The wind howled with an eerie cadence, threading through the ancient, broken pillars that once held up the long-forgotten outer sanctum. Lynchie clutched her side as she stumbled forward, her cloak shredded and slick with mud and soot. Her breath hitched; each gasp burned in her chest. The ground beneath her boots pulsed like a heartbeat, low and slow and ancient.
She wasn't supposed to be here. She had only meant to trace the energy signature that radiated from the academy's sealed west wing—nothing more. The echoing call, faint and half-sung like an unfinished lullaby, had drawn her away from her training, her dorm, and safety. Now, that same call was a chorus in her skull, relentless and insistent.
A sharp crack resounded through the misty ruins, followed by the hiss of displaced air. From the deepest part of the broken sanctum, a fault line widened, glowing faintly with violet light. The crack reached up the wall like veins on a dying leaf. Lynchie braced herself against a crumbling column, teeth gritted. Her aura flickered uncontrolled around her, a pale corona of wind and starfire.
"You weren't supposed to follow it this far," came a voice—smooth, masculine, with the tired gravity of someone who had watched too many tragedies unfold.
Lynchie froze.
The speaker emerged from the shadow of a collapsed archway, robes dragging against the dusty stone. His features were obscured beneath a hood threaded with symbols that shimmered and shifted between dimensions. One eye burned faintly silver; the other, hidden behind a crystalline lens, pulsed softly in time with the rift.
"Who are you?" she managed to say, forcing strength into her tone.
"No one of import," he answered calmly, though his gaze pierced through her. "Only a keeper of locked doors. You were meant to sleep through this cycle, little heir."
Her blood ran cold.
Heir?
Before she could respond, the crack in the wall shuddered violently. A claw—slender, white, and burning with reversed flame—slipped through the breach. Lynchie's thoughts collapsed into chaos. That was no ordinary rift. That was a breach from the Between. The creature writhing behind it was not fully formed—a ghost of potential, a paradox in the shape of something real.
The stranger did not flinch. Instead, he reached into his robe and produced a symbol—not a weapon, but a folded sigil etched on parchment that gleamed like memory. He placed it on the ground and pressed two fingers to it.
"Lynchie Fuentes Regino," he said. "Run."
The sigil ignited, forming a glyph-ring around the breach. For a moment, time fractured. Lynchie saw herself reflected in hundreds of broken shards—some older, some darker, some carrying wings or horns or eyes that were not hers.
And the rift screamed.
Not in sound, but in truth. In revelation.
Behind it, a shape stirred. A face—no, not a face, but a memory of one. Eyes that should not exist opened wide and locked onto hers. Lynchie staggered, her thoughts blanking. Somewhere in her soul, something ancient twitched.
The stranger raised his other hand. Light and shadow burst into a latticework of runes and chains. The claw withdrew—not out of pain, but curiosity.
"You heard it, didn't you?" the man whispered, more to himself than to her. "The hymn that exists before language. The breath of the First Rift."
And with that, the glyph exploded, flinging Lynchie backward with a pulse that flattened the air.
When she opened her eyes again, she was lying in a decontamination cell in the academy's infirmary.
But the crack was still behind her eyes.
And something had seen her.
She had seen it back.