The sky broke before anyone could scream.
Above the northern crown of Asvalith, where the aurora used to dance on festival nights, there came a gash. A wound in the heavens—not lightning, not magic, not any spell known to the Archons or their keepers. It split open like flesh under divine fire, pouring forth not light… but void. It shimmered in violet-black tears, tendrils of fractured starlight spilling downward, like threads unraveling from reality's own spine.
No thunder followed.
Just the silence of something older than sound.
From within the rift came a pulse—a tremor across the leylines that made the stones of the city's old bastions hum low, like forgotten hymns buried in the marrow of the world. Clerics wept in their sleep. Beast-kin bolted from their dens. In the high orbit of the third moon, glass towers of a skyborne observatory turned to ash and memory.
And somewhere far below, in the Valley of Still Names…
Lynchie Fuentes Regino sat upright in her sleep.
She wasn't supposed to wake.
She wasn't supposed to remember this.
A prickling ice crawled beneath her skin, not from cold, but from recognition—a truth not yet hers whispering just below her heartbeat. Her breath caught. Her pupils shrank. And for one suspended moment, the world paused.
Then the pain hit.
It wasn't physical. Not like breaking a bone or getting struck. It was deeper. Older. Like someone pulling at her essence with fingers that remembered her from before she was born.
> "Not again—"
Her voice trembled in her mind, unable to speak. Her mouth wouldn't move. Her body refused to obey her. And yet… her soul leaned forward.
The vision came like floodwater.
A spire of crystal, taller than storms. A bleeding sun. A throne empty—but not abandoned. A name, half-formed, was being shouted from the far end of her skull. Not her name. Someone else's. Someone important. Someone dangerous.
The world blinked, and Lynchie found herself… falling.
She was no longer in her bed.
No walls.
No floor.
No sky.
Just endless descent, framed by drifting petals of dark fire and scattered runes spinning like debris around her. Below, a sigil burned on a floating slab of black stone—the shape of an eye half-shut, rimmed in unfamiliar glyphs that pulsed with every beat of her heart.
Or was it her heart?
She couldn't tell.
And yet, this fall didn't feel accidental. It wasn't like dropping from a height. There was rhythm to it. A pull. A calling.
> "You were not meant to awaken."
The voice didn't echo in her ears. It grew inside her mind like frost on glass, blooming behind the silence. Masculine? Feminine? It shifted, fluid and regal, ancient but intimate. Like a library speaking directly to its favorite page.
> "But the Rift has spoken. And it calls what it remembers."
The words came with weight. Like each syllable was an anchor sinking her deeper. Memories—not hers—spilled into her. Images, raw and blinding: A woman with wings of starlight folding over a broken infant. A sword forged from heartbeat and time. A crown. A coffin.
A war.
Then… light.
A singular point of light far, far below her—rising.
Rising too fast.
> That's not a star—
She screamed.
And then she woke—if that's what this was.
A crater.
A sky the wrong color.
Her skin still glowing faintly with unformed sigils and the scent of burned air in her lungs.
She stood up slowly, legs trembling, her white nightclothes charred at the hem. The ground beneath her was etched with lines—some arcane, some organic, like veins or roots.
And standing at the edge of the impact zone was a figure cloaked in lightless robes.
No face.
Just a smooth, polished obsidian mask and a stillness that made the air crackle.
The figure raised one hand, palm out.
> "You," it said, voice quiet and calm, "were not meant to arrive this way."
Lynchie opened her mouth. No words came. Just the shape of a question.
The figure nodded as if hearing her silence.
> "Come. The Gate stirs. You are the Rift-Borne. That title is no longer avoidable."
Behind her, the crater groaned. The runes she thought were glowing dimmed—not because they were fading… but because something else was climbing through them.
She turned her head slowly.
It had no shape.
Only hunger.
And as it began to pull itself up, Lynchie did the only thing her instincts demanded:
She ran—toward the figure. Toward the veil. Toward a future that would never let her forget this moment.
And behind her, the sky bled just a little more.