The world didn't shake when it happened.
There was no grand explosion. No howling wind. No tearing sky.
Just a stillness.
Too still.
Kael noticed it before anyone else — how the birds stopped singing, how the trees ceased their swaying. Even the insects fell silent, like the entire forest had inhaled and forgotten how to breathe.
He stood at the edge of the southern ridge, Elira beside him, staring at something that hadn't been there the day before.
An arch of stone. Ancient. Weather-worn. Half-sunken into the soil like it had been buried for centuries… except the ground around it was untouched.
Kael narrowed his eyes. "That wasn't there yesterday."
"No," Elira replied softly. "But it was. We just didn't see it until now."
The air shimmered faintly around the arch. It pulsed — not with light, but with memory. Cold battles. Cries from other worlds. Footsteps that never touched this soil.
Kael stepped forward. The hairs on his arms rose.
The arch whispered to him.
It wasn't words. It was something deeper, older — a song in a language the bones remembered before the brain did. Around the arch, the Lattice twisted. Threads of mana warped, bent — not broken, but unnaturally strained.
"It's not part of the Lattice," Elira said. "It's outside of it."
Kael nodded slowly. "It doesn't belong."
And yet… it called to him.
When they stepped through the arch, the world didn't twist — it folded.
No flash. No blur. One moment, they were under the morning sky — the next, somewhere else.
The same forest.
But wrong.
Colors bled too vividly. The air tasted of iron and rain. Trees groaned as they grew, bark splitting like it hurt to exist. Overhead, the sky was a dull gray dome — unmoving, like paint too tired to hold stars.
Kael reached for mana.
It responded — sluggishly. Like trying to breathe underwater.
"Where are we?" he asked.
Elira was staring at a symbol carved into a nearby tree — a broken circle with jagged lines like shattered glass.
"A mirror realm," she whispered. "A broken one."
Kael looked around again. "It's us… but cracked."
They walked in silence. Every step careful.
The forest here pulsed with wrongness. No animals. No wind. Only distant echoes, like voices stuck just out of reach.
Then they found the bodies.
Two. Human-shaped, but twisted. Scorched. One still wore armor — not of the village, not of this world. Gold inlay cracked across the chestplate.
Kael crouched.
The sigil on the armor… he'd seen it before — The Veiled Watch. A long-lost order said to guard the Echo Realms. Extinct.
But this corpse hadn't been dead long.
"Someone else has been crossing," Kael muttered.
Elira's face paled. "Maybe not someone."
On their way back, something watched them.
Kael didn't see it clearly — just flickers. A shimmer. A shadow too eager to wear a shape. But he felt its eyes.
Hungry. Ancient. Amused.
The arch pulsed again as they stepped through — a sharp breath, a flash of nausea — and they were back.
Except… the arch didn't close.
The forest was quiet again.
But now the arch glowed faintly red — like a wound refusing to scab over.
"It's a door," Kael said.
"Or a crack in the wall," Elira replied.
"Either way… it's open now."
That evening, Kael returned home — and met something worse than monsters.
Silence.
The door was open. The hearth cold. No stew simmered. No humming from Lira. No sound of Dren's carving blade.
"Mom?" Kael called.
Nothing.
He ran to the back room.
Untouched beds. No signs of struggle. No footprints. No blood.
Just… absence.
They were gone.
Kael stumbled outside. Hands shaking. The threads around the house were bent. Not cut — plucked. Yanked from the weave like loose threads from a dying tapestry.
His breath turned to steam despite the warm night.
Elira arrived minutes later, drawn by the shift.
She didn't speak. Just placed a hand on his shoulder.
"They took them," she whispered.
Kael nodded.
He didn't cry.
Something deeper cracked open inside him.
Not grief. Not fear.
Resolve.
"They're trying to scare me," he said.
"To send a message."
Elira's voice was barely audible. "What message?"
Kael's answer was cold.
"That I'm not ready."
He looked at the arch, still pulsing red in the trees.
"They're right," he said.
"But I will be."