The moment Ember opened her mouth and Callen’s breath passed through her lips, the world shifted, Not visibly, Not with tremor or collapse, But inside the air itself, as though the Riftline rewrote gravity to obey something ancient, something feral.Skov froze mid-step, Savi dropped her spiral band as if it suddenly burned, Amari went pale, whispering something no one could hear, The First scattered, not gliding fleeing.The Second’s hum surged so loud the Witnesses collapsed to their knees, And Ember… wasn’t breathing anymore, The breath in her body didn’t belong to her, It moved in rhythms foreign to her lungs slow, measured, thick like tar exhaled in pulses.Her eyes stayed open but unfocused, One hand still gripped Callen’s limp wrist, The Circle held its breath, Waiting, Watching, Not one dared touch her. Inside her chest, Ember was awake. But not… present.She stood in a space layered with pulse and echo. The floor beneath her flickered with overlapping memory, a thousand spiral

The breach snapped shut like a mouth that had swallowed its last name, And with it, Callen was gone, Not dead, Not screaming. Just erased.Ember stood barefoot in the churned earth, mud clinging to her ankles, blood streaked up her arms, and a rawness inside her that didn't come from the Rift.The kind of rawness that meant something was missing, Not a limb, Not a stone, A person, Behind her, the Witnesses rose in silence. Some bowed. Some turned away. None dared speak her name.Skov walked toward her slowly, like someone approaching the center of a battlefield littered with traps. “Ember…”She didn’t look up. Just whispered, “He chose me.”Skov stopped. He had no answer. There wasn’t one, In the infirmary tent, Amari hovered over Callen’s body. Technically: not a body anymore. His vitals were gone. Pulse. Breath. Neural trace. Spiral groove completely burned out.But the skin was warm. The lips slightly parted. And his right hand still curled into a fist, like it was holding on to so

It wasn’t a person, It wasn’t a Hollowborn. It wasn’t even alive. But the moment the sky cracked open and it began to fall, every spiral stone in the crater went dark. Not dim, Not flickering. Gone.A silence descended like a hammer, The Third hum ceased, Even the wind stopped, The shape fell fast, No fire, No flare. Just a vertical descent that ignored gravity, as though obeying only memory.The clouds twisted around it, The Hollowborn watched it come. And for the first time, it stepped backward.Ember hovered mid-air, still glowing, still breathing the breath of the Rift, Ten flickering Witnesses stood behind her.Callen lay collapsed on the ground below, Savi held a shaking spiral blade, Amari raised her rifle, Skov braced for impact. And then, the thing hit the earth. No explosion, No crater, No impact tremor. It just appeared.A vertical figure, hunched and silent, with no face, No arms, No spiral groove, Just a column of jagged spirals folded inward upon itself like a collapsed

The sky didn’t shatter, it peeled. Thin as skin stretched over bone, the air above the crater tore in long, silent ribbons.The split ran from horizon to horizon, spilling no light, no sound, only absence. And from that absence came whispers. Not voices. Memories trying to remember themselves.The Spine roared without moving. The hum deepened into a vibration so low it lived in the bone. Amari’s teeth cracked. Skov’s armor plates flickered. Savi’s pulse rig shorted and fused to her arm.And Callen, what was left of him, floated a few feet off the ground, head tilted back, mouth open in a silent scream.The Hollowborn’s spiral burned black across his chest, the grooves cutting through skin and into light. The Rift wind rose.Ember coughed blood, dragging herself upright. Her groove was dim now, her glow dying. “Callen…”The Hollowborn turned his head, slow, stiff, marionette-like, and smiled. But behind the dark spiral, a flicker moved. A heartbeat not yet erased.Skov’s voice broke th

When the white light faded, there was no sky. No ground. Only memory pretending to be geography.Callen lay on his back, gasping. The air was thick, not with smoke, but with fragments of thought trying to remember what “air” meant. He could feel it crawling into his lungs, reprogramming breath into data.Somewhere nearby, something moved, slow, deliberate. “Elira?” His voice cracked on the name.A soft hum answered him, like the world exhaling through a throat it hadn’t used in centuries. Shapes began forming around him, buildings, trees, the distant line of a city, but they were wrong.They were remembered versions, drawn from countless different histories colliding at once. A skyline of contradictions.Stone towers beside mirrored arcologies. A sun that flickered between dawn and dusk every heartbeat. And in the center of it all, she stood.The Source, Elira reborn, or something worse, was watching the horizon, eyes burning gold. Every step she took reshaped the ground beneath her,