Fractured Realms

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 liquid silver, bending the skyline.

“Elara, get inside.”

The roar became a scream of wind. The sky split open above us. For one heartbeat, everything glowed white; the next, color poured through the tear like water spilling from a wound.

We ran. The balcony buckled. Glass rained around us, chiming like falling stars. I caught Elara’s hand and pulled her toward the stairwell. Every surface pulsed—the air smelt of burnt ozone and rain.

The Bridge’s control tower stood at the city’s center, its beam rising through the clouds. It was flickering now, threads of light breaking apart, whole pieces vanishing as if erased.

“Kael, the Bridge!” she shouted.

“I see it!”

We sprinted through the corridor. Floors twisted under our feet. An alarm bellowed from somewhere deep below, then cut off in a strangled burst.

The city folded in on itself. Streets curled upward. Cars hung in the air, rotating slowly before vanishing into the light.

“Elara!” I tried to hold her arm as another shockwave hit. The floor cracked between us.

She slipped, caught herself, eyes wide with the kind of fear that only comes once. “Don’t let go!”

“I won’t!” I pulled, but the light roared between us, a wall of heat and color.

She reached for me one last time.

Her fingers brushed mine, and light exploded between us. The sound tore through the city, deep and endless, like a mountain breaking underwater. I tried to see her through the glare, but her outline dissolved, first into shadow, then into nothing.

“No!” I lunged forward, but the blast threw me back against the wall. The air turned to glass. Every sound warped, then vanished.

When I could move again, everything around me was falling. The towers leaned, their surfaces melting into rivers of light. People ran below, their voices breaking apart mid-shout, swallowed by the brightness. The ground buckled and folded.

“Elara!” I screamed again, but the noise died the instant it left my throat. The wind had been replaced by silence, a silence so complete it felt alive.

I forced myself up and ran toward where she had been. The balcony no longer existed. Beyond the edge of the floor was a storm of color and motion, fragments of buildings, streets, and whole bridges spinning through an ocean of light. Gravity twisted. I grabbed the frame of a door as the floor tilted and began to slide outward into the void.

I thought of the last thing she had said to me an hour earlier, in the lab beneath the Bridge.

If the Bridge ever breaks, we’ll find each other on the other side.

That sentence burned through my skull now, louder than the silence.

I reached for the edge, but the world gave way. My body was weightless for one breath, and then the sky swallowed me.

Color, heat, and wind fused into one sensation. I couldn’t tell if I was falling or flying. Lights spiralled past me – cities, faces, whole worlds folding in on themselves. For a heartbeat, I saw her again, far below, arms outstretched, her hair streaming behind her like flame. Then she was gone, consumed by the storm.

The fall lasted forever or not at all. I tried to scream her name again, but the sound stayed inside my chest. Everything turned white.

Then nothing.

Silence.

Then a low hum, steady as a heartbeat.

I opened my eyes. The world had no up or down. I was lying on a sheet of rock that floated in midair. Below, fragments of the city drifted through a storm of color. Streets looped into themselves. Towers hung sideways. The air shimmered like heat above metal.

I pushed myself upright. My arms shook. Every muscle felt charged, like I had been filled with static. The light that surrounded me came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“Elara,” I whispered. My voice barely existed. The name disappeared into the noise of the storm.

I stood, looking for anything familiar. Nothing was solid. The ground pulsed under my feet, responding to my movement, bending in slight waves. Each step sent ripples of light across its surface.

The air tasted metallic. My skin buzzed. I stared down at my hands and saw faint blue lines running beneath the skin, glowing softly, pulsing with the same rhythm as the ground.

“What is this place?”

No answer. Only the hum.

I took a step forward, and the fragment of rock drifted slowly, sliding toward another piece of ground a few meters away. Between them was open air, an endless depth that shone with a cold, white radiance.

I jumped. For a moment, I was suspended in nothing, then landed on the next fragment. It moved under my weight but held.

Every direction looked infinite, with floating shards, rivers of light, and clouds that twisted into shapes almost human. The sky itself seemed cracked, split by lines that glowed like molten glass.

I turned slowly, searching for the Bridge, for the city, for her. Nothing remained. Only this impossible landscape.

A voice spoke behind me, quiet but close. “Kael.”

I froze.

The sound was soft, not mechanical, and not human either. I turned.

A figure stood on the fragment behind me. It was tall and transparent, its form made of shifting glass. Each piece reflected something different: a tree, a storm, a field of stars, a city burning.

I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry. “Who are you?”

The figure tilted its head. “You stand in the fracture.”

“The fracture?” I repeated. “What happened to the world? Where is she?”

“The worlds broke together,” it said. “You were at its center.”

“That’s not possible.”

The figure stepped closer. The air thickened. “You touched the Bridge. You called the light. The balance fell. Now the realms remember their maker.”

I shook my head. “I was trying to stop it.”

“Intent does not undo what has begun.”

A pulse of energy rolled outward from the figure. The surrounding fragments trembled.

“Why am I alive?” I asked.

“Because the fracture remembers you. Because it needs you to finish what you began.”

Light gathered around its hands, swirling like smoke turned to glass.

“Finish?” I whispered. “What do you mean, ‘finish?”

“To remember, to repair, or to destroy.”

The light flared, blinding white.

I raised my arms instinctively, but before it could reach me, the same blue glow under my skin erupted outward, forming a sphere around me. The blast struck it and scattered into shards of light. The air vibrated. I felt the storm inside my chest answer the storm outside.

When the glow faded, the figure was gone. Only the hum remained, softer now, almost gentle.

I dropped to my knees, breathing hard. My skin still glowed faintly. The silence felt deeper than before.

“Elara,” I whispered again. The name trembled out of me like a prayer.

No answer. Only the endless horizon of broken worlds.

I stood unsteady and looked toward the light that pulsed far ahead, a single steady glow among the ruins. The pulse matched my heartbeat.

“If I am the fracture,” I said, “then I will decide how it ends.”

I took a step toward it. The ground moved, forming a path beneath my feet.

The storm parted.

And I walked forward, alone.