COST OF FREEDOM

Reed awoke to the taste of ashes and something metallic—blood, he realized, his own. His consciousness flickered like a dying flame, struggling to coalesce into something whole again. Fragments of memory pierced through the haze: the Watchers disintegrating, The Voice Between's horrific screams, his own body dissolving as he sealed the breach.

He should be dead.

The ground beneath him was no longer the smooth stone of the chamber but rough soil interspersed with crystalline shards that cut into his palms as he pushed himself up. The sky above—if it could still be called a sky—was a tapestry of fractures, like a mirror shattered but somehow still holding its shape. Through the cracks, impossible colors bled through, colors that shouldn't exist in any natural spectrum.

"Shia?" His voice was wrong—layered with echoes that weren't his own, remnants of The Voice Between still lingering within him.