The ruins were still warm when Solus rose to his feet.
Ash and dust clung to his skin, weighing him down like a second body. The light that had once answered his call was now a fading ember deep inside his chest, barely enough to heat his blood.
'I need to move. I can't stay here.'
The Rift wasn't done. The cracks in the sky above him yawned wider by the second, spilling unseen currents that twisted the very air. The village — if it could even still be called that — was little more than a graveyard now.
Solus tightened his grip on the memory of the fight.
The Gatekeeper was gone. But it had been a guardian, not a true predator.
Which meant something worse was waiting beyond the horizon.
He staggered forward, boots scraping against the shattered cobblestone, and tried not to look at the collapsed bodies scattered through the square. Some of them were twisted into wrong shapes, half-swallowed by patches of seething darkness. Others were simply... gone.
'Keep walking.'
It wasn't guilt that pressed on his spine. It was the heavy certainty that survival was no longer enough. He would need to become something — or be erased like all the others.
The broken road stretched ahead, vanishing into the low, roiling mists that were slowly swallowing the land.
Solus hesitated at the edge of the village.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice — faint and unfamiliar — whispered.
'Not all cracks are accidents.'
He didn't understand. Not yet.
But something deep in the Rift was calling. And if he didn't answer, someone else would.
Solus gritted his teeth.
"I'm not dying here," he said aloud, voice low and hard. "Not before I understand what they did to me."
The mist shivered at the sound of his words — almost as if it were listening.
The mist swallowed Solus whole the moment he stepped beyond the ruined village.
It wasn't a natural mist.
It had weight — not on the body, but on the mind.
Each breath tasted faintly of metal and memory, like inhaling the ashes of forgotten lives. Shadows twisted inside the fog, their edges flickering, half-real, like memories refusing to fade.
'Every step forward feels heavier than the last,' Solus thought grimly.
He tightened the straps of his ruined coat and pressed forward, boots scraping the uneven stones of the old road. This path was ancient, predating the village by centuries. Maybe longer. A time when the Rift hadn't yet begun bleeding into the sky.
Or maybe it had always been bleeding — and they had simply been too blind to notice.
Solus pushed the thought aside.
Something shifted in the mist ahead.
Not the random twitch of fog.
Deliberate.
He froze.
For a moment, all was still — save for the soft crackling of distant glass breaking itself.
Then, out of the swirling white, a figure emerged.
At first glance, it was human.
Hunched, wrapped in heavy layers of torn fabric and rope, the figure shuffled forward with a stick tapping against the ground.
An old man?
Solus narrowed his eyes.
No — wrong. The movements were too fluid, too sharp beneath the trembling facade.
The figure stopped about ten paces away, head tilting unnaturally to one side as if studying him.
"Traveler..." the figure rasped. Its voice was like wind passing through hollow bones. "Have you come to seek the Crowning?"
Solus's instincts screamed.
He didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he shifted his weight slightly, grounding himself in case the thing decided to lunge.
"I'm looking for the Rift's edge," Solus said carefully, keeping his voice low, and firm.
The figure chuckled — a brittle, cracking sound.
"There is no edge," it said. "Only deeper. Only darker. The Rift is a wound without end."
'Great,' Solus thought grimly. 'Cryptic lunatic in the middle of a soul-stealing mist. Perfect.'
The figure tapped its stick once against the stones.
"You carry a Flicker," it said, voice sharpening. "It stains your soul already. The Rift smells it."
Solus tensed.
He hadn't told anyone about the Flicker — the raw, violent ember that had ignited inside him during the collapse.
"If you know what's good for you," the figure continued, leaning closer, "you'll extinguish it before it grows."
"And if I don't?" Solus asked flatly.
The figure paused. For the first time, Solus thought he saw something glint beneath the heavy folds of cloth — not eyes, but something colder. Older.
"You will become a Crownless," the figure whispered.
"And the Rift devours the Crownless first."
Solus's jaw tightened.
"I'm not here to be devoured," he said. "I'm here to survive."
The mist churned violently at his declaration as if recoiling.
The figure said nothing more.
Instead, it turned, melting back into the fog without another word.
Solus watched it vanish, tension thrumming through every muscle.
'Not everything lost in the Rift stays dead.'
He didn't know why the thought came — but it stuck.
Tightening his coat around him, Solus resumed walking into the endless mist.
Whatever waited ahead, he'd face it with open eyes.
The mist thinned just enough to reveal the remnants of a shattered monument ahead.
It jutted out of the broken road like a rib from a half-buried corpse — a massive stone arch, cracked and leaning, etched with symbols that no living tongue could name.
Solus slowed his pace, boots grinding against shattered glass and gravel.
'Is this a boundary marker?' he wondered. 'Or a warning?'
Either way, the monument pulsed faintly under his gaze, as if some old instinct within it still recognized travelers... and still judged them.
He stepped closer.
The runes writhed when he looked directly at them, shifting shapes beneath the surface of the stone.
They spoke of passage.
Of price.
Solus placed his hand flat against the monument.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the stone flared, and something looked back at him from within the ancient archway.
A pressure slammed into his mind — cold and vast and curious.
It raked claws of thought across his memories, peeling away layers, seeking something.
Solus grits his teeth.
'I won't break,' he thought savagely.
He threw up the wall inside him — the wall that had survived the Rift's fall, the loss of his home, the screams, the blood, the ending of everything.
The monument shuddered, a deep bass rumble rolling through the ground.
The mist recoiled from it, shivering like a living thing.
Then, just as suddenly, the pressure snapped back, retreating into the stone.
Solus staggered a step, heart hammering in his chest.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the archway had changed.
No longer just a ruin — it now framed a path beyond it.
A road not made of stone, but of shadow and starlight, winding into an endless void.
He understood immediately:
This was no ordinary road.
It was a Riftway.
A shortcut across broken reality — but a treacherous one.
Only those the Rift acknowledged could walk it.
'And it just acknowledged me,' Solus realized, grim satisfaction threading through him.
But the recognition came at a cost.
Already he could feel something thin and sharp winding around his soul, a thread pulled taut by the Rift's hidden hand.
Freedom was never free here.
He took one last look at the ruined world behind him — the mist, the broken village, the collapsing horizon.
No going back.
With a steadying breath, Solus stepped through the archway.
The world flipped.
Down became up. The light became sound. Breath became gravity.
He stumbled, dropped to one knee — but forced himself upright, vision swimming as reality knitted itself badly around him.
The Riftway stretched ahead, wide enough for only one traveler.
Above and below, strange stars blinked in patterns too complex to be a coincidence.
Whispers brushed his ears — not voices, but ideas, half-born things reaching for purchase in his mind.
He ignored them.
He kept moving.
Every step forward on the Riftway stitched his presence tighter into this half-made world — binding him closer to its laws, to its wounds.
But Solus Onelight had made a choice.
He would not be devoured.
He would not fade.
He would carve a place even in the heart of a dying reality.
And if the Rift demanded a price for his survival —
He would teach it that some fires do not extinguish.
No matter how deep the darkness becomes.