❖ Chapter 16: The Weight of a Shadow Unseen
There were rules—unwritten and unbreakable—that governed the flow between realms.
The In-Lay was not a place.
It was the life itself.
The script unwritten. The space between scenes. The breath between two moments. And no one, not even the Faeries, could touch it freely without being rewritten themselves.
That is—until Veltheris Umbra stepped forward.
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She stood at the peak of the Northern Pillar, her cloak of glass-thin threads trailing across the smooth obsidian floor. Around her, no sound existed. No servants. No guards. No light.
Only her.
And the infinite mirrors that spun slowly behind her throne—each one holding an image of the realms she governed. South flickered in warning. The center, the cubic balance of the Uni-Pixel, trembled softly.
"Let it tremble," she whispered.
Her hand rose.
And the world answered.
> "Absolute Darkness."
No cry. No flash. No warning.
It devoured.
A cascade of ink spread through space like reverse lightning—branching upward, downward, outward—seeking not the Realms, but the very spaces between them. The jump points. The gaps. The life itself.
Of course she wasn't crazy enough to touch the life, but her absolute darkness have power over people's life, isn't this basically the same but instead of a person the in-lay?.
The In-Lay shivered.
In the place where story becomes motion, a pause took hold.
Like someone caught between words in a sentence, Jio and Havella froze mid-leap, their bodies surrounded by a sudden and unnatural stillness. The tunnel of light around them bent, like glass placed in fire.
Time wobbled.
> "Who blocks the In-Lay?" Havella shouted, eyes wide with rare fear.
Jio didn't answer.
He only stared forward—into the nothingness now spreading through the In-Lay.
The words of the world blurred.
The logic crumbled.
And the life of everything itself... was being choked.
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Back at the fortress, Veltheris stepped forward onto a dark platform now hovering in a ring of hovering null-light.
Behind her, echoes of the guards murmured in fear. But she wasn't looking at them. Her hand pointed to one of the shattered mirrors—one where Jio and Havella had just passed through.
> "I don't need to be stronger than a Fairie," she said, to no one. "I only need to care less than one."
Her voice chilled the mirrors themselves. Several cracked at the edges.
> "She… dares to enter my territory like a shadow through an unlocked door. And that boy with no name and no fear? What are they hiding, I wonder."
She stepped onto a glyph etched into the air.
Her shadow followed, larger than her body, stretching further than the floor, faster than the light.
And the Uni-Pixel trembled again.
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Back in the In-Lay, Havella gasped.
"We need to move!" she shouted, trying to break the seal on her legs.
But Jio did not struggle. He simply lifted his hand again.
The light inside him pulsed. Not aggressively. Not violently.
But consistently.
Like it didn't care what tried to block it.
> "This isn't a trap," Jio said, his voice emotionless but heavy. "This is her will."
"…who?"
"She who sees more than we do. The one who won't let us pass."
The light in his hand flared.
It wasn't resistance. It wasn't rebellion.
It was refusal.
Jio didn't fight the Absolute Darkness.
He walked into it.
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End of Chapter 16
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