The dream began with water, black and endless, and a voice that was not a voice.
Elias floated in the dark, his body weightless, the cold pressing against his skin like a second skin. He could not move, could not breathe, but he did not need to. This was not the physical world. This was the space between, the place where the door inside him had been carved open and now lay closed like a scar. And in the scar, something stirred.
You think you have won, the voice said. It was the original's voice, but older, colder, stripped of everything human. You closed the Primordial Gate, but you only sealed me deeper. I am not a fragment, Elias. I am the seed. And you are the soil.
Elias tried to speak, but his mouth filled with salt. The darkness shifted, and he saw it: a shape rising from the dept
