Kael Miren crouched low beneath the warped metal ribs of an old shuttlecraft, his fingers smeared with grease and dust. He listened to the whirring hum of broken circuits overhead, filtering the sound for anything familiar. The old world still spoke, but in cryptic bursts of static and failing sparks.
Orhyn was not a city anymore. It was a graveyard for machines and memories. After the Sundering fractured the sky itself three hundred years ago, everything beyond the inner spires of the Aetherlords had become ruin—dangerous, forbidden, and discarded. Yet it was here that Kael made his living, scraping relics of power from beneath the earth's crust.
At seventeen, Kael was lean, tall, and hungry—not for food, but for meaning. He'd never fit in with the others in the outer colonies. The Aether Vein rejected him. He couldn't tap into fire, ice, lightning, or wind like his peers. He couldn't heal with light or cloak with shadow. He was Null, as the guilds said—an outcast with no value in a world where power meant everything.
The settlement of Haven's Rest, where he'd grown up after the transport accident that killed his parents, had made that clear enough. While other children his age were apprenticed to the Elemental Guilds or the Healer's Circle, Kael had been relegated to salvage work—dangerous, thankless labor that kept the community's failing infrastructure barely functional.
But today, something was different.
Buried beneath a collapsed watchtower, Kael had uncovered a spherical relic the size of a child's skull. It pulsed with a silent rhythm, glowing faintly blue and black—colors that shouldn't exist together in nature. When he'd touched it, it hadn't rejected him like all other Vein-touched technology. Instead, it had whispered to him.
It spoke in pulses. In thoughts. In symbols that formed in his mind like half-remembered dreams.
*Welcome home, Riftborne.*
Kael didn't understand the words, but something inside him responded with bone-deep recognition. His chest burned with sudden heat. The sky overhead cracked—not with thunder, but with a tear of violet light that arced through the clouds like a scream. For a moment, reality itself seemed to bend around the relic's glow.
In the distance, someone was watching.
He turned instinctively, crouching lower and drawing the rusted blade at his belt. The weapon was more ceremonial than functional, salvaged from a derelict Temple-Knight's ruin, but it had seen him through trouble before. He scanned the broken skyline, noting the familiar patterns of debris and shadow. A shimmer in the distance—a silhouette just beyond the rim of collapsed stone that didn't belong to the landscape he knew by heart.
Kael didn't wait to find out who or what it was. Three years of scavenging in the ruins had taught him that curiosity was often fatal. He snatched the relic and stuffed it into his reinforced satchel, slinging the leather strap over his shoulder. His boots crunched gravel as he ducked through a shattered ventilation duct and into the deeper belly of the ruins.
The underways of Orhyn were a labyrinth he'd mapped in his mind over countless expeditions. Once designed for maintenance bots and transport lines, they now served as arteries of shadow for scavengers and worse. Kael moved quickly but quietly, his breath shallow, his heart pounding. That voice—that message in the relic—lingered in his thoughts like a whisper of prophecy.
He reached his hideout, a makeshift nook behind a derelict server array that he'd carefully concealed over the past year. Among his salvaged scraps and makeshift tools, he pulled the relic into the pale beam of a hanging worklight powered by a small Vein fragment. The sphere's pulse quickened in response to the energy source.
"Alright," he muttered, settling into a crouch. "What are you?"
He placed both hands on the sphere, and the world tilted.
Darkness fell over him—not absence of light, but of reality itself. Time stilled. Space folded. Kael floated in a void where stars burned like living memories, and figures—faceless and tall—drifted past him like ghosts of a forgotten age. One turned toward him, its presence filling his mind with ancient sorrow.
*You are the last Echo,* it said, its voice carrying the weight of civilizations. *The final ember of what we once were.*
Images flooded his consciousness: worlds of crystal and impossible architecture, beings who shaped reality with thought alone, a golden age of power and wonder. Then came the darkness—betrayal from within, war across dimensions, the systematic destruction of everything his people had built.
Kael gasped, stumbling back as the vision snapped away like a broken wire. The relic tumbled from his grasp, landing with a crystalline chime on the stone floor. Its glow had dimmed, but it still pulsed with patient energy.
He sat panting, sweat trickling down his temple despite the cool air of the underground chamber. He had never felt power like that—raw, unchained, ancient. It sang in his blood now, a harmony he'd never known he was missing. He didn't know what an Echo was, but he knew one thing with absolute certainty: he wasn't Null. Not anymore.
A metallic creak echoed through the chamber. A careful footstep on stone.
"Found you," a voice said—female, confident, with an accent he couldn't place.
Kael leaped to his feet, blade ready, positioning himself between the relic and the entrance to his hideout.
A woman stepped into the room—tall, clad in black plating etched with glowing lines that pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat. She held a rifle aimed casually at the floor, but even relaxed, her stance spoke of deadly competence. Her short-cropped hair was silver-white, though her face suggested she was no older than thirty, and her eyes were the deep green of old forest shadows.
"I'm not here to kill you," she said, raising one gloved hand in a gesture of peace. "I'm here because that thing you found just lit up the Vein sensors across three provinces. Every Aetherlord monitoring station from here to the Crystal Peaks registered the pulse."
Kael didn't lower his blade. "Who are you?"
"Lysara Thorne," she said, her tone carrying the authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed. "Former chief engineer of the Third Guild's Experimental Division. Now... let's say I help people like you."
"People like me?"
"You touched a Rift Relic and lived. That shouldn't be possible for anyone born in the last three centuries." Her green eyes studied him with scientific curiosity. "Unless... you're Riftborne."
The word again. Riftborne. It resonated in his chest like the tolling of a great bell.
Kael lowered the blade slowly, his mind racing. "What does that mean?"
Lysara glanced over her shoulder, scanning the shadows beyond the chamber entrance. "It means you're either a miracle or a walking cataclysm. Possibly both. Either way, others will be coming—and they won't be as friendly as I am. You'll need training. Answers. And a lot more than that antique blade if you plan to stay alive."
She gestured to his weapon with something approaching sympathy. "That's Temple-Knight steel, isn't it? Pre-Sundering alloy. Decent enough for scaring off other scavengers, but useless against Aetherlord hunters."
"Hunters?"
"Specialists trained to track and eliminate rogue Vein-users. They'll have detected the same pulse I did, and they won't hesitate to kill you rather than risk another uncontrolled awakening." Lysara's expression grew grim. "The last time something like this happened, they glassed an entire province to make sure nothing survived."
Kael felt ice form in his stomach. "How long do we have?"
"Hours, if we're lucky. Minutes, if we're not." She shouldered her rifle and moved toward the chamber entrance. "Gather what you need. We leave now."
Kael hesitated, looking around the hideout that had been his sanctuary for the past year. The carefully organized tools, the maps of safe routes through the ruins, the small comforts that had made his solitary existence bearable—all of it would have to be abandoned.
But as he reached for his pack, the relic pulsed again, and for just an instant, he felt that vast presence from his vision. The entity—whatever it had been—was still out there, waiting. Along with others like it.
*You are not alone,* whispered a voice that might have been memory or might have been hope.
Kael snatched up the relic and what few possessions he couldn't bear to lose, then followed Lysara into the darkness of the underways. Behind them, his abandoned hideout seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the hunters who would inevitably come.
And so, he stepped out of the ruins of Orhyn and into a world that had long since forgotten his kind. A world that feared what he would become.
The sky above had cracked with his awakening.
And Kael Miren had been chosen for something far greater and more terrible than he could possibly imagine.