The air around Elias shimmered with an unsettling stillness, as if the world itself was holding its breath. The sky remained in its paradoxical state—half-drenched in the velvety darkness of night, half-painted in the golden hues of an eternal dawn.
Ilyana's grip on his hand tightened.
"Elias," she said, urgency lacing her voice, "you need to focus. We don't have much time."
Elias tried to steady his thoughts, but the echoes of his past selves still rang in his mind, fragments of lives he could barely comprehend. Yet, something had changed. The cycle—whatever cruel design had bound him—was beginning to fracture.
"What do I need to remember?" His voice was hoarse, filled with uncertainty.
Ilyana hesitated, her expression shadowed with something deeper—doubt, perhaps, or sorrow.
"The Dream Paradox," she whispered.
The words sent a chill down Elias's spine. He had heard them before, felt their weight in every moment of déjà vu, in every dream that bled into reality.
"It's real, isn't it?" he muttered. "This isn't just some nightmare I keep waking into."
Ilyana nodded.
"It's more than real. And if we don't break it completely, you'll be lost to it forever."
Thunder rumbled across the fractured sky, and the great tree behind them groaned, its roots splitting through the earth like veins in a dying body. The world was unraveling, slipping between the cracks of existence.
"How?" Elias asked, his pulse quickening. "How do we stop it?"
Ilyana opened her mouth to answer—
But the world shattered before she could.
A force, unseen yet violent, tore through reality like glass breaking under immense pressure. The ground beneath them gave way, and Elias felt himself falling—not into darkness, not into light, but into something far worse.
A void of endless reflections.
He caught glimpses of himself in every fragment—Elias the scholar, Elias the warrior, Elias the forsaken. All the versions of him that had ever existed, staring back with hollow eyes.
And then, through the chaos, a voice called out.
"Wake up."
Not Ilyana's.
Not his own.
Something deeper.
Something waiting for him at the end of the paradox.