The wind greeted him not with kindness, but with hunger.
Kaelen lay on the cold earth beneath a sky fractured by color and silence. He could feel it—the weight of the sky pressing down like invisible hands, curious and ancient. Not sky, exactly. A canopy of broken stars tangled in strands of glowing mist. Beyond it, something darker stirred. Something aware.
He coughed, curled on his side.
Dirt filled his mouth. The taste was raw and coppery—his own blood mingled with ash. His back burned with the afterglow of etched runes, and his limbs trembled with the memory of power that was no longer his to command. Not yet.
The facility was gone—buried behind him beneath shattered stone and warped reality. Its lights had died in his final outburst. Or perhaps they'd simply turned away, no longer willing to bear witness.
Above him, wind whispered through dead grass and twisted trees. The terrain stretched far in every direction—scarred earth and fractured ridgelines, jagged rocks standing like broken teeth. Patches of fog drifted lazily across the land, some drifting upward rather than down.
The Riftwilds.
He knew the name without knowing how.
Kaelen sat up slowly. Each movement sent knives of pain through his nerves. His muscles were torn, his bones likely fractured. But the power—the strange, alien force that had responded to his will—still flickered inside him like a dying flame. Not gone. Dormant.
As his vision adjusted, he realized just how far from normality he had wandered. The stars in the sky were wrong—larger, drifting in slow spirals. One of them had three rings. Another pulsed like a heartbeat. The constellations twisted if stared at too long, as if they did not appreciate being observed.
He exhaled and forced himself to his feet.
Every instinct told him to lie down and rest. But rest was death.
There were things out here. Even without memory, he could feel it in his marrow—predators that wore skin not their own. Beasts that whispered from behind mirrors. Even the trees bent away from certain patches of land, leaning like worshippers before an altar of silence.
He began to walk.
The first day passed in shivers and hallucinations.
Kaelen moved with the shambling gait of the half-dead, clutching a makeshift walking stick torn from the carcass of a brittle-barked tree. Hunger gnawed at him, but the land offered no fruit. No animals. Only pale fungi, glowing faintly blue, growing along cracks in the stone.
He ignored them. Instinct screamed poison.
A river cut through the land hours later—wide, black, and silent. He knelt beside it, drank cautiously. The water was cold and tasted like memory—bitter and metallic, tinged with a sweetness he couldn't name.
As the sun—or what passed for one—fell behind ridges of serrated stone, the land changed.
Colors deepened.
Sounds faded.
Shadows stretched.
Kaelen found shelter beneath an overhang of fossilized bone. Some massive beast, long dead, its ribcage now a crude cave. There, beneath its broken sternum, he collapsed.
Sleep didn't come easy.
Each time he closed his eyes, he fell—not in dreams, but in memory.
A boy. A name he couldn't remember. A hand reaching toward a window etched with frost. A woman's voice—warm, singing. Then silence. Fire. Screams. Metal descending.
Then... a mask. A voice: "Subject Theta-Nine is ready for rupture seeding."
Pain.
Always pain.
He woke to the sound of whispering wind.
And something else.
Movement.
Kaelen remained still, slowing his breath. He heard it—soft footsteps crunching over brittle grass. Not animal. Too cautious. Measured.
He waited. Tensed.
A figure stepped into the mouth of the bone cave.
Thin. Cloaked. Masked.
Kaelen moved like a blade unsheathed.
His hand snapped out, grabbing the stranger by the wrist, twisting—forcing them to their knees. A sharp object clattered to the ground. A bone dagger.
They didn't cry out.
Instead, a raspy laugh.
"Impressive. You're barely breathing, and still you move like a Riftshade."
The voice was feminine. Cold. Not surprised.
Kaelen narrowed his eyes. "Who are you?"
"Does it matter?" the figure rasped. "They're still hunting you. I followed the echo—figured I'd find a corpse. Not this."
He applied pressure. "Answer."
She shifted slightly, lowering her hood.
A woman's face—half-hidden behind cracked porcelain mask. But her eyes... they shimmered with faint violet light. Like oil over still water. Too knowing.
"Call me... a scavenger," she said. "I collect things the world discards. And you, my lovely friend, are leaking power."
Kaelen's grip tightened.
She sighed. "No gratitude, then. Fine. I'll go. But if the Scales track your scent—and they will—you won't survive another confrontation."
He released her.
She rose slowly, rubbing her wrist. "Wise. Still useful, perhaps."
"What do you want?"
She turned toward the cave entrance, gaze distant.
"To see if the stories are true," she said. "That something survived the Spindle and walked free. You... you're just the first ripple, aren't you?"
She vanished into the mist before he could speak again.
The next few days passed in painful recovery.
Kaelen found a pool of Riftwater—warm and iridescent, hidden in a crevice. He soaked in it, letting his body absorb its strange energies. It accelerated his healing—scars flaked off like dried leaves. The runes on his back pulsed, slowly dimming as the bindings faded.
It was in that water that he saw it.
The reflection.
Not just his body—now lean, honed, unnaturally perfect. Skin flawless except for faint lines of silver threading down his arms, like veins of starlight. His hair had darkened, silver-purple under the moons. His eyes glowed faintly when angry or focused.
But deeper, beneath that reflection—
—a shadow.
A coiled shape.
Watching.
Waiting.
Himself, and not.
He touched the water.
It rippled, and the reflection vanished.
On the sixth day, the Weave spoke.
Not with words. Not in sound.
But in sensation.
A ripple in space—an echo without cause.
Kaelen turned his head and saw it—a distortion hanging in midair like a heat haze. Thin, almost invisible. A scar in the fabric of reality.
Drawn to it, he approached. Reached out.
The moment his fingers brushed it, the world folded.
He stood in a ruin.
Not the Riftwilds. Not the facility.
Somewhere... older.
Massive columns of crystal rose around him. A sky of silver storms churned above. In the center stood a massive loom—woven from beams of light and chains of memory. Threads poured from it in all directions—fading into infinity.
And he understood:
This was the Weave.
The real one.
The origin of all.
For a heartbeat, he felt everything.
A million lives. A billion deaths. Every choice. Every failure. Every breath.
And he was the center.
Then it shattered.
He fell to his knees, gasping, vomiting blood.
The Riftwilds returned.
The scar had vanished.
But Kaelen was not the same.
He could feel it now—the threads around him. Lines of possibility. Weaknesses in the terrain. Patterns in the wind.
Power.
Not just magic.
Truth.
That night, as he stared up at the sky, Kaelen whispered to no one:
"I don't know who I was before. But I know what I'm becoming."
His voice was steady.
His path had begun.