[Ava's POV]
Dawn did not come to the Vault; it was a grudging concession of the darkness, a slight graying at the edges of perpetual night. Sleep, for Ava, was no longer a retreat. It was a descent into a more honest, more terrifying layer of reality.
There were no narrative dreams, no symbolic landscapes. There was only sensation, profound and inescapable. She existed as a point of awareness in a formless, infinite obsidian.
And through the very core of her being—the psychic locus where identity clung to its fragile perch—three living conduits were inextricably anchored, their roots tangled in the soil of her soul.
They were not restraints, but lifelines of terrifying potency. Rhett’s was a colossal, braided hawser, woven from tectonic strain and the deep, radiant heat of the earth’
