The ground was made of bones.
Not literal ones—but bleached pale, brittle, and buried just enough that each of Kaelen's steps crunched like an echo of forgotten deaths. The Riftwilds weren't simply ruined. They were haunted by causality itself. Places here did not remember what they had once been. They simply existed—half real, half conjecture.
Ash drifted in the air like dry snow.
The sun was wrong again.
It hung too low. Burnt too red. And when Kaelen turned to look back at where he had walked, the footprints were sometimes missing. Or moved.
Still, he walked on.
Days blurred into one another.
The Riftwilds were vast, cracked deserts of time-warped stone and craters that leaked starlight. Dead forests clung to mountainsides, branches frozen mid-movement like dancers caught in their last breath. At night, the sky changed languages—constellations shifting into patterns he didn't know, then somehow recognized.
Kaelen didn't sleep. Not truly.
His body no longer needed it in the same way. The first burst of Domain power still lingered in him like an ember buried in ice—slow-burning, feeding on his resolve. But his mind... his mind frayed.
Memories surfaced without context.
A woman with silver eyes.
A city of spiraling towers made of glass that whispered.
A voice whispering, "We failed."
On the fourth day, Kaelen reached a canyon rim where the earth fell away in a clean, impossible line—carved as if by a blade that knew shame.
Below, something moved.
Not a creature.
A city.
Sunken, reversed.
Buildings lay sideways, walls folded upon ceilings. Bridges curled into themselves like dying snakes. Entire structures defied geometry, standing atop the echoes of themselves.
Kaelen narrowed his eyes. Something about the place called to him. Not with urgency—but with inevitability.
He descended slowly, each step cautious.
As he entered the dead city, the Weave shimmered.
He could see it again—faint outlines, strings connecting stone to silence, walls to wind. The Weave here was... brittle.
Cracked.
Kaelen knelt near a fallen arch and touched the stone.
It responded.
Not in obedience. In memory.
His hand sunk an inch into the surface—not breaking it, but phasing through as if pressing into warm wax.
Then—images.
A child running through the halls.
A man screaming beneath a sunless sky.
And then... himself, standing in the center of the city, arms outstretched, calling the threads to dance.
He pulled his hand away sharply.
"What is this place?" he whispered.
The Weave didn't answer.
But something else did.
A roar cracked through the sky.
Kaelen spun.
The wind coiled, the shadows moved. From one of the shattered courtyards, a creature emerged.
A Stitchbeast.
He remembered them from the Spindle's records—abominations born from failed transmutation, Rift-touched flesh sewn together from multiple timelines. This one stood on six legs, with faces—three of them—stitched into its torso, each weeping black liquid that hissed on the ground.
It saw him.
And it screamed.
Kaelen raised his hand.
No time to test.
He reached inward.
To the Weave.
To Matter.
And he pulled.
The stone beneath the beast liquefied.
Its front legs sank with a gurgling noise, dragged into a pit of softening granite that hardened the moment its limbs disappeared.
It roared again, fury and confusion twisting its body.
Kaelen stepped forward, voice low, focused.
"Break. Separate. Harden."
The earth complied.
Spikes of bone-white stone erupted from the ground in a ring, slicing through tendons. The Stitchbeast screeched—one voice, then two, then five—and lunged.
Kaelen moved without thinking.
Dove.
Rolled.
A claw missed him by inches.
He raised both hands and shouted, "Disperse."
The wall behind the beast shimmered—and fell apart into a sandstorm.
Kaelen kicked it, driving the creature backward into the disintegrated zone.
It fell.
Not dead—but buried.
For now.
Kaelen collapsed to one knee, breath ragged.
That had taken too much.
His vision blurred, his bones ached. He had forced the Weave to obey, without preparation, without balance.
And the price?
He bled from his fingernails.
Small streams of black-red ichor.
A warning.
He rested in the ruins.
Not because it was safe—but because it was time.
Here, in the cracked remains of a place time forgot, Kaelen finally examined his body.
He removed the torn shirt that clung to him like dust.
What he saw both awed and disturbed him.
His body was... sculpted.
Not muscular in the traditional sense—but precise. Every line, every contour had been reconstructed during the power burst. There were patterns under his skin—faint tattoos of Weave glyphs that pulsed when he concentrated.
He touched one near his collarbone.
It warmed.
Then sparked.
His vision shifted—
—and he could see heat. Life. Motion.
Weave-laced sight.
He turned it off with a blink, heart racing.
Who had done this to him?
The Scales?
Or something older?
He stayed in the city for a day and a night.
During that time, he hunted small Rift-critters. Boiled their meat with heat conjured from friction and reshaped flint. He created a shelter by melting stone into an arch over himself.
And he listened.
The voices were clearer now.
Soft threads of sound that murmured as he walked.
Not words—but patterns. Emotions. Commands.
One whisper always returned:
"Weave unbroken. Thread unspun. Find the Loom."
What Loom?
What thread?
His memories offered no answer.
Only fragments of the Eye's vision.
A mirror.
A throne.
A choice.
On the second dawn, Kaelen left.
But not before carving a spiral into the ground at the city's edge.
Not as a symbol.
As a challenge.
Let the Watchers see it.
Let the Weave take notice.
He was done hiding.
He was done running.
He would master the threads that bound the world—or he would sever them all.
As he walked, the mist parted.
In the distance, lightning cracked silently across a Riftstorm.
He headed toward it.
Where the world was broken—
He would become whole.