By the time we reached Miralith, the sun was little more than a pale wound behind the Rift clouds. The land itself seemed to resist our approach, ridges curling inward like a vast creature's ribs, wind keening through the bones of a dead age.
From a distance the city looked frozen mid-collapse: towers slanted, bridges half-melted, veins of violet light crawling through stone. But as we stepped across the outer wall, the air shimmered.
My breath caught.
"What… happened here?"
Kael's voice was low. "The Rift never closed. It fed on Miralith until the city became part of it."
We passed statues worn smooth by time faces erased, eyes hollow. Every few steps the ground flickered between solid and translucent, revealing layers of machinery beneath, still humming faintly.
I crouched, tracing a glyph etched in metal. "This pattern… it's binary code."
Kael frowned. "Binary?"
"Language of machines from my world." I looked up. "But how could it be here?"
He didn't answer. His gaze swept the ruins as if expecting them to awaken.
A faint chime echoed ahead, like glass singing. I turned and a figure stood among the ruins. Not flesh, but light shaped like a woman, shimmering blue.
"Hello?" I called.
The apparition tilted its head. Then, in perfect Japanese:
Anata wa oso sugita
(You came… too late.)
My heart stuttered. "Who are you?"
It stepped closer, fragments of data rippling through its form. "I am Miralith's memory. The Gate-Heart's echo."
Kael's hand went to his weapon. "A construct?"
"An archive," the voice said. "And a warning."
The light flickered, showing glimpses,streets alive with people, laughter, towers blazing gold. Then screams. A rift opening above the city. Creatures pouring through like liquid shadow.
I reached toward the vision, and pain lanced through my skull. Images flooded in: scientists,humans, working beside Miralith's engineers, building something vast beneath the city.
"I know this tech," I whispered. "It's… ours. Earth's."
Kael stared. "That's impossible."
The illusion fractured. "Your world's curiosity tore a hole between realms," the echo said. "Ours answered the call. We joined hands… and fell together."
Then the light dimmed, voice trembling:
Gēto o mitsukete owarasete kudasa
(Find the Gate-Heart. End it.)
It vanished, leaving only the hum of the wind.
For a long moment neither of us spoke. Then Kael said quietly, "You realize what this means."
"That my experiment didn't just open the Rift," I said. "It reopened it."
The weight of it hit me like cold water. The faces in the illusion, people from two worlds blurred together until I couldn't tell who was who.
Kael placed a hand on my shoulder. "We still have a choice. The Gate-Heart is below. If we can reach it…"
"…maybe I can close it again."
He nodded. "But the path won't be kind."
We found an entrance half-buried under fallen metal, a spiral stair descending into darkness. Blue light pulsed from below, steady as a heartbeat.
As we started down, I glanced back at the city one last time. For a moment, I thought I saw figures moving among the ruins specters watching silently.
"Sai'ko" I whispered. (Let's go.)
And the darkness swallowed us whole
The stairs wound downward forever, a spiral sinking into the cold heart of the earth. Each step echoed softly in the hollow dark. The air grew sharper the deeper we went, filled with that metallic tang that made my skin prickle.
Kael walked ahead with his sword raised. Its faint light brushed against the walls, waking symbols that glimmered and faded as we passed. They looked strange yet familiar, patterns of code and numbers I had seen before in my research. I realized with a chill that this place spoke in the language of my world.
It felt as though I were walking through the memory of my own mistake.
At last the stairway opened into a vast cavern. The air was alive with quiet vibration. In the center of the chamber floated a sphere of glass and metal that breathed with light, slow and steady.
Before I understood it, I could feel it. The rhythm beneath my skin matched the rhythm of that light. It was not a machine. It was a pulse.
Kael's voice was low and reverent. "So this is what remains."
I could barely breathe. "No," I whispered. "This is what began it."
We stepped closer. The walls were fused with machinery that looked both organic and artificial, veins of light flowing through them like living tissue. The entire room seemed to be part of the same body.
Without thinking, I reached toward the sphere. It responded instantly. Light surged outward and swallowed the world.
I was weightless. Voices surrounded me, thousands of them, blending into one vast chorus. Then one voice rose clear and soft above the rest.
"Akiya, me o samashite."
It meant: (Akiya, wake up.)
I turned. My mother stood before me.
She looked exactly as I remembered her. Her smile was gentle, her eyes full of warmth, but her skin shimmered faintly with the light of the Rift.
"Mom?" My voice trembled.
"You opened the door," she said softly. "But you were not the first. The worlds have always been connected. You simply remembered the way."
"I didn't mean to," I said. "It was an experiment. I just wanted to stabilize a fold in space."
She reached out, though her hand passed through mine like mist. "You reached for infinity, Akiya. And infinity reached back."
Around us the white space filled with moving images. I saw people from Earth working beside others who looked like Kael, building something vast and bright. Two worlds joined by curiosity and pride. Then the light twisted, and everything collapsed into shadow.
"The Gate Heart was never a bridge," my mother said. "It was a mirror. It showed each world what it wanted to see."
"Then tell me how to fix it."
Her expression softened. "To close the Rift, you must understand why it opened."
The light broke apart. I fell.
When I opened my eyes again, Kael was holding me upright. His face was pale in the glow of the Gate Heart.
"Akiya, what happened?"
"It knows me," I whispered. "It remembers me."
The sphere brightened. The chamber shook. The air hummed until my bones ached.
Kael shouted over the noise. "It's destabilizing. What did you do?"
"I don't know," I gasped. "It's speaking."
The sound deepened into a voice inside my head.
"Futatsu no sekai o tsunaida mono, erabe."
It meant: (You who joined two worlds, choose.)
A vision opened before me. Two futures. In one, I destroyed the Heart and sealed the Rift forever. In the other, I merged both realities into one. Both paths were drenched in light and loss.
Kael's voice cut through the storm. "Whatever it's showing you, don't let it control you."
"I can't stop it."
"Yes, you can. You're not alone."
His hand found my shoulder, steady and warm, grounding me. I looked at him, and the trembling slowed.
I raised my hand and touched the surface of the Gate Heart.
The light flared once, then softened. The air grew still. The hum settled into a slow, peaceful rhythm that matched my heartbeat.
Kael exhaled, lowering his sword. "What did you do?"
"I calmed it," I said. "At least for now."
He studied the sphere. "It's alive, isn't it?"
"Maybe not alive," I said quietly. "But it's learning. And it remembers us."
The Gate Heart pulsed once more, faintly, almost as if it agreed.
We climbed the long stairs back toward the surface. When I looked over my shoulder one last time, the light of the Gate Heart still glowed in the darkness, beating slowly in rhythm with my own pulse.
It felt like it was waiting for me
"....to be continued..."