It started with the sound.
A wet crack, like stone grinding against bone.
Kaelen's head snapped toward her. The seal in her hand split down its middle, bleeding something darker than shadow.
The rain didn't stop. It reversed, droplets hanging, then dragging upward, drawn toward the black shard as if the sky itself was trying to reclaim them.
The pressure hit next. Not a push. Not a pull. Something worse. The air thickened until his ribs strained against it, the weight coming from everywhere at once, as if the world was folding in around her.
It wasn't heat. It wasn't cold. It was absence, the hollow between one heartbeat and the next, stretched too far, refusing to close.
Her face twisted, teeth bared, eyes wide with strain. She brought the shard to her chest, fingers digging in like she could force it inside. Her mouth opened on a ragged breath. Kaelen didn't hear the word she spoke.
The hum started low, deep in his skull, vibrating through bone. It built, layering over itself until it wasn't a sound at all, it was thought. And it wasn't his.
—Not yours.
The yard changed. The cobblestones heaved under her feet, lifting and cracking in slow, unnatural waves, fine fissures spreading like frost across black glass.
The air thickened until every breath dragged at his chest. Light bent around her, not smoothly but in jagged shivers, like the space between them had splintered into warped panes of glass.
The rain had been steady, warm enough to steam off the cobbles. Somewhere beyond the yard, a cart rattled over loose stones, the clink of a harness chain faint under the patter. Then the sound cut out, not faded, not muffled. Gone.
She staggered. Knees hit the stone. The runes on the shard flared once, a blinding spike that etched pale scars into the wet cobbles, before they turned inward. Veins crawled black beneath her skin, racing up her arms in branching rivers. Her eyes widened, confusion overtaking fear.
Veyr's chain slackened as his gaze locked on the shard. "Idiot,"
The Spark rejected her. Kaelen felt it, an instant of violent separation, like oil flung from boiling water, the power forcing her out with the finality of a slammed door.
The rejection tore the yard open. Rain warped into a spiral, each droplet drawn into a tightening gyre above the shard. Loose stones lifted, spinning in lazy arcs before snapping toward the centre hard enough to chip on impact.
Move, I must move.
The sound came next, a deep, bone-borne groan, as if the air itself was being wrung dry. Kaelen's hands clamped over his ears, but it didn't help, the vibration was in his teeth, his spine, his skull. He staggered back a step, boots skidding on the slick stone.
Veyr cursed under his breath, hauling the chain tight on instinct, like bracing against a physical tide. The links trembled against his grip, pulling toward the shard until one warped mid-link and snapped in a spray of sparks.
Then it turned.
Every drop of rain in the yard curved toward Kaelen. The spark fractured silently in her hands, its pieces hovering, quivering in place, before collapsing into a sphere of black so dense it seemed to drink the light from the rain itself. The void swelled, edges boiling like ink in water, a heart of nothing that felt too large for the yard, too heavy for the world to hold. The cobbles beneath it groaned as if under a mountain's weight.
The heart moved.
Kaelen had time for one breath, shallow, ragged, and half a step back before the absence was inside him. No heat. No force. Just the unbearable certainty that something ancient had crossed the threshold without asking, without caring what it would take with it. At first it was nothing, too quiet, too empty. Then the nothing spread, prying into every nerve, seeping through muscle and marrow until he felt it digging for a place to stay.
His chest cinched tight, every vein burning cold. This wasn't SkyStep. That had been a current you could ride, a hum through the muscles. This was an invasion, something forcing its way in, seeping through every nerve, every cell, like it meant to live there, until there was no line between what was his and what wasn't.
His vision tore sideways. The yard, the woman, Veyr, all stretched into streaks of grey. And underneath it all, the Spark's thought, cold and absolute, sank its claws in.
A vast dark expanse, no horizon, no sky, just a never-ending void. And in the middle of it, shimmering, not light, not shadow, but shapes.
Wrong shapes. Lines that bent the wrong way. Angles that cut into places they shouldn't exist.
They spun, no, shifted, never whole, sliding away the instant his mind tried to hold them.
His mind clawed for names, for patterns, glass, blades, the curve of a hook, but the moment he grasped one, it bent back on itself and became something else. Every attempt to fix them into sense left him emptier, like the act of knowing had been stolen.
Pressure bloomed behind his eyes, sharp enough to make them water. His jaw locked. His heartbeat became a hammer in his ears.
Kaelen couldn't tell if the shapes were in front of him, behind him, or burning somewhere deep inside his skull.
He couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. His body was locked in place, but his mind was drifting elsewhere.
The black expanse stretched on forever, silent and airless. No wind. No ground. Only the slow drift of those shapes, each trailing threads of nothing that curled back into themselves.
One of them stopped. Turned toward him.
A single mark bloomed into view, searing itself into his vision until it was the only thing he could see. It pulsed once, and the silence cracked.
—Origin.
The mark collapsed into him, driving through bone and thought alike. His chest seized. Breath stalled halfway. And immediately SkyStep stirred, the familiar light-current rushing up his veins, and then shattering. The pieces folded into the mark, twisting, reshaping.
The hum that filled him now was getting heavier, and a colder tide surged, like stepping forward meant stepping through the skin of the world. And underneath it, a pressure in his veins that whispered of other Sparks.
Sparks it could take.
Something flared in front of him, Spark Runes.
Almost.
The frame was there, faint white lines flickering in and out like bad glass. He could read only a small section of it. But inside it… there was nothing the guild would recognize.
NΞXUS–ORIGIN: [Fragment Bound 1/??]
Primary Host: KΛELEN V. [Tier: ∅]
Status: Incomplete / Integration Unstable
Primary: W [REDACTED]
Secondary Function: Acquisition, Consume / Assimilate / Merge
Linked Ability: SKY-STEP (ALTERED), [Overlay Applied]
The words bled into strange symbols at the edges, flickering between shapes and angles he didn't know how to read.
He'd seen a few rune windows every time he used the guild's Fleetingstep, and today Skystep.
This was not theirs.
Suddenly, the mark, the runes, the hum, all of it tore loose.
The black expanse shattered, and he went with it.
No air. No up. No down. Just the feeling of being stripped apart, thought by thought, nerve by nerve, and shoved through a space too small for what he was.
Am I dying?
The thought came in someone else's voice. His own was gone.
Something in his balance was wrong. The ground felt too far away, the weight in his limbs shifting a fraction too late, like his body had learned a new rhythm he hadn't agreed to. Each breath came with a faint aftertaste, metal, rain, and something colder, sharp enough to catch at the back of his throat. The sensation wasn't fading. If anything, it was settling in, as if it had always been there and he was only noticing now.
Something ripped, and then there was only,
Impact.
Pain detonated along his ribs. Cold stone caught his cheek. For a few heartbeats, breathing was something that happened without his permission, shallow and raw.
He blinked grit out of his eyes, but the world doubled and smeared. A wall. Lamplight. Puddles slick as oil.
What in the saints just happened?
If I'm alive, I need to Move
His fingers twitched, then curled. That small act felt like dragging himself back into a body he wasn't sure fit anymore. He flexed his fingers. The joints moved, but not right, as if there was a half-second delay between thought and muscle. His breath steamed in the rain; each exhale edged with a faint tremor he couldn't stop. With immense effort, he dragged his upper body up to a seated position, trying to make out his surrounding, when his eye caught something.
A shape waited beside him. Matte black. Familiar.
The case.
This damn job better be worth it. And they better reimburse my skystep, I must have used half of it.
Kaelen forced himself upright, head lolling until the ground steadied beneath him. The rain was softer here, running down tilted cobbles into the dark. A half-collapsed arch sagged overhead.
Recognition clicked.
The drop location.
But he hadn't walked here. He hadn't done anything. The last thing he remembered was,
His chest tightened. The memory tried to surface, but all that came was the black, the wrong angles, the mark burning behind his eyes.
The case's lock light winked green.
No. This isn't right.
How did I get here?
Something inside him shifted, a slow, cold pulse. It wasn't his heartbeat.