All Chapters of Fractured Realms: Chapter 1
- Chapter 7
7 chapters
The Fracture
The night felt wrong before it broke. The air vibrated, the way sound does before thunder, only there was no storm. I stood on the balcony with Elara, watching the towers across the river flicker between one color and another. A ripple of light rolled through the clouds as if someone had drawn a curtain across the sky.“Another surge?” she asked. Her reflection trembled on the glass doors behind us.“Probably just the Core Bridge testing again,” I said, but my throat felt tight. We both knew the bridge had been unstable for weeks. It linked the mirror worlds together, and when it pulsed, the streets glowed with veins of blue. Tonight, those veins ran too bright.A faint hum built in the distance. Elara turned toward the sound. Her dark hair caught the light from the street below, a soft halo in the metallic air. “Kael,” she said quietly, “does it ever stop?”Before I could answer, the hum cracked into a deep, rising roar. The lights in the buildings folded inward. Windows turned to li
Echoes of light
The light faded behind me until it became only a pulse in the distance. Ahead stretched a field of silver mist that rippled with every breath. Each step stirred faint motes of luminescence from the ground, as though the air itself remembered fire.The silence was alive. I could hear it breathing, a low pulse that moved through the space around me like the heartbeat of something enormous and unseen. The horizon curved inward, pulling me closer with every step.The storm was gone, but its memory clung to me. The scent of ozone still lingered. My clothes were torn, my hands scraped, yet none of it felt real. The warmth that had protected me in the storm now burned quietly beneath my skin, pulsing like an ember refusing to die.Elara’s face would not leave my mind. The image of her reaching for me as the bridge tore apart replayed again and again, sharp enough to wound. I could still feel the weight of her fingers slipping from mine, the way the light swallowed her. It was the kind of mom
The City Between Worlds
The light swallowed me whole, then released me into motion.I fell through layers of air that shimmered like broken mirrors. Each one reflected a city I did not recognize. When I struck the ground, it was solid but trembling, as if the world itself was waking beneath my feet.I pushed myself up, breath unsteady. The air smelled of stone dust and iron. The sky was low, filled with shifting clouds that carried faint orange light. Around me stretched a city that seemed endless, carved into fragments of reality held together by streams of energy.Towers leaned at impossible angles but did not fall. Bridges crossed gaps that reached into nothing. Walls pulsed faintly with veins of blue light, beating in time with my pulse.Every sound echoed. My footsteps rang louder than they should have. The place was not silent. It was listening.A wind moved through the empty streets, carrying whispers that sounded almost human. I walked forward slowly, keeping one hand close to the glow beneath my ski
The Realm of Ash and Silence
The ground beneath us collapsed. Light twisted around my body as the city above dissolved into smoke. For a moment, I felt weightless again, suspended between falling and breaking. Then the light vanished, and I struck hard stone.When I opened my eyes, the world was gray.Ash drifted from a sky that had no sun. The air shimmered with heat, yet the wind was cold enough to sting. Mountains of blackened rock stretched in every direction, their shapes jagged and unnatural. Rivers of silver light crawled across the ground like veins through a corpse.I stood slowly, my body heavy from exhaustion. The pulse of my light had dimmed, but I could still feel it inside me, waiting. The silence here was different from the city’s. It was thicker, heavier, like the world had forgotten how to breathe.Seryn landed beside me, her armor streaked with soot. She looked around with wary eyes. “This is not the city’s doing. The portal threw us into another realm.”“What realm?” I asked.She crouched, brus
The Realm of Shadows
The light of the ash realm faded behind us. What replaced it was absence. Not darkness, but something worse, a stillness that devoured light and sound alike.We stepped through the passage the symbol had opened, and the ground beneath my feet turned smooth and cold. The air was thick and heavy, pressing against my lungs as if the world itself resented breath.The first thing I noticed was the reflection.The floor was made of black glass that stretched endlessly, mirroring everything above it. My boots made no sound on its surface. The faint glow of my light reflected at me, smaller and weaker, as though drained by the realm itself.Seryn’s voice came softly beside me. “The Realm of Shadows. Few return from here unchanged.”I looked around. “Why?”“Because the realm does not create new enemies. It only gives form to the ones already inside you.”Her words lingered as we walked. The silence was unbearable. No wind, no echo, no life. Even our reflections moved a heartbeat slower, as tho
The Realm of Echoes
Every voice leaves a shadow in the silence.I awoke to the sound of breathing that was not my own. The air was weightless, the world still. A pale light stretched in all directions, without source or warmth. It felt like standing inside a thought that refused to end. The silence was so complete that it became a sound, pressing against my skull until I could almost hear my own heartbeat echo through it.Then the whispers began.They were faint at first, ripples across the silence. I turned, but there was no one. The light around me shimmered like a mirror disturbed by the wind. The whispers grew clearer. Some called my name. Others laughed. Some cried. All of them sounded like me.I took a step forward, and the ground responded like glass bending under weight. Each movement left behind a faint reflection, an image of myself that lingered for a moment before fading. When I stopped, one of the reflections did not fade. It stood, staring back at me. Its eyes were hollow.“Where am I?” I a
The Heart of the Fracture
The end is only the shape truth takes when it begins again.I was falling again, but this time the air itself glowed. It folded around me like liquid glass, each ripple carrying a faint hum that vibrated through my ribs. The storm of the Realm of Echoes had become a tunnel of light. Stars streamed past like sparks drawn into an unseen current. I tried to breathe, yet each breath filled me with warmth instead of air. The fall slowed until I was drifting weightless through a chamber the size of eternity.The space around me moved like a living machine. Rings of radiant metal revolved in silence, crossing one another in perfect rhythm. Rivers of starlight poured through transparent conduits that curved into infinity. I felt the weight of something older than time pressing down gently, like a hand on the crown of my head.So this was the Heart.I touched down on a platform of pale crystal. The surface pulsed beneath my boots in slow, steady beats. With every pulse, memories surfaced—Elara