The rift hung in the air like a wound that refused to close.
Through it, I saw her. Maya. Fourteen years old, hooked to machines that beeped and hissed, her small body barely visible beneath the white hospital sheets. Her face was thinner than I remembered, paler. The same illness that took our mother was eating her alive.
The sight should have broken me. Instead, it anchored me.
The void within roared, demanding I step through, consume the distance, end this. But I couldn't move. The convergence wasn't finished. Below my feet, the ley lines still pulsed with dying energy, feeding the rift, holding it open. If I left now, the rift would collapse behind me. The empire—what remained of it—would survive. Victus would claim the throne. Elara would flee. Lyra would burn her temple and disappear.
And Maya would die in a hospital bed, alone, wondering why her brother never came home with the groceries.
No.
I needed more power. I needed to stabilize the rift, make it permanent, or at least lasting long enough to find her, save her, bring her back or stay with her forever.
The Star-Eater stirred, its vast attention focusing on my thought.
...hunger...
Yes. Hunger. The battlefield was still rich with dying magic. The factions weren't all dead—some still twitched, still bled, still held flickers of elemental life. The Iron Legion, drained but alive, stared at me with horror and awe. The city beyond the Forum buzzed with terrified, confused energy.
I could take more. I could take everything.
---
Victus found me at the edge of the convergence, his fine robes torn, his face streaked with soot. He looked at the rift, at Maya's distant form, then at me.
"It's done," he said. "You won."
"Not yet."
He followed my gaze to the city, to the millions of lives pulsing beyond the Forum's boundaries. Understanding dawned, and with it, horror.
"You can't. Kieran, you can't. That's not a war anymore. That's genocide."
"The rift needs power to stay open. The convergence is fading. If I don't feed it, it closes, and she dies."
"Then go through now! Take what you have and go!"
I turned to face him fully. The void within me was calm now, patient. It had waited eons. It could wait a little longer.
"If I go now, the rift closes behind me. I'm stuck in a world without magic, without the void. The Star-Eater becomes dormant again. Maya still dies, because I can't save her without power. I'd just be a brother watching his sister die. Again."
Victus's face twisted with emotions I couldn't read. Grief? Guilt? Fear?
"Then what? You destroy an entire world to save one girl?"
I looked past him, at the city. At the millions of strangers going about their lives, unaware that their existence was being weighed on a cosmic scale.
"Yes."
The word was simple. Absolute.
And it was the truest thing I'd said since arriving in this world.
---
Lyra appeared hours later, as night fell and the rift's light cast strange, shifting shadows across the ruined Forum. She walked through the carnage like an old woman taking a evening stroll, her eyes fixed on the tear in reality.
"You actually did it," she murmured, stopping beside me. "The old texts said it was possible, but I never believed..."
"Can it be stabilized without more death?"
She studied the rift, her alchemist's mind clearly calculating. "Theoretically. If you had a power source equivalent to the six elemental convergences, you could feed it continuously. But that would require something like..." She paused, her eyes widening. "The Imperial Mana Core."
"What's that?"
"Beneath the palace. The original foundation stone of the empire. They built the entire capital around it. It's a naturally occurring mana geode, the largest ever discovered. It's been powering the city's wards, the palace's enchantments, everything, for a thousand years."
I understood immediately. "If I consume it..."
"The city loses its wards. Every enchantment fails. Every mage loses their external power source. But no one dies. Not directly."
It was a compromise. A terrible, destructive compromise, but not genocide.
"The Emperor," I said. "He'd have to authorize it."
Lyra's face fell. "He'd never—"
"He will."
---
The Emperor was waiting for me.
Not in his bed—he'd had himself carried to the throne room, propped up on the ancient seat of power like a skeleton wearing a crown. His eyes, when I entered, held a strange peace.
"I felt it," he said. "The convergence. The rift. My son, what have you done?"
"I've torn a hole in reality to save my sister."
He nodded slowly, as if this made perfect sense. "Your mother would be proud. Terrified, but proud."
"I need the Mana Core."
The guards around the throne stiffened. The Iron Legion remnants, still loyal, shifted uneasily.
The Emperor looked at me for a long, silent moment. Then he laughed—a weak, rattling sound that turned into a cough.
"Of course you do. Why stop at tearing a hole in the sky? Why not hollow out the foundation of an empire while you're at it?" He waved a trembling hand. "Take it. It's just a rock. The empire is people, not stones. If my people survive, they can build new walls."
"Father—" one of the guards started.
"Silence." The Emperor's voice, even dying, carried absolute authority. "I have failed every child I ever had. Let me succeed at this one thing. Let me help one of them save someone they love."
He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw not an emperor, not a distant figure, but a tired old man who had outlived everyone he cared about.
"Go, Kieran. Take the core. Save your sister. And if you can... think of me sometimes. Not as the emperor. As the father who should have done more."
I approached the throne. The guards parted. I knelt before the dying man, took his hand—cold, papery—and held it for a moment.
"Thank you," I said. And meant it.
He smiled, closed his eyes, and let out a long, slow breath.
The Emperor of Aethel was gone.
---
The Mana Core was beautiful.
A crystal the size of a house, pulsing with soft, blue-white light, embedded in the bedrock beneath the palace. It hummed with a thousand years of accumulated power, a heartbeat that had kept the empire alive for centuries.
I stood before it, the void within me stretching, reaching, hungering.
...yes...
The Star-Eater's voice was clearer than ever. It wanted this. Not to destroy, but to absorb. To take this beautiful, ancient light and convert it into the fuel that would keep the rift open long enough for me to save Maya.
I placed my hands on the crystal.
The sensation was unlike anything I'd felt before. Not cold, not hunger, but a profound connection. The core's energy flowed into me, not violently, but willingly, as if it recognized that its purpose was ending and a new one was beginning.
The void within expanded, filling with light that became darkness that became something beyond either. I was becoming a bridge between creation and annihilation.
Behind me, in the Forum, the rift blazed brighter. Wider. More stable.
Through it, I saw Maya stir. A nurse rushed to her side, checking monitors, frowning at readings that suddenly, inexplicably, were improving.
I poured more power into the rift.
Maya's color improved. Her breathing deepened. The machines beeped steadier rhythms.
I poured more.
The core dimmed. The palace's wards flickered and died. Every enchantment in the city—street lights, heating crystals, communication arrays—went dark.
I poured more.
The core cracked. A thousand years of accumulated power, drained in minutes.
I poured the last of it into the rift.
And then, I stepped through.
---
The hospital room was too bright, too white, too small after the vastness of the Forum. Machines beeped. Fluorescent lights hummed. The air smelled of antiseptic and cheap coffee.
And Maya.
She lay in the bed, her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. When I appeared—stepping out of a shimmering tear in the air that closed silently behind me—she didn't scream. She turned her head slowly, looked at me, and whispered:
"You came back."
I crossed to her bed in two steps, took her hand. It was warm. Alive.
"I never left."
A tear traced down her cheek. "They said you were dead. The police. After... after what happened with uncle. They said you'd been taken away and then you just... disappeared."
"I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
She gripped my hand with surprising strength. "Where did you go? What happened to you?"
I looked at the machines, at the monitors showing improving vitals, at the small window showing a city that had no magic, no void, no Star-Eater. A world that couldn't contain what I'd become.
"I went somewhere far away," I said. "And I fought my way back to you."
She laughed, a weak, wet sound. "You're so weird."
"I know."
We sat like that for a long time, her hand in mine, the machines beeping their steady rhythm. Outside, sirens wailed, cars honked, life went on. Inside, two orphans held onto each other like anchors in a storm.
But even as I held her, I felt it. The rift, still open somewhere in the space between worlds. The Star-Eater, patient in my soul. The power, coiled and waiting.
I had saved Maya. But I hadn't saved myself.
And on the other side of that invisible rift, an empire lay in ruins, a throne sat empty, and a war had been fought and won by a ghost who was no longer there to claim his victory.
The void within me stirred, not with hunger, but with a question:
...what now...
I looked at my sister, sleeping peacefully for the first time in years.
I didn't have an answer. Not yet.
But for the first time since this nightmare began, I had time to find one.
---