While Aurelia was struggling with her feelings out in the courtyard, Grace led Mirabella and Carl deep into the remaining wing of the mansion, heading straight towards her younger sister’s room. Behind them, the rest of the Dragon Academy team scattered in all directions through the fractured hallways, methodically searching for any useful clues, documents, or discarded tech that would help locate or know about what happened to the prominent family when the world collapsed. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

​"This here is my little sister’s room," Grace said, her voice dropping to a strained whisper as she pushed open the heavy, ornate door.

​She stepped across the threshold and froze. Grace moved her shattered, horrified gaze around the ruined room, and then slowly raised her head to the ceiling, which was completely gone. Where a canopy of painted stars used to be, there was only the grey, ash-choked sky of Queens, pouring dust onto the remnants of a childhood cut short.

​"...?!"

​She paused at the door, paralyzed by the ghosts of her past, while Mirabella and Carl entered the space without hesitation, moving their gazes around the debris, checking corners for structural safety and hidden threats.

​"There is nothing valuable here except from this book," Carl said. He knelt beside a crushed nightstand, carefully dusting the soot and plaster off a small, leather-bound volume which he picked up from the ground. He stood and held it out with a look of quiet empathy.

​"That is my sister’s diary." Grace rushed towards Carl, her hands shaking as he gently handed her the book. She held it against her chest for a fraction of a second before opening the notebook. "She... She never goes anywhere without this. It was her absolute safe haven."

​"Your sister, how old is she?" Mirabella asked, calculating the timeline of the worlds’ integration. Grace was already eighteen, an adult by the old world’s standards and a seasoned combatant in the new one, so this sister should be fifteen or so.

​"She is 13," Grace answered, her heart aching for the child who should have been worrying about middle school rather than annihilation.

​Grace started flipping through the pages, her eyes scanning past trivial entries of a peaceful past until she stopped abruptly on the page marking the start of the apocalypse. She swallowed hard; she was right, her sister indeed wrote things down as the world tore itself apart at the seams.

​Breathing unsteadily, Grace cleared her throat and started reading aloud, her voice echoing strangely through the roofless room:

​"January 15, 3025: I am so scared, there is an earthquake, this has never happened before, what is happening... I need my sister."

​Grace stared at the blank space beneath the words, remembering where she had been when those first foundational tremors fractured the planet. She flipped the pages and continued reading:

​"January 17, 3025: The Earthquakes have finally stopped, but there are creatures, monsters that I haven’t seen before. They kill and eat people, I am so scared... Dad asked us to hide in the bunker, while the security fight them off."

​Grace suddenly gasped, her eyes widening as the text triggered a long-buried memory of the estate’s floor plans. She turned to Mirabella and Carl, a spark of desperate hope igniting in her chest. "The Bunker? I forgot about it; our estate has a deep-underground fallout shelter built beneath the foundations!"

​"—Continue," Mirabella cut her off, her tone firm but grounded. She needed the full timeline before they rushed into a blind extraction. "Read the rest."

​Grace nodded quickly, her fingers trembling as she turned two more pages, skipping past empty sheets before seeing words again.

​"January 23, 3025: It has been more than a week now. Mom, Dad, I and some helpers and securities are now inside the bunker... We have been staying here for days... I wonder what happened to my sister, I missed her so much. I missed the old time, where we play pirates, and games."

​Grace muttered the last words, a sob catching in her throat as her eyes watered. The memory of their innocent childhood games contrasted brutally against the concrete tomb her family had been forced into. She swallowed down the bile, wiped her tears away with the back of her sleeve, and moved the page again.

​"February 20, 3025: It has been one month now, and we’re still hiding here. Some days ago, we heard people yelling upstairs, searching for things, but they were all killed... One rushed towards the bunker, and started hitting on the door. We were so scared; the man’s scream was so terrifying, after that I hear his flesh ripping and things breaking, maybe those are his bones, I don’t know... There was silence for a moment, and Dad rushed to the cameras to see what was happening. I don’t know what he saw, but he was terrified... I hope sister is safe. We are also getting short on food."

​The room grew colder as the grim reality of the siege settled over them. Grace wiped her tears once more, her breathing shallow, and turned the page over again to an entry written weeks later:

​"March 16, 3025: I have been counting days now on the wall. My phone is dead, and the food is almost up. I heard Dad speaking with the head security, saying it won’t last us a week... I don’t know what they’re planning to do. Not only that, but I don’t want anyone to leave and end up dying... Please, If sister was here, she would have known what to do, she is so smart. I am just useless... Yes, I forgot to mention the weird bracelets that appeared around our hands. But a month back, military said no one should tap it... It led to another world, and it’s dangerous in there. Maybe my sister is inside this world... I have always wanted to tap it, but Mom always stopped me."

​Grace swallowed, the realization of what her family had gone through choking her. She turned her tear-streaked face to Mirabella.

​"I think she was the only one qualified to enter Galaxy Fall then, but your Mom kept stopping her," Mirabella said with a slight frown. The system handed out user interfaces widely during the initial merge, but fear of the unknown kept many locked in the physical world.

​"I think she is just scared to lose her second daughter," Carl suggested quietly.

​Mirabella considered his words and nodded her head, her sharp demeanor softening just a fraction. "Yeah, you have a point. Fear makes people reject the very tools meant to save them."

​Grace moved the page to read the final entry, but her breath hitched, and she froze, staring at the dark, dried bloodstain smeared heavily across the ragged edge of the paper. Her stomach turned over, but she forced herself to look at the erratic, panicked handwriting.

​"April... I no longer remember the time. I am so scared... Dad went out with the securities to search for food because we ran out of it, and everyone was starving. But later that day, they all rushed back; the security guard was screaming for the women to unlock the door, but Dad was yelling at us not to. I... I watched the head security shoot Dad, and kept yelling at us to open the door. We could see the bags in his hand, and knew it was food, but seeing he killed Dad, Mom and the women were so scared, and none opened the door."

​Grace’s voice began to crack violently, the horror of her father’s betrayal and murder tearing through her soul. She forced her eyes down to the final lines, where the ink was smudged with panic.

​"Then we saw the monster on the camera. It was walking like a human, with tentacles all over his body. He killed the security, and ate him and... and Dad. Then stared at the camera, right at us."

​Grace gasped loudly, completely losing her grip on her composure. She slammed her hand over her mouth as a fresh torrent of tears rolled down her cheeks, her knees buckling as the horrifying image of her father’s demise burned itself into her mind.