Layla made it only a few steps into the side corridor before her body protested.
Her legs weakened beneath her, and she caught herself on the wall. Reaper had left every muscle aching as though it had been pulled apart and hastily stitched back together. She did not have the strength—or time—for a careful conversation.
"Alexi," Layla said, breath unsteady. "Just answer me one thing. Quickly."
Alexi turned, concern immediately tightening her expression.
Layla looked back toward Arthur's room, where Alex and Lola remained close enough that they could not risk being heard.
"What is the Ravenheart curse?" Layla asked. "And how did Arthur survive Flight 220?"
The corridor went still.
Alexi's face lost its colour.
For the first time since Layla had known her, Arthur's mother looked less like someone guarding a secret—and more like someone standing before a grave she had spent years refusing to name.
"Layla…" Alexi whispered. "Who told you about that flight?"
Layla's hand tightened against the wall, fighting the tremor running through her weakened body.
"I didn't hear it from someone," she said. "I received a memory fragment. From my family—the Skywalkers."
Alexi went completely still.
Layla's eyes hardened. "I saw pieces of them. Not clearly enough to understand everything, but I saw Flight 220. I saw the fear. I saw Arthur."
Her voice dropped.
"So don't ask me who told me. Tell me why my family's memories know about the Ravenhearts."
For a moment, Alexi could not answer. Her gaze fell to the floor.
"The Skywalkers and Ravenhearts were bound together long before that flight," she finally said. "And Flight 220 was not an accident."
Layla's breath caught.
"What happened?"
Alexi looked toward Arthur's room, then back at Layla.
"If I tell you the truth," she whispered, "you may never be able to look at Arthur the same way again."
Layla held Alexi's gaze, though guilt tightened in her chest.
"That fragment was real," she said carefully. "I saw my family. I saw enough to know Flight 220 mattered."
That much was true.
What Layla did not say was that Arthur had told her the name—Ravenheart—and that his fear had been real when he did. He had trusted her with something he was not ready to share with anyone else. She would not repay that trust by exposing him, especially not while he lay injured a few metres away.
Alexi did not notice the omission. Her face had already fallen into the old terror of someone who believed the past had finally caught up.
"The Skywalkers were there because of us," Alexi said quietly. "Because of the Ravenheart curse."
Layla's pulse quickened. "Then tell me what it is."
Alexi glanced toward Arthur's room.
"The curse doesn't only destroy the person bound to it," she whispered. "It pulls everyone who loves them into the fall."
Alexi leaned against the corridor wall, suddenly looking exhausted.
"From my point of view, Flight 220 ends with a blow," she said. "There was screaming. The plane was breaking apart. I remember grabbing Arthur—and then something hit me. I woke up afterward with Levi beside me, Arthur alive, and no memory of how we got out."
Her fingers curled tightly. "Levi remembers the same thing. Nothing after we were knocked out. Nothing about who saved us. Nothing about how we survived."
Layla kept her face still.
Arthur had told her the missing part: a black figure had torn through the plane as it fell. It had taken Arthur, Alexi, and Levi from the wreckage—but before Arthur could fight it, the figure knocked him unconscious.
It erased itself from Alexi and Levi's memories.
But it left Arthur with the truth.
Layla did not betray him.
"So Arthur remembers?" she asked carefully.
Alexi's eyes flicked toward the recovery room. "I think he remembers something. But every time I tried to ask, he looked terrified—as if remembering it might bring it back."
Layla looked through the doorway at Arthur's sleeping form, the scar on his chest rising and falling with each breath.
The black figure had saved them.
Or claimed them.
Arthur lay still in the recovery room, eyes closed, breathing shallowly beneath the blankets.
But he had been awake.
The moment Alexi and Layla stepped into the corridor, Arthur had drawn on the last thin remnant of his aether. Absolute Black unfolded without a visible shadow, slipping over his body like a second skin. It copied his breathing, the rise of his chest, even the faint slackness of sleep across his face.
Not even Alex sensed it.
That was the frightening part. A Watcher stood only metres away, yet Arthur's attribute hid its presence completely.
Through the barely open doorway, Arthur heard every word.
Flight 220.
The black figure.
It erased itself from Alexi and Levi's memories—but left Arthur to remember.
The scar in Arthur's chest gave one faint red pulse.
He kept his expression empty until Alexi's voice fell quiet.
Then Arthur released Absolute Black.
The false sleep dissolved so subtly that neither Layla nor Alexi noticed the exact moment it ended. Arthur opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his jaw tight.
They thought he had been unconscious.
They thought the past was buried.
Arthur knew better.
The black figure had not merely saved Flight 220.
It had chosen who was allowed to remember.
Rivien remembered the attack in broken pieces.
He had been separated from the others in a service passage outside the recovery sector when the nightmares found him. They came low and fast through the red emergency light—shell-backed things with split jaws, hooked forelimbs, and too many limbs scraping over the tile.
His abilities had not fully awakened. So he used what he had.
A sword.
Rivien cut at the first creature's throat seam. The blade skidded across its hardened shell. He struck again, then again, but each blow barely left a mark. One nightmare knocked him into the wall. Another raked his side. More closed in before he could regain his footing.
He fought anyway.
Then the nightmares stopped.
A woman stood behind them in a fitted purple dress and black high heels, with short black hair, clear pale skin, purple lipstick, and black sunglasses. A long wide-brimmed hat shadowed her face. She was not especially tall—perhaps five-foot-seven without the heels—but the corridor seemed to shrink around her.
She walked past the nightmares as if they were furniture.
Then she wrapped Rivien in a tight embrace.
It was almost comforting.
Almost.
The nightmares tore apart behind her.
No spell circle. No shouted command. Their shells simply split, their bodies collapsing into wet black fragments along the corridor floor. In seconds, the passage was silent except for Rivien's ragged breathing.
He stared at her, sword lowered. "Who are you?"
She leaned back just enough to look at him through the sunglasses.
"Tell me," she asked softly. "What is the better way to deal with problems like racism? Or poverty?"
Rivien could not answer.
"Do you smile through the pain, like everyone else?" she continued. "Or do you go to lengths you never believed yourself capable of?"
Her purple lips curled.
"Because that is primal instinct. And you do not have it."
She showed him a badge hidden beneath the collar of her dress: the red, hollow symbol of the Midnight Church.
"I will not kill you," she said. "You are going to deliver a message instead."
Rivien's grip tightened around his sword.
"Tell Arthur the Midnight Church is coming for him and Sunny. Do not ask why."
Before he could move, she struck him. A sharp blow drove into his ribs, followed by another across his face. He stumbled into the wall. The corridor spun; his sword slipped from his hand.
The woman caught him by the front of his clothes before he fell.
"Keep this interaction to yourself," she whispered. "No one else."
Then she let him drop.
The last thing Rivien saw before darkness took him was her purple silhouette stepping over the dead nightmares—unhurried, untouched, and already gone by the time he woke in the recovery wing.
Back in the present, unconscious beneath Lucas's stabilization, Rivien's hand clenched weakly around the sheet.
The Midnight Church had not merely sent a warning.
They had sent someone who wanted Arthur to know they were coming.
(Rivien — The Boy Who Kept Smiling)
( Rivien's pov )
Rivien slept beneath the recovery-room blankets, his body finally still after Lucas's healing.
Then the memory came.
Not like a dream.
Like a door opening.
(Dimension Echo )Rivareth Terralis
Before he was Rivien Grey in Dimension Fragment, he had been Rivareth Terralis.
He was born in Ottawa, Canada, in Dimension Echo, into a noisy family of eight.
His parents came first. Then his older twin sisters—one of them Hailey. Then Rivareth and his younger brother. Last came the newborn twins, tiny and loud and always being passed from one exhausted pair of arms to another.
Rivareth was the only child without a twin.
It never made him lonely.
His father was a comedian—the kind who could turn burnt toast, a leaking tap, or a bad day at work into a story that made the whole house laugh. Rivareth loved that sound. He wanted to grow up just like him: stand in front of people who had forgotten how to smile and give them a reason to laugh again.
For six years, life was warm.
Then came the cold night.
Snow fell heavily over the streets, and fog swallowed the lamps outside. Rivareth had been playing with his friends, Jacob and Chris, until Chris invited them both over for lunch.
Rivareth went.
And when he came home, his family was gone.
The house was untouched. No blood. No broken locks. No sign of a struggle. The baby twins' blankets were still in place. His father's coat hung by the door. His mother's cup sat on the kitchen counter, cold.
But every person Rivareth loved had vanished.
He was six.
He cried until his throat hurt. He waited by the window. He shouted their names through the snow. Nobody came back.
Weeks later, on the ninth of August, Rivareth found what his parents had hidden beneath their bed: a small concealed door leading to their safe and the savings inside it.
That money became food. Heat. Survival.
Sometimes, he wanted to spend it on something useless—a toy, sweets, anything that could make him feel like a child again. But he never did. He knew what happened when the money ran out.
Still, Rivareth smiled.
Not because he was unhurt.
Because he believed his family would return. Because he still wanted to become a comedian like his father. Because somewhere inside him, the boy who had lived in that laughing house refused to die.
Two months later came the Collapse.
The sky turned black.
A vortex opened over the city, swallowing streets, lights, and screaming fragments of the world. Rivareth saw someone who looked like Chris near its edge.
And beside him—
Hailey.
His older sister.
"Where is everyone?" Rivareth screamed, running toward them. "Hailey!"
They could not hear him.
But Hailey looked at him.
For one terrible second, she understood exactly what he meant. Her expression broke as though she wanted to tell him everything.
Then the black vortex took them.
And Rivareth was left behind again.
The memory shattered.
Rivien woke the next morning in the recovery room, breath caught in his throat and tears drying cold along his cheeks.
The name Rivareth Terralis lingered in his mind like a voice from another life.
A chair shifted beside his bed.
Sunny was there.
He had not woken anyone else. He simply sat nearby, watching Rivien with the quiet recognition of someone who knew what it meant to receive memories that were not finished.
"You saw your old world," Sunny said softly.
Rivien looked down at his hands.
"I saw my sister."
For the first time since the Midnight Church attack, Rivien's smile did not come easily.
"But I still don't know if she survived."
Sunny sat in the chair beside Rivien's bed, elbows on his knees. Morning light fell across the restored recovery room, far too clean for a place that had held so much blood the night before.
Rivien stared at the ceiling. "I used to be Rivareth Terralis."
Sunny nodded slowly. "From Dimension Echo."
"Canada. Ottawa." Rivien gave a dry, fragile laugh. "My dad was a comedian. Our house was always loud. I wanted to make people laugh like he did."
His expression collapsed as quickly as it came.
"Then my family disappeared. All seven of them. I was six."
Sunny stayed quiet. He did not offer a false comfort.
"Two months later, during the Collapse, I saw Chris." Rivien's fingers tightened in the blanket. "Or someone who looked exactly like him. Hailey was with him—my sister. They were being pulled into that black vortex."
"You think Chris took them?" Sunny asked.
"I don't know." Rivien swallowed. "Hailey looked at me like she knew where everyone was. Like she wanted to answer. But she couldn't."
Sunny looked down at his hands. "Memory fragments give us pieces, not permission to understand them all at once."
Rivien turned toward him. "You get them too?"
"Sometimes." Sunny's answer was quiet. "They can make you feel like you are standing inside a life that ended before you were ready."
For a moment, neither boy spoke.
Then Rivien let out a faint breath. "I kept smiling after they vanished. I thought if I stopped, it meant I had given up on them returning."
"You don't have to smile to keep looking for them," Sunny said.
Rivien's eyes stung. "And if I find Hailey?"
"Then you won't face it alone."
Rivien looked at Sunny properly then. "The Midnight Church is after you too it seems . Arthur as well. That woman wanted me to tell him—but told me not to tell anyone else."
Sunny's face tightened. "You did the right thing telling them."
"I hope so."
"You survived when you were six," Sunny said. "You protected your family's hope for years. Whatever is coming, you are stronger than the person who left you bleeding in a corridor thinks."
Rivien managed a small smile—not the automatic one he used to hide pain, but a real one, however brief.
"Maybe one day," he said, "I'll tell a joke that actually lands."
Sunny's mouth lifted slightly. "Aim low, It is safer that way , Rivareth Terralis."