[Emma's POV]
Sleep was no longer a sanctuary. It had become a covert extraction, a forcible conscription into a reality more vivid and more chilling than the waking world. For Emma, the descent into unconsciousness was not a gentle fade but a sudden, silent plunge into dark, cold waters. Each time, she surfaced in the same place: the vision-chamber.
It was a place of oppressive grandeur, a cavernous hall carved not by tools but by will from a single, mountainous vein of glossy, black obsidian. The air was still and frigid, carrying a mineral scent like the breath of a deep cave.
There was no source of light, yet the chamber was illuminated by a sourceless, phosphorescent glow that emanated from the stone itself, casting no warm shadows, only deepening the existing pools of absolute dar
