Arthur woke without breath.
There was no recovery bed. No alarms. No pain in his chest—only an endless black expanse beneath his feet, smooth as glass and cold enough to feel through his bones.
He knew this place.
It was where he had first touched Sunny.
At the edge of the darkness, shapes waited.
Before, they had been little more than silhouettes: tall, thin outlines drowned beneath black water. Now they were clearer. Arthur could make out pale hands, fractured faces, and eyes that held a dim red glow. Their bodies seemed stitched from shadow, each one flickering between human and something far older.
"You died again," they said.
Their voices did not echo. They spoke from inside his skull.
Arthur looked down at himself. A dark tear split across his chest, matching the wound the nightmare had made. From it, thin red light leaked into the black beneath him.
"I'm alive," he said.
"For now."
The nearest being stepped closer. Its face was almost familiar, but Arthur could not place it.
"Your will held us together," it whispered. "When the claw opened you, we began to slip. But you refused to let go. You held on long enough for the one with the golden staff… and then the angel."
Arthur's jaw tightened. "Who are you?"
The figures did not answer.
Instead, the darkness beneath them rippled, revealing brief images: Layla screaming; Alexi kneeling beside him with blood on her hands; Sunny unable to rise; his own body on the floor.
Arthur took a step back.
"You keep dying," another being said, clearer now. "And each death brings you closer."
"Closer to what?"
This time, they all looked at him.
The red in their eyes brightened.
"The next time we meet," they said together, "things will be different."
Arthur felt something move beneath the black floor—vast, slow, and listening.
"You will have changed."
The scar on his chest burned.
Arthur reached for it, and the dark place cracked like a mirror.
As the beings faded, one final voice followed him into the breaking black:
"Do not mistake survival for remaining yourself."
Arthur woke sharply in the recovery room, dragging in air.
His hand clamped over the scar on his chest.
It was healed.
But beneath the skin, something answered with a faint red pulse.
Arthur's eyes opened sharply, but he kept his hand over the scar until the faint red pulse beneath it faded.
Layla shifted beside the bed. "Arthur? What happened?"
He swallowed the truth with the blood-metal taste still clinging to his mouth. "Nothing. Just the pain."
Alexi leaned closer, worry cutting through her exhaustion. Arthur gave her a small, practiced smile—the kind meant to end questions before they began.
"I'm fine," he said.
He did not mention the dark place. He did not mention the beings becoming clear. And he did not tell anyone that they had called this his second death.
But while the room slowly settled around him, Arthur stared at the ceiling and understood one thing:
The next time he died, whatever woke up might not be entirely him.
Alex stood at the recovery room window, watching Arthur wake without saying what had truly happened.
He knew that look. Someone had come back from somewhere they should not have been—and decided to carry it alone.
Behind him, Rivien slept under Lucas's stabilizing aether. Arthur bore a scar Aris had deliberately left behind. Sunny was a target. And Midnight Church disciples were inside Voidspire, preparing for war with the Hollow Choir.
Alex adjusted the cuff of his dark-purple suit. The white Watcher symbol on his black coat caught the room's light.
"Four months," Lucas said quietly. "What do we do with them?"
Alex looked at Arthur, then Sunny.
"We make sure they survive them."
His eyes moved to the shattered remains of the false Book of the Dead, sealed in a containment case near the wall.
"Then we find out why a Church willing to start a war wants those two alive."
For the first time since the fighting began, Alex allowed himself a thin, cold smile.
"They made the mistake of giving us time."
Aris stood at the very edge of the hospital roof, his coat snapping in the night wind below a sky with no stars. Far beneath him, ambulances came and went, their lights bleeding red across the wet streets.
His pale eyes fixed on Arthur Ravenheart through the window of Layla's room.
"Beware the curse that binds you, Arthur Ravenheart," Aris said, his voice carrying through the glass though no window was open. "For it will tear your world apart."
Arthur looked up—but Aris was already gone. No flash. No smoke. One heartbeat he stood on the roof; the next, only rain occupied the ledge.
Layla lay motionless in her hospital bed, the ache of the battle sitting deep in her bones. Machines whispered beside her. Lola slept in a chair nearby, her hand wrapped around Layla's as if she were afraid Layla might vanish too.
Then sleep took Layla—and with it came a memory that did not feel like her own.
She saw Spain.
She was younger, standing between her parents in the sunlit courtyard of an old house near Valencia. Her mother laughed as her father tried to carry too many suitcases. It had always been explained simply: they had moved to Spain for a fresh start.
But the fragment showed the truth.
Her grandmother, Amara Skywalker, had spent most of her life in India. She loved its colour, its music, its temples, and the stories people told beneath warm evening skies. More than that, she had gone there searching for knowledge about an ancient celestial bloodline—the Skywalkers.
In a ruined shrine in the Himalayas, Amara found a stone chamber marked with the Skywalker Crest: a silver wing crossing a black circle, with a single gold star at its centre.
The wing meant guidance through darkness.
The black circle meant the void between worlds.
And the gold star meant a Skywalker must always choose the light, even when their blood calls them toward the abyss.
The crest was not just a symbol. It was a seal.
Amara discovered that the Skywalker family had once guarded the passages between worlds. They were not rulers, nor gods, but wardens—people born with the ability to sense fractures in reality. For generations, they kept creatures and curses from crossing into the human world.
Then, one night, the entire family disappeared.
No bodies were found. No homes were disturbed. Their estates stood abandoned, meals left on tables and doors unlocked, as though every Skywalker had simply stepped out of the world at once.
The official story was that they had died in a fire at their ancestral manor.
The truth was far worse.
They had sealed themselves beyond the Veil to stop a curse from spreading. A curse that carried one name through history: Ravenheart.
Amara had learned too much. In the shrine, a guardian of the old seal attacked her—not to kill her quickly, but to stop her from taking what she had found. The wound it left was poisoned with a spiritual venom. Her parents brought her to a hospital in India, but ordinary medicine could not touch it. Before she died, Amara made Layla's parents promise to leave India, hide the Crest, and keep Layla away from anything connected to the Skywalkers.
That was why they went to Spain.
That was why Layla had never known the truth.
The memory splintered.
Layla was sitting at a school desk.
Sunlight filled the classroom. Arthur sat beside her, quieter than usual, while Lola leaned back in her chair and spun a pen between her fingers. The dream had brought Layla here—the place where it had ended before.
Arthur's arm was bruised.
Three older boys waited outside the classroom door, grinning whenever he glanced their way. They had been bothering him for weeks: taking his books, shoving him into lockers, calling him names whenever no teacher was watching.
The first time, Layla stepped between them.
"Pick on someone who actually cares what you think," she told them.
The second time, Lola "accidentally" spilled a bottle of juice down the ringleader's shirt before he could touch Arthur.
The third time, Layla and Lola found Arthur surrounded near the sports field. Lola distracted two of them while Layla pulled Arthur away, both girls refusing to leave him alone until he was safe.
But it kept happening.
Finally, Arthur reported them to the principal. Layla remembered waiting outside the office with Lola, both pretending not to be worried. The three boys were called in separately. Security footage, witness statements, and the bruises on Arthur's arm did the rest.
They were suspended.
After that, Arthur was never bothered by them again, although it wasn't explained why .
For the first time in weeks, he smiled without forcing it.
At lunch, he looked at Layla and Lola with a strange, distant excitement.
"My dad said if I pass the next few years," Arthur said, "we're going on a vacation trip. Properly far away. He mentioned a flight—Flight 220."
Layla's breath caught.
The classroom dissolved.
She woke in the hospital with tears on her cheeks and one name echoing through her mind.
Flight 220.
The incident Arthur had told her about was never just an accident.
It was the moment the Ravenheart curse found him.
And somehow, long before Layla understood who she was, the Skywalker Crest had already been trying to lead her back to him.
Rain swept across the hospital roof as Aris stood at its edge, looking down through Layla's window. Below him, Arthur Ravenheart sat beside her bed, unaware of the figure watching from above.
Arthur looked up at the sound of his name.
Aris had vanished.
Layla lay weak beneath the hospital blankets, pain from the battle still burning through her body. Lola was asleep in the chair at her bedside, one hand resting protectively over Layla's.
She then thinks after experiencing that memory and finally deducted that after
She was standing in Spain, younger, between her parents, For years they had said they moved there for a new beginning. But the memory showed her why.
Her grandmother, Amara Skywalker, had loved India. She had lived there for decades, studying its languages, traditions, and ancient spiritual sites. Beneath that love was a family purpose: she was searching for the lost history of the Skywalkers.
Their Crest appeared in Layla's vision—a gold star encircled by a black ring, crossed by two silver wings.
The star meant hope and the path home. The black ring represented the Void between worlds. The wings symbolized the Skywalkers' duty: to guide those lost beyond that Void and prevent darkness from returning through it.
The Skywalkers had once guarded fractures between worlds. When a great breach opened generations ago, the family entered it to seal what waited on the other side. They never returned. Their homes were found empty, their crest scratched from records, and their disappearance became a legend.
The Ravenhearts were blamed because the breach had opened beneath Ravenheart land. Old witnesses claimed a Ravenheart ritual had weakened the Veil, while others insisted the Ravenhearts had betrayed the Skywalkers and left them trapped beyond it. No one knew which story was true.
Amara had discovered evidence that the Skywalkers might not have vanished willingly. Before she could bring it home, something found her in an ancient shrine in India. It left her with a wound that looked harmless at first—a thin, dark cut across her ribs.
But the wound spread like ink beneath her skin. Doctors called it an unknown infection. Amara knew better. It was Veil-poison: a curse carried by something that had crossed through the fracture.
She died three days later.
Before her final breath, she made Layla's parents promise to flee India with Layla, hide the Skywalker Crest, and never let the Ravenheart name draw her into the past.
She had woken up violently as soon as the memory ended in the hospital bed, her hand pressed to the place where the Skywalker Crest had burned beneath her skin.
"That damn Fated Attribute," Layla whispered. "It's been tying our lives together all along."
Her gaze snapped toward Arthur, still asleep near the window.
"What is the Ravenheart curse?" she demanded, her voice trembling with fury. "How did Arthur survive Flight 220? And why did everyone blame the Ravenhearts for what happened to the Skywalkers?"
"Layla?"
Lola stirred in the chair beside her, blinking sleep from her eyes. "You're awake." She leaned forward, instantly worried. "What happened? You look terrified."
Before Layla could answer, the door opened.
Alex entered first, holding a cup of water and looking relieved. Behind him came Alexi—Arthur's mother.
Alexi's posture was composed, but exhaustion weighed heavily on her face. Her eyes were ringed with sleeplessness, and she moved slowly, as though she had spent the entire night refusing to leave her son's side.
"Layla," Alexi said softly, glancing first at Arthur and then at Layla. "You're awake. How are you feeling?"
Layla stared at her.
Arthur's mother.
A woman who might know why her son had lived through Flight 220.
A woman whose family name was Ravenheart.
Layla's questions crowded her throat, but Lola's hand found hers first, grounding her before the words could spill out.
And Alexi—far too tired to hide it—looked at Layla as if she already knew exactly what Layla had seen.