Yuna woke to silence.
No howling. No claws scraping against wood. Just the soft creak of the building settling and the distant murmur of voices outside.
She lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling of the small room they'd given her. Stone walls, narrow bed, a single window showing the violet sky beginning to lighten.
She was alive.
The thought still felt strange. Twenty-four hours ago she'd been standing in a Seoul park with a rejection letter in her hand. Now she was in another dimension, in a settlement surrounded by walls built to keep out creatures that dissolved reality.
Her mother was dead. Her world was gone.
And somehow, she was still breathing.
A knock at the door made her flinch.
"We leave in twenty minutes." Mara's voice, clipped and professional. "Eat fast. The Reach doesn't forgive slow starts."
Footsteps retreated down the hall.
Yuna sat up. Her body ached everywhere. The crash landing, the run to the gates, three days of barely eating or sleeping before the portal even took her. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean, running on nothing but adrenaline and stubbornness.
But she was alive.
She got dressed in the clothes they'd given her. Dark fabric, practical, slightly too large. Found bread and dried meat waiting outside her door, wrapped in cloth.
She ate while walking toward the gates.
The settlement looked different in daylight.
Last night it had been shadows and torchlight, panic and running. Now Yuna could see the actual layout: stone buildings packed tight together, narrow streets, walls that rose thirty feet high on all sides.
A fortress. Built for siege.
People moved through the streets with the quiet efficiency of those who'd done this a thousand times. Guards checking weapons. Merchants loading packs. A woman filling waterskins from a well in the central square.
Everyone looked tired. Everyone looked wary.
No one looked surprised.
This was normal for them. The creatures at the gates, the walls, the constant vigilance. Just another day in a dying world.
Yuna found Mara near the main gate, talking with a group of travelers.
Twelve of them, not counting Yuna. A mix of ages and appearances: merchants with heavy packs, a few who looked like soldiers, one elderly woman with a walking staff who studied Yuna with sharp, knowing eyes.
"New summon?" the old woman asked.
"Crossed two nights ago," Mara answered. "Survived the run."
"Tough or lucky?"
"Haven't decided yet."
The old woman smiled. It wasn't a kind smile, but it wasn't cruel either. Just honest.
"The Reach will decide for her."
The gates opened as the sky brightened.
Last night's attack had left marks. Deep gouges in the wooden doors where claws had torn at the surface. Dark stains on the cobblestones that hissed faintly in the morning air, dissolving into nothing as Yuna watched.
No bodies. The creatures didn't leave corpses.
They just erased things.
"Three days to the Academy," Mara announced to the group. "Stay together. Stay quiet. If something attacks, you run. If someone falls behind, you keep moving."
"What if someone gets hurt?" Yuna asked.
Mara looked at her. Those storm-gray eyes held no comfort.
"Then they get hurt. The Reach doesn't care about injuries. Neither can we."
She turned and walked through the gates.
The group followed.
Yuna took a breath and stepped into the wasteland.
The first hour taught her what scale meant.
The area around the settlement had been bad enough. Ash and mountains and emptiness. But as they walked deeper into the Reach, the landscape transformed into something worse.
Ruins.
Stone foundations jutting from the ash like broken bones. Collapsed walls, their edges melted smooth by something that wasn't fire. Streets that led nowhere, lined with the outlines of buildings that had simply ceased to exist.
A city. Or what remained of one.
"Ashreach," the old woman said, falling into step beside Yuna. "Used to be the largest city on the continent. Half a million people lived here."
Yuna looked at the endless gray expanse. The foundations stretching to the horizon. The silence so complete it felt like pressure against her ears.
"What happened?"
"The Fourth Unraveling. Sixty years ago."
The old woman's voice was flat. Not emotionless, but controlled. The voice of someone who'd told this story before and learned to tell it without breaking.
"The Weave tore open right in the center of the city. Everything within three miles just... stopped existing. People, buildings, memories. Gone in seconds."
Yuna's stomach turned.
She'd seen death before. Her mother, fading slowly in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines and morphine and the careful kindness of hospice nurses.
But this was different.
This was extinction.
The bodies started appearing around midday.
Not fresh. Preserved.
Frozen in the ash like insects in amber, their forms still recognizable even after sixty years. Men and women and children, caught mid-stride or mid-scream, their faces locked in expressions that Yuna couldn't look at for long.
Some reached toward the sky, hands grasping for something that never came.
Some held each other, huddled together in groups that might have been families.
Some were alone.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Scattered across the ruins like fallen leaves, half-buried in gray powder that used to be their world.
Five hundred thousand people.
Yuna had heard the number, but she hadn't understood it until now.
This wasn't a graveyard. Graveyards had headstones, markers, some acknowledgment that the dead had names and lives and meaning.
This was just... absence. A city-sized wound in reality, filled with the outlines of people who'd been erased so completely that even their corpses were just shapes in the ash.
"Don't touch them," the old woman warned. "They dissolve if you touch them. Better to let them rest."
Yuna nodded. Couldn't speak.
Her throat was too tight for words.
They walked through the graveyard for hours.
No one spoke. Even the merchants, who'd made this crossing before, moved in silence. Some out of respect. Some out of fear that speaking would wake something better left sleeping.
Yuna kept her eyes forward. Tried not to look at the bodies.
But they were everywhere. Every step brought new faces, new frozen moments, new evidence of lives ended without warning or reason.
A woman clutching a bundle that might have been a baby.
A man with his arms spread wide, shielding something behind him.
Two children holding hands.
An elderly couple, embracing.
Each one a story that would never be told. Each one a person who'd woken up that morning thinking it was just another day.
Her mother's death had felt like the end of the world.
This was what the end of the world actually looked like.
The ash-storm hit on the second day.
One moment the air was still. The next, wind screamed across the wasteland, whipping ash into a wall of gray so thick Yuna couldn't see her own hands.
"LINK UP!" Mara's voice cut through the howl. "GRAB HANDS! DON'T LET GO!"
Yuna reached blindly, found someone's hand, gripped tight. Felt another hand grab hers from the other side.
A human chain formed in the chaos.
They walked blind, step by step, following Mara's voice through the storm.
The ash tasted like copper and something older. Something wrong. It coated Yuna's tongue, her throat, her lungs, making every breath feel like drowning in dust.
But worse than the ash were the shapes.
They moved at the edges of Yuna's vision.
Figures in the storm. Human-shaped, but wrong somehow. Their proportions shifted as she watched, limbs too long, joints bending in directions that made her stomach lurch.
One of them had too many fingers.
One of them had no face.
One of them looked exactly like her mother.
"Don't look at them." The old woman's voice, close to her ear. "Don't listen. They're echoes. Ghosts of the Unraveled. They use your grief to pull you in."
"They look real."
"They're not. But they can become real if you acknowledge them."
Yuna squeezed her eyes shut.
The figures whispered anyway.
Voices in Korean, in English, in languages she didn't recognize. Saying things that made her chest ache:
"Where are you going? Don't leave me here."
"It hurts. Why does it hurt so much?"
"I don't want to be forgotten. Please. Remember me."
And then, her mother's voice, soft and clear:
"You are enough."
Yuna's breath caught.
She almost stopped. Almost turned toward the voice. Almost let go of the hands holding her.
"Keep moving." The old woman's grip tightened painfully. "That's not her. That's the Reach using her voice. Keep moving."
Yuna kept her eyes closed.
Put one foot in front of the other.
And walked through a storm of ghosts wearing her mother's face.
The storm broke near dusk.
The ash settled. The whispers faded. The figures dissolved into nothing, leaving only the gray wasteland and the violet sky.
They'd lost two people.
A young merchant who'd looked at the echoes too long and walked into the storm without a word. And an older man whose hand had simply gone limp, his body dropping to the ash without sound or struggle.
Heart attack, maybe. Or something worse.
No one went back for them.
"First crossing?" the old woman asked Yuna quietly.
Yuna nodded. Her throat was raw. Her eyes burned.
"It gets easier."
"Does it?"
The old woman was quiet for a moment.
"No. But you learn to keep walking anyway."
Day three.
The Academy appeared on the horizon like a promise.
Dark stone walls rising from the ash. Towers that caught the violet light and threw it back in colors that shouldn't exist. Windows blazing with something that wasn't firelight, something that pulsed with a rhythm Yuna could feel in her chest.
Magic.
Real magic. Not the 2.1 Resonance that had gotten her rejected fifteen times on Earth.
This was power that bent the air around it, that left afterimages when you looked away, that hummed at a frequency just below hearing.
"The Last Academy," Mara said. "Only training facility left on the continent. Only place that might keep you alive long enough to matter."
Their group had shrunk.
Nine survivors out of thirteen. Two lost to the storm, one to exhaustion that became something worse, one to an Unraveling creature that had attacked at dawn on day two. Yuna hadn't seen that attack. Just heard the screaming, then silence.
Four people who'd started this journey with names and histories and reasons for making the crossing.
Now just outlines in her memory, already fading.
The Academy gates stood open.
Guards in dark armor watched them approach. One of them, an older man with a scarred face, nodded to Mara.
"Rough crossing?"
"Lost four."
"Better than last month." He looked at the survivors, his gaze settling on Yuna. "New summon?"
"Crossed four nights ago. Made it through the storm."
"Tough one, then."
Mara almost smiled. "Or lucky. Hard to tell the difference."
"There isn't one. Not here."
Yuna's legs chose that moment to stop working.
She sat down hard on the cobblestones, suddenly unable to take another step. Three days of walking through graveyards. Three days of ash and ghosts and death.
Her mother had been dead for less than a week.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
Mara crouched beside her. "You good?"
"No." Yuna's voice came out cracked. "I'm really not good."
"Fair." Mara stood, offered a hand. "But you're here. That counts."
Yuna looked at the offered hand. Thought about all the times she'd gotten back up when staying down would have been easier.
She took it.
The Academy courtyard spread out before her.
Stone buildings arranged around a central square. People moving between them, some in robes, some in armor, all with the purposeful energy of those who had work to do and limited time to do it.
Warm light spilled from windows. Voices carried on the evening air. Somewhere, someone was laughing.
Life.
After three days of death, the sound of laughter felt almost painful.
A voice whispered in her mind. Not her mother's. Something else. Something that came from the same place the silver wings did.
"One hundred twenty days."
Yuna blinked.
"One hundred twenty days to become enough. Or die trying."
She didn't know where that thought came from. Didn't know what it meant.
But she felt its truth in her bones.
Behind her, the Ashfall Reach stretched into darkness. Five hundred thousand dead. Ghosts that wore her mother's face. A world that was actively dying.
Ahead: the Academy. Training. Purpose. Maybe answers.
The rejection letter was still in her pocket. Ash-stained and crumpled, but still there.
"Insufficient," it said.
Yuna looked at the Academy gates. At the light beyond them. At the life that somehow continued even in a dying world.
"We'll see," she whispered.
And she walked inside.
[END CHAPTER 3]