Kaelen traveled west, away from the smoldering ruins of the Rift temple, his silver-purple eyes narrowed beneath the hood of his torn cloak. The remnants of the battle still clung to him: the ache of overdrawn flux, the bruises and cuts that lined his body, and the strange pull in his chest that had begun since his communion with the Rift. The world had shifted—not physically, but in how it responded to him. Animals no longer fled at his approach; birds watched in unnatural silence, and even the wind seemed to flow around him, reluctant to touch.
The forest gave way to open plains, the sky darkening with storm clouds that rumbled like sleeping giants. Lightning danced along the horizon, distant yet insistent. Kaelen felt no fear. Storms were honest, and honesty was a rare commodity.
A crumbling cobblestone path emerged from the wild grass, a road long abandoned and half-swallowed by earth. No signs marked its purpose or destination. Kaelen knelt, tracing his fingers along the stones. Each one hummed faintly under his touch, not with magic, but with memory—the kind only places steeped in ancient blood could hold.
"Nameless," he murmured. "Like me."
He followed the path, Flux gently pulsing beneath his skin. Hours passed. The terrain became stranger. Trees twisted in impossible spirals, and patches of the world shimmered briefly, like ripples in a glass pane. He crossed through one such ripple and felt the air grow colder.
A settlement appeared, half-real and half-illusion. Houses built of bone-white stone, roofs made of woven black leaves, windows that showed stars instead of rooms. Phantom shapes moved behind them, flickers of what once was or what might be.
Kaelen stepped carefully, hand hovering near his belt. He wasn't alone here.
From one of the structures, a figure stepped forward—a girl, no older than twelve, draped in a dress of ash-gray silk, her eyes silver with vertical pupils.
"You're not supposed to be here," she said calmly.
Kaelen's voice was cold. "Then point me where I'm supposed to be."
She studied him, unafraid. "You're a splinter. A shard that remembers the First Silence. That's why they follow you."
"Who?"
She tilted her head. "The ones who whisper. The broken kings beneath the roots. The Rift remembers you. So do they."
Before Kaelen could question further, the illusion around them cracked. The stars in the windows flickered. A high-pitched scream rippled through the air, and shadows poured from the ground.
Riftborn.
This time, they were different—less physical, more... conceptual. One had no face but moved by mimicking Kaelen's form in echo. Another was a mass of limbs that unraveled and rewove itself constantly. They hissed in overlapping voices.
Belong. Belong. Belong.
Kaelen bared his teeth. He didn't need words.
With a flick of his wrist, space warped, hurling the mimic-thing into the air. He timed a burst of temporal freeze, suspending it mid-motion, then blinked behind it and collapsed its form into a tight matter implosion. It screamed in silence.
The second creature lunged, but Kaelen preemptively split space into mirrored shards, forcing it to attack reflections. Then he reversed its momentum through a controlled time pulse, slamming it into the ground.
The girl watched, unmoving, eyes wide.
When the Riftborn lay still, Kaelen turned to her. "What are you?"
She blinked. "A seed. A failed dream. My name was Elenya, once. This is what's left."
"This place?"
"A lost echo of a city devoured by the first destruction. You woke it."
Kaelen sighed. "Of course I did."
The wind shifted. Kaelen felt it before it came—a presence unlike the others. Not a Riftborn. Something older. Watching.
The girl looked toward the hills. "You should go. It's waking up. The Rootmind. It remembers you."
Kaelen turned to leave.
Behind him, the settlement shimmered and faded.
He did not look back.
The Nameless Road stretched onward.