the shattered realm

Chapter Ten: The Shattered Realm

Awakening in the Ruins

The first thing Emma feels is the cold bite of stone beneath her fingers. Her palms press into the cracked surface, her skin raw and scraped. She blinks against the swirling fog, her vision blurred and unfocused. Her entire body aches, the aftershocks of the Veil's collapse still burning through her veins.

She coughs weakly, forcing herself onto her knees. Her breath catches when she sees the landscape around her—the world she once knew is no more.

The familiar forest road where she confronted the Hollowborn is gone, replaced by an endless expanse of broken fragments—pieces of reality torn from their original places, now floating in a sea of void and memory.

Pale islands of stone and earth hover in midair, splintered and jagged, suspended in gravity-defying stillness. Shards of forgotten places float like flotsam—pieces of cottages, fractured cobblestone paths, and even remnants of entire villages—all disjointed and drifting through the broken sky.

Overhead, the sky is fractured. The once-familiar sun is replaced by a swirling void of light and darkness, splitting and bleeding into itself—a torn canvas of shifting hues. Occasional bursts of golden and violet light pulse through the sky, remnants of the Veil's magic still crackling with instability.

Emma's knees tremble as she stands, her legs weak beneath her, her breath unsteady. She wraps her arms around herself, but the cold isn't from the air—it's from the emptiness she feels inside.

"Liam…" she breathes. His name feels like glass on her tongue, jagged and painful. She half-expects him to call back to her, to emerge from the mist. But the silence that follows is absolute.

He is gone.

And she is alone.

The Price of Defiance

Emma takes an unsteady step forward, her boots scraping across the uneven stone. She glances down and sees that the ground itself is unstable—it flickers slightly, glitching at the edges like a half-formed memory. The reality around her is incomplete.

The Veil's collapse hasn't just destroyed the illusion—it has fractured the foundation of existence itself.

She presses her hand against a piece of jagged stone, only for it to phase slightly beneath her fingertips. She can feel the unreality of it, as though the world itself no longer remembers what it is supposed to be.

Emma exhales slowly, staring into the horizon. She can see floating remnants of places she vaguely recognizes—a broken windmill she passed once as a child, the spire of a church she saw in a distant village—but they are all disconnected, scattered memories that no longer have a place in the real world.

Her fingers tighten into fists. She knows the truth now: when she tore through the Veil, she didn't just break the Hollowborn's hold—she fractured the world itself.

Whispers of the Forgotten

As she walks forward, strange sounds begin to drift through the swirling air. At first, she thinks it is the wind, but then she hears them clearly: voices. Faint, broken voices.

"Emma…"

She freezes, her eyes wide. Her name—spoken softly, as though from a great distance.

"Emma… help me…"

Her breath catches in her throat. She spins around, but there is no one there.

The voices multiply, overlapping—faint echoes that stutter and break like a scratched record. She can't tell if they are memories or remnants of lost souls, but they haunt the fragments of the broken world.

She passes through a crumbling village square that seems to loop in on itself—a place she dimly recognizes from her childhood. The stone fountain in the center glitches in and out of existence, the water suspended mid-flow, droplets frozen in time, hovering in the air.

Emma stares at the figures moving through the square—half-formed people flickering in and out of existence, faces she almost recognizes but can't quite place. They drift like specters, repeating fractured moments of their former lives.

A man in a merchant's coat leans down to pick up an apple from a splintered cart, but his hand phases through it. A young girl runs after a ball, but she glitches with every step, her body flickering and transparent.

They are memories—fragments left behind when the Veil fell.

Her throat tightens. She steps forward and reaches out to touch the child, but her fingers pass right through her. The girl's form stutters, eyes wide with fear, and she vanishes into mist.

Emma stumbles back, her hands trembling. These people aren't real. They are only pieces of the past, fragments that can no longer hold together.

Her knees weaken, and she falls to the stone floor, choking back a sob.

"Liam," she whispers brokenly. "Where are you?"

The Tear in Reality

As she moves forward, the landscape becomes more chaotic. The floating islands of stone and memory twist around each other, creating jagged spires that pierce the sky. The pieces of reality seem fused together in strange, unnatural ways—parts of villages overlapping with barren wastelands, forests tangled with broken cityscapes.

And then she sees it—a massive rift looming on the horizon.

The tear in reality is unlike anything she has ever seen. It stretches across the horizon, a jagged wound of light and darkness, spilling multicolored energy into the void. It pulsates with raw, fractured power, threads of memory and reality tangling together.

She feels her knees weaken at the sight of it. The tear is a wound left by her defiance—a place where the Veil has not just fallen but been obliterated.

As she approaches, the ground beneath her warps, shifting with each step, unable to decide what it is meant to be. She can feel the instability in her bones, the remnants of the Veil still clinging to her.

The voices around her grow louder as she nears the tear—frantic, broken whispers, pleading voices she can no longer place. Some are angry, others desperate, but all are fragments of lost memories.

And then she hears his voice.

"Emma…"

Her breath halts. She spins around, eyes wide. The voice is unmistakable.

"Liam…"

Her eyes scan the broken landscape, searching for him, but he is nowhere in sight.

"Emma, please…" His voice is filled with pain, with longing, and with a desperate sorrow that cuts through her like a blade.

She stumbles toward the tear, her feet slipping on the uneven ground. She reaches out toward the swirling rift, her fingers trembling, her heart pounding.

And then she sees him.

Liam.

He is standing on the other side of the tear, his form flickering and fragmented, his eyes wide with fear and longing. He is reaching for her, just as he was when the Veil collapsed.

Her breath catches in her throat. "No…" she whispers. "No, I lost you…"

His eyes fill with tears as he shakes his head. "You didn't lose me. You just… left me behind."

Her legs nearly give out, but she stumbles forward.

"No!" she cries. "I'll find you! I'll fix this—I swear I will."

Liam's voice is breaking, his image flickering. He is being pulled deeper into the tear, the remnants of his memory unraveling into the void.

"Emma…" His voice is softer now, fading. "You have to hurry… before I'm forgotten."

And then he is gone.

Emma stands in the fractured ruins, her hands trembling, her heart breaking.

She screams into the empty void, the sound swallowed by the broken world.

And then, slowly, she steps forward—toward the tear in reality, toward the fragments of Liam's memory, and toward the only hope she has left: finding him.

The Shattered Realms: A World Without Borders

The Edge of Reality

Emma stands at the precipice of the tear in reality, her body trembling as she gazes into the yawning abyss. The swirling fracture before her pulses with an unnatural rhythm, shifting between hues of violet, gold, and midnight blue—colors that feel both familiar and alien, as though she is staring at memories bleeding into raw magic.

The wind here is nonexistent, but the space around her seems to breathe, inhaling and exhaling in slow, ragged gasps. She can feel the Veil's remnants still clinging to her skin, like faint static brushing against her fingertips. The power is broken but not gone, and somewhere in the heart of the shattered realms, it still lingers, alive and watching.

Her gaze drifts across the horizon, where the fragments of the world float like splintered islands. She can see rivers that end abruptly, flowing off the edges of floating landmasses and spilling into the void. Jagged remnants of cities drift aimlessly through the broken sky—rooftops, clock towers, and twisted streets hovering in midair, disconnected from any foundation.

A portion of a forest drifts by on a fragment of rock, its trees still shrouded in mist. The trees themselves are twisted and half-formed, glitching at the edges—flickering between seasons, their leaves turning from summer green to skeletal winter branches with each pulse of instability.

It is a world without borders.

A place where time, memory, and reality no longer obey their laws.

The Ghost Roads

Emma steps onto the first floating landmass, the stone trembling beneath her boots. The ground is unstable, flickering slightly, almost two-dimensional at times, as though the world itself is forgetting how to hold its form.

As she walks, she sees roads that go nowhere—ancient paths severed by the realm's collapse. The roads twist upward into the sky, like abandoned highways suspended in midair. Memories of travelers still linger—glitching specters walking the roads they once knew.

She watches a man in old traveling leathers, his form distorted by the instability, walking along a fractured road with a hollow-eyed horse at his side. He glances toward Emma, his face flickering in and out of existence, and for a fleeting moment, their eyes meet. His lips part slightly—as if he remembers her—and then he vanishes into a haze of forgotten mist.

Emma reaches for him, but her hand touches only the cold, empty air.

"They're just echoes," she murmurs bitterly, clenching her fists. "Fragments left behind."

She forces herself forward, moving from one floating path to the next, crossing the broken bridges of splintered reality. Each step she takes feels heavier, her boots scraping across the unstable ground. She knows that with every island she crosses, she is moving further away from her own world and deeper into the broken unknown.

The Tower of Forgotten Time

After hours of wandering, she reaches a massive, tilted spire suspended in the void. The tower is ancient, formed from blackened stone and adorned with runes that glow faintly in shifting hues. It is one of the few remnants that seems stable, held together by magic so old it has outlasted the collapse.

She enters cautiously, her boots scraping against the marble floor. Inside, the space is impossibly vast—far larger than it should be. The walls are lined with time-worn mirrors, but their surfaces no longer reflect the present. Instead, they show flickering memories, shifting through fragmented moments like an old film reel skipping frames.

In one mirror, she sees a glimpse of her childhood—her father laughing as he swings her into the air, her mother's voice singing a lullaby. But the moment glitches violently, and the image fractures into a thousand shards. The faces blur and shift, their features melting away into unrecognizable forms.

Another mirror shows Liam, his eyes wide with fear, standing at the edge of the Veil just before it fractured. His mouth moves, but no sound reaches her. His fading form is swallowed by darkness, flickering out before she can call to him.

She turns away sharply, her throat tight. The mirrors show only loss.

At the center of the tower, she finds a spiraling staircase that leads upward. As she ascends, the atmosphere grows colder, the air thick with memory and forgotten voices. Her footsteps echo faintly, but sometimes she hears extra steps that do not belong to her—phantom footsteps walking alongside her.

When she reaches the top, she finds a vast window of fractured glass overlooking the realms. She gazes out over the broken landscape, her eyes filled with equal parts awe and despair.

The world outside is both beautiful and horrifying—a ruined masterpiece of color and memory, drifting through a sea of nothingness.

The Garden of Unmaking

Continuing her journey, Emma passes through a vast, floating garden of ruin. The once-beautiful grove is now a place of decay and memory. The grass flickers between lush green and withered brown, unable to decide what time it belongs to.

Ancient statues of forgotten gods line the garden paths, their faces cracked and weathered. Some have no faces at all, their features eroded by the instability. Others are twisted into broken reflections of themselves—deities with too many eyes, too many arms, and gaping mouths filled with void.

The flowers here are alive but wrong—their petals phasing in and out of existence, shimmering between colors that do not belong in nature. Some blossoms are half-faded, their stems transparent, caught between real and unreal.

As Emma steps onto the cracked stone path, she hears whispers—faint voices drifting on the wind. She turns sharply and sees figures moving through the garden.

They are people she once knew—or could have known. Faces from half-forgotten dreams, people she can't quite place. Some look at her with hollow eyes, their lips moving soundlessly. Others simply drift by, unaware of her presence.

And then she sees Liam.

Or rather, an echo of him.

He stands in the center of the garden, his back to her. He is dressed in the same coat he wore the night they first met, his hair slightly tousled, his posture familiar yet strange.

Her breath catches in her throat.

"Liam…" she whispers.

He doesn't turn.

Instead, he begins to walk away, toward the far end of the garden, his figure becoming less real with each step.

"Wait!" she shouts, breaking into a run.

She pushes past the fractured statues and glitching flowers, her boots pounding against the crumbling stones. She reaches for him—her fingers brushing the edge of his coat—but he fades into mist before she can grasp him.

She stumbles to a halt, her heart pounding, her hands trembling in the emptiness he left behind.

And then she screams—a raw, broken sound that tears through the stillness. The garden shudders violently in response, and the flowers wither to ash, consumed by the grief in her voice.

The Lonely Horizon

As she continues her journey, the realms grow stranger—more broken, more unstable.

She walks across a bridge of light that shatters behind her with each step. She passes through a village where time loops infinitely—a single day repeating endlessly. She sees fragments of the past, people who cannot move forward, trapped in moments that never existed.

But she keeps walking.

Toward the next realm.

Toward the next broken fragment.

Toward him.

The Shattered Realms: Unraveling Liam's Lost Memories

The Memory Tide

Emma trudges through the fractured ruins of the realms, her steps sluggish, her limbs heavy with exhaustion. She has lost track of how long she has been walking. Time here is meaningless—the sunless void offers no day, no night. Only the unending expanse of floating ruins and broken memories.

Her boots scrape across a half-formed street, its cobblestones flickering between solid and transparent, unable to decide whether they still exist. The air itself feels thick with longing—a strange, electric tension that clings to her skin like static.

Then she feels it—a strange pull, subtle at first, then stronger. It coils around her chest like an invisible tether, urging her toward the far horizon, where the jagged remnants of reality fracture into a field of swirling mist.

She clutches at her chest instinctively, her fingers trembling over her heart.

It is his presence.

Liam.

Her legs move before she realizes it, her body drawn by instinct. She half-stumbles, half-runs toward the edge of the realm, where the mist thickens into an opalescent haze.

As she passes through the veil of mist, the world around her changes.

The jagged ruins and broken landscapes vanish.

In their place, she finds herself standing on a shoreline—but not one she recognizes.

The sand beneath her boots is glimmering silver, sparkling faintly beneath a twilight sky. The ocean ahead of her is made of memories—a shimmering tide of translucent light, moving with slow, graceful waves.

The tide is not water but fractured recollections—rippling currents of lost moments, drifting in and out of existence. As each wave rises, faces, voices, and emotions shimmer briefly before falling away again.

Emma stumbles forward. The ocean seems to call to her, and she knows, with certainty, that Liam's memories are here—adrift in the tide, slipping further and further away with each passing wave.

The First Memory: The Boy in the Orchard

She steps into the tide.

Her boots splash through the shimmering current, but the memory doesn't resist. It embraces her, folding around her like a second skin.

The silver tide washes over her eyes, and suddenly, she is elsewhere.

She stands in an apple orchard, its branches heavy with fruit. The sunlight is golden and soft, and the air smells faintly of cider and autumn leaves. She hears laughter—a boy's laughter, bright and carefree.

She turns and sees him: Liam, no older than ten, chasing a small, shaggy dog through the orchard. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes wide with wonder, and his hair is wild and unkempt. The dog barks playfully, weaving between the trees, and Liam laughs so hard he almost trips over his own feet.

Emma's breath catches in her throat.

She has never seen him like this before—innocent and unscarred, untouched by the darkness that would come.

Then she hears another voice—familiar but warmer, richer. A woman's voice.

"Liam!"

A tall woman steps into view, her arms wide with mock exasperation. She has Liam's eyes—a deep, forest green that shimmer with warmth. Her hair is chestnut brown, braided loosely over one shoulder.

"Come back here," she calls, laughing softly. "You're going to ruin your boots again."

Liam glances back at her, breathless and smiling. "You'll just fix them!" he calls, cheekily.

The woman laughs. "Only if you promise me you'll actually wear them next time."

Emma feels her throat tighten. She knows who this is.

Liam's mother.

The woman moves toward him, and he runs into her arms without hesitation. She lifts him easily, holding him against her hip, and he buries his face in her shoulder, still laughing.

For a moment, Emma feels her heart soften—a pang of sorrow and tenderness rising in her chest. She had always imagined Liam as hardened, as broken by his past. But here he is—a boy who once knew love.

But the memory begins to glitch.

The orchard flickers violently.

The sun turns ashen, and the leaves blacken, falling in slow motion.

The warmth vanishes.

And when Emma turns back, Liam's mother is gone.

He stands alone in the orchard, his arms empty, his face pale with confusion.

His small hands grasp at nothing.

And he calls out:

"Mama?"

But no one answers.

The memory fractures into mist, and Emma is cast back into the tide, choking on the loss she just witnessed.

The Second Memory: The Architect's Lie

The tide drags her deeper, pulling her into another memory.

This time, she stands in a stone chamber, lit only by the glow of flickering candles. The room is lined with ancient tomes and maps, and in the center, Liam stands—no longer a child but a man on the edge of desperation.

He is in his early twenties, his face younger and unscarred, but his eyes are already haunted. He paces the chamber, his hands trembling as he clutches a blackened book bound in leather marked with Hollowborn sigils. His face is drawn, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

Across from him stands a man Emma recognizes immediately: The Architect.

But he looks different here—younger, uncorrupted, dressed in elegant black robes embroidered with faint silver runes. His hair is streaked with gray, but his eyes are sharp and commanding, the expression of a man still confident in his beliefs.

"You said you could bring her back!" Liam's voice cracks with grief. His hands slam down onto the table, causing the books to rattle.

The Architect watches him coldly, unmoved.

"Nothing comes without a price," he says quietly. "You knew this from the start."

Liam's hands tremble violently, his knuckles bloodless. His voice breaks.

"I don't care. You said there was a way. I want my mother back."

Emma's heart lurches.

Liam hadn't been trying to stop the Hollowborn all those years ago.

He had been trying to bargain with them.

The Architect steps forward, his voice silken with cruelty.

"She is gone, Liam. But there is something you can do." He smiles faintly. "You can make sure no one else suffers the same fate."

He presses a Hollowborn seal into Liam's palm—a small, silver medallion with the sigil of the Hollowborn cult etched into the surface. It shimmers faintly with dark magic.

"Take it," the Architect murmurs. "Join us. Change the world."

Liam stares at the sigil for a long moment, his breathing shallow.

His hands are trembling so violently that the sigil almost slips through his fingers.

But he clenches it in his fist, his jaw tightening.

He nods.

And in that moment, Emma feels the weight of his regret, years in the making.

The memory begins to flicker, fracturing at the edges. Liam's face becomes distant, blurred by the tide's pull.

"No…" Emma gasps, reaching out, but her fingers slip through the memory.

The image shatters into mist.

And she is left, gasping in the surf of lost time.

The Shattered Realms: Confronting the Architect's Lingering Influence

The Hollow Wake

Emma rises from the tide of lost memories, her lungs heaving as though she has surfaced from deep water. The silver current still clings to her limbs, glittering faintly in her hair, slipping through her fingers like strands of fading light. She staggers onto the shimmering shore, her knees sinking into the cold, shifting sand.

Her hands tremble as she stares at her own reflection in the memory tide—her face pale and haunted, her eyes ringed with exhaustion. But it is not just weariness she sees. The memories she has just witnessed cling to her like a second skin.

Liam's grief.

His desperation.

The terrible moment when he had clenched the Hollowborn seal in his trembling hand and sealed his fate.

Emma shudders violently, gripping her own arms, her breath ragged.

"You made him this way…" she whispers, her voice trembling with fury.

Her gaze hardens.

"You made him yours."

She pushes herself to her feet, her legs unsteady but her resolve firm.

She knows what she must do.

Somewhere in the Shattered Realms, the Architect's influence still lingers.

His presence coils through the broken reality like poisoned smoke, infecting the Veil's remnants, siphoning power from its ruins.

And she will find him.

Even if she has to tear the realms apart.

The Hollow Gate

Emma's boots crunch against the glass-like sand as she marches along the jagged shore. The broken realms around her bend and shift, the landscape glitching with every step she takes.

She moves through phantom villages that flicker between existence and nothingness—half-formed houses rising from the ground, only to dissolve into mist moments later. She passes bridges suspended in midair, their stone arches fractured and splintering, as though they are caught mid-collapse.

The further she goes, the more tainted the realms become. The atmosphere grows thicker with shadow, the ground darker, slick with a tar-like mist. The Veil's once-pure magic is now foul and rotted, corrupted by the Architect's lingering touch.

And then she sees it—looming ahead of her on the horizon:

The Hollow Gate.

A massive, spiraling arch of black stone, jagged and cruel in its construction. Hollowborn runes are carved into its surface, writhing with faint, blood-red light. The gate is fractured—half-formed, broken by the Veil's collapse—but it still shimmers with dark magic, like a festering wound that refuses to heal.

The air around the gate shivers with voices—whispers that drift from the chasm beyond it. They speak in a thousand fragmented tongues, some familiar, some lost. She hears pleading voices, desperate prayers, and half-forgotten memories, all swirling together in an eternal chant.

As she approaches, she feels a faint heat against her chest. She glances down and sees the scar where the Hollowborn once branded her—the sigil of the broken cult. It pulses faintly, reacting to the gate's presence.

Her fingers brush the scar, and she clenches her fists.

The Architect's power is still here.

He is still here.

The Architect's Shade

Emma steps beneath the Hollow Gate. The air grows dense and heavy, thick with corrupted magic. The fractured stone beneath her boots seems to sigh faintly, the ground pulsing as though it remembers the Architect's footsteps.

The void beyond the gate is empty at first—a vast expanse of swirling darkness. But then she feels it: a sliver of wrongness, slithering beneath the surface of reality.

A shadow stirs.

And then she hears his voice.

"You came so far. Just for him."

The voice is smooth as silk, with the same familiar, cruel elegance it once held. But it is fractured now—distorted, cracked with malice.

Emma whirls around, her hand instinctively going to her dagger, but there is nothing behind her.

And then the darkness itself begins to twist.

The shadows coalesce, forming into a humanoid figure—tall and elegant, robed in tattered black. His face is half-formed, flickering between the features of the man she once saw in Liam's memory and something monstrous—faceless, eyeless, with nothing but an empty grin of white teeth.

His eyes—when they appear—are hollow, silver pits, devoid of light.

The Architect's voice drips with mocking amusement.

"You're chasing a ghost, Emma."

He tilts his head, his lips curling into a cruel smile.

"But you always were good at clinging to lost things."

Her fingers tighten around the dagger's hilt, but she does not strike.

Not yet.

"You destroyed him," she says coldly, her voice barely above a whisper.

The Architect's grin widens.

"Destroyed him?" he says softly. He takes a slow step forward, his form glitching violently. His voice drops to a low murmur.

"No, Emma. I made him."

The Haunting of Liam's Soul

Without warning, the Architect raises his hand, and the void around them fractures open. A surge of Hollowborn magic splinters through the air, and the scenery around them shifts violently.

Emma stumbles backward, shielding her eyes as the landscape reshapes itself into a familiar scene.

The memory tide.

The orchard.

Liam's mother standing in the golden sunlight.

But something is wrong.

This is not the memory Emma saw.

It is twisted, corrupted.

Liam's mother turns toward her.

But when she lifts her face, her eyes are hollow voids, her mouth stretching into a cruel grin. Her voice is not her own.

"He sold his soul for a lie."

The memory fractures, and Emma suddenly sees Liam—alone and trembling in the orchard. But this version of him is older, more broken. His face is pale, his eyes sunken with despair. He clutches the Hollowborn sigil in his hands, his knuckles bloodless, his gaze empty.

"Stop it!" Emma screams, but her voice doesn't reach him.

He doesn't look at her.

He can't see her.

He is trapped in this corrupted memory, forced to relive his mistakes over and over again.

And from the shadows, the Architect's voice whispers into her ear, so close she can feel the coldness of it against her skin.

"He will never be whole again."

The Shattering of the Illusion

But Emma's fury burns white-hot.

She lashes out—her dagger igniting with Veilfire, the light of the magic piercing the false memory. The illusion shatters violently, the orchard and Liam's broken form dissolving into ash.

The Architect's shade stumbles back, his face glitching violently, writhing with fractured rage.

He hisses through his teeth, his voice fractured with fury.

"You should have let him drown with me."

But Emma takes a single step forward, her eyes blazing with defiance.

Her voice is calm, steady, and merciless.

"You should have killed me when you had the chance."