The Rift stretched like a scar between Velmora and Kael'Thar, black as void, rimmed with jagged cliffs and whispering winds that never ceased. Legends called it the Wound of the World. Soldiers simply called it cursed.
Seren moved carefully along the eastern rim. Her boots crunched frost-coated gravel as the pale morning light filtered through a sky bruised purple and blue. She was alone—sent to chart a set of ancient ruins that had resurfaced near the ice-choked crevasse.
The ruins were older than Velmora's own history. Columns of stone etched with symbols long scrubbed from doctrine. The air tasted like metal and thunder. Her crystal, set into her gauntlet, pulsed erratically.
She knelt beside a broken pedestal. Runes shimmered beneath a dusting of snow. Words in an unfamiliar tongue.
Then her breath caught. The snow had been disturbed recently. Light steps. No claws. No hooves. A person. But not Velmoran.
She gripped her blade. Listened.
Silence.
A soundless storm gathered over the Rift. Lightning flashed in violet veins across the chasm. A tower of stone, once sunken, now jutted from the abyss, half-revealed. From it emanated a low thrum, a pulse like a beating heart.
She didn't wait to see more. She marked the site and turned back toward the cliffs.
Across the Rift, Kaelien stood among twisted trees where the land cracked open like broken teeth. He descended carefully, following a trail his firestones had detected—old magic leaking through fault-lines in the ground.
The path led to a cavern, its mouth wide and dark, shaped unnaturally smooth—as if bored by magic, not water. Faint lights danced along the interior, golden and red.
Inside, he found symbols etched into the rock. Some matched the visions he'd glimpsed in the ley-grove. Others he didn't recognize at all. He touched one—and it shivered under his hand.
A gust of wind screamed through the cave, though no storm blew outside. He turned, stepping back—and paused.
On the far wall, drawn in blood or something darker, was a mural.
Two figures stood on either side of a burning chasm. One held a spear of ice, the other a staff of flame. Beneath them writhed a third form, serpentine and crowned in shadow.
Kaelien's skin prickled. He backed away.
Just as a sound—a soft footstep—echoed from outside the cavern.
He snuffed his flame instantly, pressing into shadow.
But it was only a scavenger bird, flapping away into the void.
Still, his breath stayed shallow for a while longer.
High above, a storm gathered.
Seren crossed a ridge not far from the cavern Kaelien had just left. She paused at a forked stone, strange burn-marks across it.Kaelien, minutes earlier, had passed the same spot, his presence hidden by the land's curve and the storm's roar.
Neither saw the other.
But something saw both.
From the Rift's depths, eyes opened.