The wind bit with the memory of home.
They had left Blackstone behind. Weeks passed in silence, in steps, in starlight. Now, the world had changed. The desert's breath was a distant thing, replaced by rising mist, verdant hills, and at last — frost-touched glades where the roots of the World Tree began to rise like sleeping titans from the earth.
They stood at the edge of it now.
A forest not just old — but ancient.
Not quiet — listening.
Kaia stepped forward first, her ears twitching as if recognizing an old song buried in snow. Her breath caught. She hadn't been here since the burning.
The grove still bore the scars.
Trees regrown from blackened stumps.
Sacred stones cracked and leaning.
And the wind — the wind carried names in it.
"Is this… your home?" Rei asked quietly. He didn't need to raise his voice. Not here.
Kaia nodded once. "What's left of it."
They found the shrine — one of the few still standing.
Its columns leaned, moss-cloaked and weather-worn, but it endured.
Kaia lit the frost-braziers with powder ground from pale blossoms. Cold flame bloomed — blue, silent, eternal.
Rei watched its reflection flicker in her golden eyes as she knelt before the altar.
"I used to pray here," she murmured. "Before the Order came. Before they turned our dreams to ash."
Rei stood behind her, unsure. "Why did they come?"
Kaia's fists curled slowly against her knees.
"Because we said no."
Then…
She was younger.
Fierce. Beautiful in the way a white tiger is beautiful — all grace, all danger.
The Order came in white robes and honeyed words.
They promised peace. Guidance. Power.
They asked for loyalty. For obedience. For sacrifice.
Her father refused.
So did she.
And so they returned — not with words, but with fire.
She remembered the night.
The smell of burning fur.
The scream of her eldest brother.
The silence when it ended.
And the brand they carved into her back — not for her defiance, but for surviving it.
"We do not need your loyalty," they said. "Only your name, etched in pain."
Kaia opened her eyes.
Beside her, Rei knelt.
"I was marked too, by The Rift" he said. "But I never understood it. Not until I saw it in your eyes."
Kaia turned to him.
Really looked.
He wasn't strong — not yet.
He wasn't wise — not always.
But he was here.
So was she.
And for the first time, she allowed herself to believe that maybe, just maybe… that was enough.
**
Far to the South…
In a temple scorched black by forgotten fire — once a sanctuary of a flame-wielding Archon — the Order gathered beneath a fractured sky.
The Rift loomed before them.
No longer just a tear in space, but a Fracture — jagged, pulsing violet and red, its edges splitting like cracked glass through the altar stones. It bled not just magic, but memory. Echoes. Pain.
The High Cantor stepped forward, arms raised, her voice echoing like a sermon across the dead halls:
"The Riftborn remembers.
The Frostfang walks.
And still… the Tree stands."
From deep within the Fracture, something stirred.
A silhouette formed in the glow — not man, not beast, but a Vestige, born of stitched void and stolen flame, shaped by centuries of corrupted echoes.
It opened its many eyes.
"Then let the roots bleed," it rasped.
"Let him feel what came before…
Let him see what's coming."
The Cantor bowed low.
Around her, twelve Acolytes drew blades blackened by rituals only the Fractured dared perform.
And so the Order marched — robes trailing ash, voices humming the Hymn of the First Rift — not for conquest…
But for prophecy.
For in every Rift, a Fracture waits.
And through every Fracture, the old gods still whisper.