind automatically spinning into overdrive. He looked down at the floor.' Is that... polished marble laced with liquid gold? The sheer cost of quarrying stone of this purity... wait. Where is the ceiling? Why are there stars?'
"What the hell…." Lloyd began to bark, his anger still boiling over, ready to demand answers from whatever illusionist had kidnapped him.
Then, he looked up. Cassie, too, turned her unseeing eyes toward the far end of the nave.
Positioned on a raised dais of white marble was a throne.
Her figure was magnified by the space, making her appear colossal. She was draped in shadows and starlight. Behind her, six massive, pristine white wings were unfurled, shielding the throne like a canopy of celestial feathers. Her face was obscured by a veil of brilliant, shifting light, revealing only the piercing, unblinking glow of her emerald eyes.
She rested her chin on a pale hand, her elbow propped on the armrest of the throne. She looked down at them with an expression of absolute, terrifying indifference. It was the look of an entity watching ants scurry across a pavement.
Lloyd's bravado shattered instantly. The obsidian knife in his hand felt like a child's toy. His knees buckled under the sheer, oppressive gravity of her gaze, and he fell prostrate onto the reflective floor.
His mind, conditioned by the harsh, power-driven hierarchy of the world, immediately recognized that he was in the presence of something entirely beyond the scope of a Saint or above.
This is a deity.
Lloyd's thoughts spiraled into terrified awe. 'The knife! It wasn't a scam! That pale boy... he wasn't a swindler, he was a cultist! A priest! The knife was a divine mark, a catalyst to summon me before... before whatever this is! I haven't been scammed, I've been chosen! If I anger it, my soul will be erased from existence. But if I survive... if I can prove my worth to a secret god... the backing of an entity like this is worth a billion Soul Shards!'
Beside him, Cassie was trembling violently, her knuckles white as she gripped her echo
Her sight was blinding her. The sheer radiance of the entity on the throne was incomprehensible. She felt as if she was gazing at the tapestry of fate itself.
'She pulled us here?' Cassie's mind raced, her thoughts moving at lightspeed as she tried to make sense of the impossible. 'Without our consent. Across the realms. This level of authority... it transcends the Spell. The Spell governs Nightmares and Awakened, but this... this feels older.'
Cassie swallowed hard, the oppressive aura of the cathedral pressing down on her shoulders.
'Is this an ancient god? A forgotten daemon that survived the doom of the Dream Realm? Why has it chosen us? What do I have in common with this man? Nothing. Which means we were selected for a specific purpose. If it wanted us dead, we would already be ashes. It wants something.'
Cassie slowly, respectfully, lowered herself into a deep, formal bow, her heart hammering against her ribs.
For a long, suffocating moment, the ruined cathedral was perfectly silent. The two awakened kneeled before the throne, completely paralyzed by their own rampant thoughts, waiting for the inevitable, earth-shattering decree of the cosmic entity that had claimed their souls.
On the throne, Cielle looked down at them.
She noticed that they were both shaking. That Lloyd had immediately flattened himself against the floor like a dropped towel. She tilted her head slightly, her face completely blank behind her veil of divine starlight.
Internally, Cielle was simply observing. 'The extraction was successful. Their minds remain intact too.'
She said nothing. She did not move.
To Lloyd and Cassie, the agonizing silence felt like a judgment. The weight of the entity's silent, unblinking stare felt as though it was dissecting their past, their sins, and their deepest secrets. The longer the silence stretched, the more terrifying the towering, six-winged figure became.
Finally, unable to bear the crushing tension any longer, Cassie forced herself to speak.
Her voice trembled slightly in the vast, echoing space, carrying the utmost reverence of a mortal addressing the divine.
"Honorable entity..." Cassie breathed, keeping her head bowed. "We are... humbled by your summons. How... how should we address you?"
Cielle looked at the blind Oracle. Then, she looked up at the endless, star-filled void of her own ruined soul. She considered the question with literal simplicity.
"You may refer to me," Cielle said, her voice echoing like a choir of falling stars, "as Lady Dawn."