They reached the outer ring by nightfall. The city's structures became warped here—buildings bent at wrong angles, time moving with a stutter-step rhythm. It was as though reality itself was fraying.
Kira motioned to a collapsed monorail car hanging above a pit of fractured glass. "We cross that. The gateway lies beneath."
He nodded, each step forward dragging pieces of forgotten memory from the blackness. Faces. Screams. A hand reaching through fire.
The Threshold was not a place. It was a phenomenon—a veil of static suspended in the air like a wound in space. It hummed with voices that weren't speaking.
Kira handed him a crystal blade. "It can cut through what's not real. But it'll cost you pieces of yourself."
He took it. And stepped through.
Inside, the world went white. Not light, but absence. Floating symbols spiraled around him. Some screamed when he touched them. Others whispered.
"You are not what you remember. You are what you were made to forget."