The Rupture at Shardsea
The sea boiled.
Not from heat—but from confusion.
Waves froze mid-crash. Rain climbed upward. Fish hovered in the air, gills fluttering as if remembering how to swim.
In the center of it all floated a black shard, pulsing with violet light.
Kaela and Solin arrived by skycraft, landing on the reefstone edge of the anomaly.
The air was thin.
Reality… bent.
"This isn't a rift," Solin muttered. "It's a scar."
Kaela touched the shard.
Images slammed into her skull—
A city made of screaming mirrors.
Children with no faces.
And Darian, standing alone before a door of light… closing it from the inside.
Then—
> "He did not finish the story."
She recoiled, blade drawn.
Something inside the shard had spoken.
And it wasn't done.
---
Meanwhile — The Girl and the Stranger
Isen stood barefoot in the glade behind her home.
She'd drawn a symbol into the dirt: a spiral made of fire, water, stone, air, and void.
She didn't know why.
Only that she had to.
