The room was dark — and what deepened that darkness was the heavy door sealing shut behind me, its silence somehow louder than any sound it could have made.
Then, slowly, the lights came on.
The circuits lining the ceiling eased to life one by one, their pale glow crawling across the room like a tide coming in. And in that revealing light, I saw him — seated at his console, unmoved, as though he had been expecting me long before I had decided to come. His dark blue eyes moved across the displays in front of him, calm and precise, scrolling through charts and figures that I couldn't fully make out from where I stood. But I didn't need to. As the Patriarch of the Lockhart family, nothing escaped him. Every expense, every movement, every fracture in the family's foundation passed through those eyes first.
The room was still.
And in that stillness I realized something — the room had never been dark. My senses had dulled somewhere between the hallway and here. I hadn't even registered his presence until the lights confirmed it. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was me.
The last time I stood in this room I was ten years old and bleeding.
Ae-cha had hit harder than she intended during sparring — or perhaps exactly as hard as she intended, I still wasn't sure. Either way I had walked through these same doors with blood running down my chin and my pride considerably worse off than my face. The Patriarch hadn't said a single word about the blood. He had simply looked at me, then looked back at his console, and told me to stand up straight.
I remembered thinking that was the coldest thing a person could do.
Standing here now, two years later, I understood it differently.
He hadn't ignored the blood.
He had decided it didn't require commentary.
There was a difference — though I was still deciding whether that difference made things better or worse.
"Youngest."
His voice broke through my thoughts like a stone through still water. Deep, measured, masculine — the kind of voice that didn't need to rise to command a room. To anyone but me, I imagine it would have inspired dread.
I steadied myself before speaking.
"Ye — Yes, Fa… Patriarch?"
He didn't look up from his console.
"You haven't unlocked your Tether these past few years. Your mates are advancing far beyond you."
The words sat between us without judgment, which somehow made them worse. A statement dressed as observation, but carrying the full weight of expectation beneath it.
I thought about Mi-cha's paper briefly — sitting folded on my bedside table where I had left it this morning.
He looked lonely.
I let a breath pass before I replied.
"Unlocking a Tether isn't simply a matter of effort, Patriarch. It's like opening a door to a much larger world — a much larger point of view. When that door opens, everything changes."
He said nothing. His eyes stayed on the console.
Something settled in me then — quiet, certain, maybe reckless. The same feeling I remembered from before my regression. The particular stubbornness that had gotten me into more trouble than I could count across two lifetimes.
"So I'll say this once." I straightened. "I will unlock my Tether. And when I do — it will be Limitless."
For the first time, he looked at me.
His dark blue eyes moved from the console and settled on my face with the same expression he had worn when I was ten and bleeding in this very room. Measuring. Assessing. Giving nothing back.
"Don't taint the family name."
Five words. And yet the moment he said them, something moved through me that I couldn't name — not quite dread, but close to it. A weight that hadn't been there before. The strange and crawling feeling of being watched, even in a room with only two people.
I didn't understand it then.
I had felt this before.
Not in this lifetime.
The thought arrived before I could stop it, quiet and certain as a closed door.
"Look here, Youngest."
With a slow flick of his wrist, a holographic display bloomed open in the air between us, bright against the dim room.
A press conference. Loud, chaotic, alive. Public media feeds ran in columns alongside the footage, comments multiplying faster than they could be read. At the center of it all stood a man behind a podium — composed, but only barely. His name appeared at the bottom of the display.
Jonathan Raswa. Astral Veil Command.
The reporters didn't wait for order.
"Jonathan — is it true? Is the Mental plane real?"
"What did you see in there?"
"Are the gods still alive? Is everything we know a lie?"
"How did you get there?"
Something cold moved through my chest at that last cluster of questions. It wasn't ignorance that chilled me. It was recognition. I had heard things — fragments, whispers passed between lower-ranked members of various families in my previous life, rumors that never quite solidified into anything before the end came. But hearing it spoken aloud now, in front of cameras, in front of the entire world, years earlier than I remembered —
Something was wrong with the timeline.
Jonathan's head lifted slowly. When he spoke, his voice carried the particular steadiness of someone who had rehearsed calm.
"I wouldn't call it simply a Mental plane." A pause. "What I entered was a Dead Zone Mental plane. The time I spent inside — twelve days. To the outside world, to this physical plane, barely a day had passed. But those twelve days were extraordinarily long. And I barely managed to survive them."
The room in the footage erupted.
"What do you mean survive? What was inside?"
"When I was pulled in," Jonathan continued, his voice dropping slightly, "I received a message — directly into my mind, in a language I recognized as Arcanian. Our ancient civilization's tongue."
The holographic display shifted. Behind Jonathan, a secondary screen lit up with transcribed text, marked: [Deciphered].
> Welcome, Hollow — to the Trauma Realm.
> In two minutes, your first Trauma will begin.
I read it twice.
Hollow.
The word sat differently than everything else on that screen. Not a greeting. Not a warning.
A name.
My jaw tightened.
"This Mental plane," Jonathan said, "confirms what the Astral Veil has maintained for years — that we are not alone in this universe. We have researched extensively across age groups and demographics. Our findings indicate that anyone from the age of fifteen and above is susceptible to being pulled into the Trauma Realm."
He paused, and in that pause the room behind the cameras fell into an uneasy quiet.
"What we are calling this — is the Trauma Spell. A curse, or perhaps a disease, inflicted upon this world. Who cast it, or what cast it — we do not yet know. But we will face it. We will pass through these times."
The display vanished with a flick of the Patriarch's wrist.
The room returned to its quiet.
I stood there for a moment longer than necessary.
In my previous life the Trauma Spell had arrived when I was older. Old enough that the world had already prepared — poorly, but prepared. Contingencies existed. Structures were in place.
Now it was here two years early.
Which meant everything I thought I knew about what was coming had just become significantly less reliable.
"Dismissed."
---
I left without another word.
The hallway outside felt longer than it had on the way in, each step pulling me further from something I couldn't name and closer to something I wasn't sure I was ready for.
By the time I reached the lower floor the weight of it had settled fully across my shoulders.
It was not like this before.
The thought arrived quietly, almost gently — the way dangerous thoughts tend to.
In my past life none of this existed at this stage. The Trauma Spell, the press conference, Jonathan Raswa standing at that podium with blood still behind his eyes — none of it happened this early. And yet here it is. Here I am. Beginning again in the same world with different rules and a Tether still locked inside me that I have been deliberately leaving closed.
Why.
Why is it early.
I stopped at the base of the stairs.
The feeling returned — that crawling, nameless certainty of being watched. But this time it didn't fade.
I turned slowly.
The hallway behind me was empty.
And yet, at the far end of it, the lights — one by one — were going out.
Then a voice reached me.
Soft.
Almost affectionate.
Carried on nothing, from nowhere, from somewhere far deeper than sound should be able to travel.
"…Found ya."
---