Darkness breathed before I did.
It wasn't quiet — no, quiet is gentle. This was the stillness of something that had stopped waiting… and started watching.
Cold air stabbed my lungs as consciousness returned like a blade dragged across my mind. I gasped, body arching, skin meeting metal so chilled it felt alive. Chains clanged — my wrists jerked, my ankles followed, and agony flared where steel bit into bone.
I opened my eyes.
Stars stared back.
Not stars like I remembered — if I ever remembered them at all. They didn't sit in heavens; they bled through cracks in reality, constellations shifting like living script, like ancient runes rearranging faster than thought. A sky that wasn't a sky, split like a wound held open by invisible hands.
And beneath it, I lay naked, trembling, breath fogging in a world too vast to contain itself.
My voice came out raw, scraped.
"…Where am I?"
No answer came — only the faint hum of something unseen, as though the air itself vibrated with a secret.
I tried to move. The chains answered instead, tightening — runes flaring along their surface, cold blue sigils crawling like spectral insects. Pain shot up my arms, into my chest. My pulse hammered so hard I could hear it, a frantic drum against eternity.
My body remembered fear.
My mind… did not remember anything.
A shudder crawled up my spine — not from the cold, but from the ache of absence. It was worse than pain, worse than fear. It was the sensation of a missing self. A hollow where a life should be.
Who am I?
Silence again — then a whisper of wind across skin, though the air was still.
No — not wind.
A presence.
A gaze.
It pressed against me from unseen angles, as if reality crowded closer to witness my awakening. Something ancient exhaled around me, threads of creation shifting like curtains in a place without walls.
I turned my head — slowly, every muscle screaming — scanning for bars, for stone, for any shape I could frame as a prison.
There were none.
Only endless dark, pierced by fractures of shimmering gold and abyssal blue, reality flickering and healing, flickering and tearing again. A cage without walls, a room without form — existence unhinged.
A tremor rippled through the slab beneath me.
Metal — or something masquerading as it — living, humming, almost breathing.
I swallowed. The taste of iron clung to my tongue.
I tried again, voice low and raw, desperation cracking it:
"Who… am I?"
The stars blinked.
And one of them — directly above me — blinked back.
I froze. Horror flooded me not as panic, but as recognition. Deep, bone‑level memory stirred, like a dead thing twitching under lightning.
I had been here before.
I didn't know how. I didn't know when. But this place — this impossible sky, this formless prison — it existed in the marrow of my being.
This wasn't birth.
It was return.
A silvery breath brushed my ear — a voice without sound, a presence without shape.
Awakened again?
My heart lurched. I jerked against the restraints, metal screaming, my breath slicing sharp through cold air.
"Who's there?"
Silence. Then a feeling — not spoken, but understood.
You were warned. And still… you return.
A tremor rippled through my chest, panic crushing breath from lungs.
Return?
Return to what?
I struggled again — muscles surging, instincts firing. The chains burned, runes flaring white‑hot, heat searing into skin, branding soul.
My scream died in my throat as the sky above split wider, stars stretching into a ragged fissure of light and void — a wound in infinity.
The world leaned closer.
And in that tearing silence, something inside me whispered, tender and terrifying:
This is the beginning. Again.
My blood froze. My breath stopped. My heart thrashed against ribs as if begging to escape my body before the truth reached it.
I didn't know my name.
I didn't know my past.
But the universe remembered me.
And it was afraid.
A hairline crack split open in the air beside me — a thin thread of pure nothingness, humming like a blade on the verge of singing.
And a voice, distant and cold as the void between worlds, whispered through the breach:
"…You were not supposed to return."
The crack didn't widen. It shivered.
A line of nothingness in the air — as if reality had been sliced open and stitched shut with trembling hands — trembled above me. I couldn't look away. The space around it sank inward, like the room was leaning toward the wound, hungry for what lay beyond.
I still don't know what I expected.
Something to emerge, maybe. A face. A god. A monster with my name stitched on its tongue.
But nothing came.
Just that voice. Whisper-thin. Bone-deep.
"You were not supposed to return."
And then silence. Not quiet — no, not even emptiness. Just silence, like the universe held its breath the moment it recognized me.
I turned my head — or tried. Muscles protested. Chains creaked. The metal slab beneath me thrummed with faint pulses, rhythmic, steady… alive. I felt more than heard them. As if the thing I lay upon had veins beneath its surface.
My eyes darted.
The world around me kept shifting.
One second, the walls pulsed with soft white light, medical and sterile. The next, jagged stone erupted around me, moss-laced and cavernous. Then it all collapsed into starless night — an endless void pierced only by distant golden motes like lanterns swallowed by infinity.
And still, I couldn't move. My wrists were bound in rune-branded cuffs. My ankles chained, ribs strapped, neck stiff from cold.
I wasn't in a room.
I was in a place that didn't know what shape to wear.
Like it couldn't remember what it was supposed to be.
Or worse — it was remembering too many things at once.
And so was I.
Shards of sensation stabbed behind my eyes — sharp, bright, painful.
— A scream. Not mine.
— A burning tower. A sun falling.
— A hand held in mine, cold as dying stars.
— The taste of silver blood.
— A voice: "He is an error. He must be undone."
I gasped — the memory splinter vanishing as fast as it had come.
"What… is this…?"
No one answered. But the air shifted — just enough to tell me I wasn't alone.
The lights flickered again. This time, when the glow stabilized, I saw something.
A window. Small. High above. Just out of reach. A dark pane of glass set in a wall of black stone veined with pulsing blue.
Movement behind it.
A silhouette.
Watching me.
"Who are you?" I rasped, voice dry, throat torn by silence.
Stillness.
Then:
"Subject Aeon-V-13 has regained partial consciousness."
The voice wasn't human. It came through the air like a ripple across water. Synthetic. Hollow.
Another voice replied — this one older. Human. Flat. Cold.
"Is it stable?"
"Unknown. Readings show elevated core resonance. Rift-threshold rising."
A pause. Footsteps. I couldn't see them — but I felt them. Every step a vibration beneath my skin.
"Prepare the contingency protocol. We can't risk another rupture."
My fists clenched. My knuckles cracked under the strain of chains. I didn't know what a "rupture" was, but every instinct screamed it was me.
I had ruptured something.
I was the thing that broke.
Anomaly.
That word came not from the window — but from the room itself. Whispered through the walls. Breathed by the ceiling. Etched in the pulse of the slab beneath me.
Anomaly.
Anomaly.
Anomaly.
It repeated, looping like a chant, a curse, a warning.
And something deep within me answered.
Not in words.
In sensation.
In a subtle but terrifying shift… inside my bones.
The cuffs began to heat.
Faintly.
Not enough to burn — just enough to make my skin twitch, like the metal was… aware.
I wasn't the only thing waking up.
The chains had runes, yes. But the runes had eyes.
And now they were looking at me.
One blinked. Not metaphorically. Literally.
A blue sigil flared, shifted… and winked. Then turned red.
An alert?
A reaction?
A memory?
The ceiling flickered again — and this time, the stars above moved.
They didn't twinkle.
They rearranged.
The constellations twisted. Folded. Shifted into new symbols. Not ones I knew. Not ones I could read.
But my body could.
My heart started hammering a different rhythm. My spine straightened involuntarily.
I don't know how, but the stars above spelled a name.
Mine.
And for the first time, I heard myself say it.
Barely a whisper. A breath of truth on a broken tongue.
"Aetherion…"
The word tasted like old thunder.
And the world reacted instantly.
Sirens screamed. Walls glitched. The glass above cracked as the silhouette behind it recoiled.
The chains lit up — all at once.
Runes turned red, gold, white, ultraviolet — cycling too fast to understand.
"Subject has breached memory lock. Core ID confirmed: AETHERION VALE."
"Emergency override. Begin full cognitive suppression—"
I roared.
It wasn't a scream. Not a cry.
A roar — primal, involuntary, godlike.
The metal slab convulsed under me.
And a voice — not mine — not theirs — older than all of us — whispered behind my ears, through my chest, in my marrow:
"Do you remember dying, Sovereign?"
My vision went white. Then gold. Then black again.
The crack in the air began to pulse.
Not open.
Not yet.
But close.
Too close.
The Rift was waking.
And so was I.
The Rift throbbed.
Not in the air — not in the sky — but inside me.
I didn't know how I knew that. I didn't know how I knew anything. But the moment I spoke the name — my name — something shifted in the structure of reality, and suddenly the walls began remembering too.
Aetherion Vale.
It echoed now. Not as sound, but as presence — a pulse that didn't stop at my ears but sank into the foundation of everything around me. The name wrapped itself around the room, wrapped itself around me, like it belonged to this place far more than I ever had.
The chains rattled again, violently. Not because I moved.
Because they did.
Each cuff tightened, then glowed.
The runes etched into them flared bright, then turned black — as if seared from the inside out — before vanishing completely, leaving scorched patterns along my wrists and ankles.
The shackles hissed.
The slab beneath me cracked.
My breathing hitched as a line of pain seared across my ribs, followed by another wave of light-headed nausea. But this wasn't illness.
It was remembrance.
And it burned.
"Kill it now before the breach completes!"
"Too late. It spoke the true name. Protocol can't suppress that."
"Then shut it down—shut it down before—"
I stopped listening.
Their voices no longer mattered. They didn't reach me. Couldn't touch me.
The stars above were still shifting. The constellations — ancient, cold, unfeeling — had begun rearranging into a symbol I couldn't comprehend but somehow recognized. My mark. A sigil carved across millennia, etched by lifetimes I had never lived… and yet had.
My skin flared hot again — but not from pain.
From power.
A golden light had begun leaking from the scars left by the cuffs, curling up my forearms like vines drawn in starlight. It didn't burn. It hummed. It remembered.
"You were a Sovereign once," came the whisper again — but this time, it was inside me. Not external. Not hallucination. A voice from the blood.
"You died screaming."
"But death forgot to finish the job."
The Rift-pulse intensified.
The floating crack in the air above me — the one that hummed like a blade waiting to split something holy — widened a sliver.
And for the first time, I saw through it.
Not clearly. Not entirely. Just enough to know it wasn't light on the other side. Not shadow either.
Something beyond both.
Like a world made of memory and myth. Where stars had mouths and time had hands. Where thrones floated in silence and screamed without sound.
I wanted to look away.
But I couldn't.
Because I remembered it. That place. That throne. That moment.
I had died there.
Not once.
Twelve times.
I felt it — every time a sword pierced my spine, a god's decree crushed my soul, or the Rift itself turned inward and devoured me.
Twelve deaths.
Twelve failures.
Twelve versions of me that never reached the end of the path.
And now?
Now there were thirteen.
And I was the thirteenth.
The unlucky one. The broken cycle. The error.
The one that didn't belong.
Anomaly detected.
Subject breach imminent.
Lockdown in progress.
I laughed.
I didn't mean to. It ripped out of me like a sob, but sharper. More honest.
They still didn't understand.
They thought I was waking up.
But I wasn't.
I was coming back.
And the Rift?
The Rift had been waiting.
I turned my head. For the first time, the silhouette behind the observation window was clear.
Lucien.
Golden hair.
White armor.
A glowing halo that wasn't holy — just manufactured brilliance. Polished falsehood.
His mouth opened in slow horror.
He recognized me.
And I recognized him.
He had killed me. At least twice.
And I had let him.
Never again.
The glass between us cracked.
Spiderwebbed.
Shattered.
And though I hadn't moved — not even twitched — the wall ruptured as if a silent explosion had detonated from inside it.
Lucien vanished in the collapse.
The Rift-crack above me groaned open wider.
And the room — if it could still be called a room — tilted, spatial logic unraveling as the floor became a ceiling, then a horizon, then a thought.
Chains dissolved.
The slab beneath me melted into stardust.
And I floated.
Not upward.
Not downward.
Inward.
Into myself.
And what I found there was not a memory.
It was a warning.
A voice older than gods, born from the bleeding edge of existence, whispered within my skull:
"We erased your name once. And still… you returned."
I don't remember the ground returning.
One moment I floated inside a collapsing dream — the next, I was upright. Kneeling. Breathing hard. The air was different now.
Sharper. Heavier.
Every breath felt like inhaling history.
I was no longer bound. No longer naked. Though I hadn't seen them placed on me, robes of dark blue and black now clung to my frame, etched with faint golden constellations that shifted subtly, like they were watching the world with me. I reached down, slowly, and touched the fabric.
It hummed under my fingers. Warm. Familiar. Like a lover I had once known in a forgotten life.
I stood.
The space around me had changed again — or perhaps I had changed how I perceived it. Walls no longer existed. Not truly. They flickered between crystalline surfaces, ethereal mist, and layered reflections of scenes I didn't recognize: a battlefield drenched in starlight, a cathedral made of shattered moons, a throne cradled in silence.
They weren't visions.
They were memories.
Mine. But not.
A shape caught in the corner of my eye made me freeze.
I turned.
And stared.
A mirror stood across from me.
Perfectly still. Perfectly framed. And perfectly impossible — because the figure within it… was not me.
He looked like me. Almost.
But where my robes glowed faintly, his robes pulsed like dying suns. Where my eyes burned soft with confused gold, his were sharp with a constellation's fury. He didn't mimic my stance. He stood tall, regal. Watching me with the disdain of someone forced to look upon a flawed echo of himself.
My throat dried.
"Who…" I began.
He tilted his head slightly.
And then he smiled.
No warmth. Just sharp, resigned amusement. As if this was inevitable.
"You're late," he said.
His voice wasn't mine, but it was close. Like it had been mine once, but refined in godfire and stitched back together with broken time.
I stepped forward. The world beneath my feet cracked softly — like glass beneath fire.
The figure didn't move.
"I know you," I whispered. "You're me."
"Almost." His smile didn't waver. "I'm what you used to be. Or what you're still becoming. Depends which direction you're bleeding through time."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"Waiting. Failing. Dying. Repeat."
He stepped closer to the glass. The crackling surface rippled between us.
I reached out.
So did he.
Our fingers did not align.
Mine trembled.
His… did not.
I touched the surface.
Pain exploded up my arm.
Not from the mirror — but from inside my bones.
My forearm convulsed. Runes erupted across my skin, spiraling patterns of gold and obsidian — shifting, burning, unfolding like a celestial circuit igniting for the first time in millennia.
I screamed through clenched teeth, stumbling back, my vision fracturing into light and afterimages.
The reflection laughed — but only once.
"That's the seal," he said. "You triggered it. It's awake now."
"What… what did I just do?"
"Opened the gate," he said, eyes narrowing. "Or cursed yourself again. Same thing."
My skin still burned. The runes carved themselves inward now. Past flesh. Into marrow.
Something ancient — buried — sealed — had just been let loose.
A fragment of memory slammed into my skull.
—I stood on a floating bridge of glass.
—Twelve thrones surrounded me.
—Each one was empty.
—Each one bore my name.
—And in the center… I sat upon the thirteenth.
—And I wept.
I fell to one knee.
Reality quaked.
Not metaphorically. The air itself shuddered, like a harp string pulled too tight. Energy trembled through the world, through me, through the mirror.
I looked up.
The reflection was gone.
The mirror had shattered — not violently, but quietly, drifting apart like snow made of starlight.
And where he stood…
Was nothing.
Only a word.
Whispered.
From nowhere.
From everywhere.
"Sovereign."
And then, from beyond the fractured glass and the cracking air — footsteps.
Footsteps approaching.
The footsteps came sharp and staccato — boots on steel, voices like blades.
"Containment breach—Subject 13 has initiated Rift feedback."
"Full lockdown in effect. Deploy null-restriction phantoms immediately."
"Do not let it look at you. If it looks at you, it remembers you."
That last one silenced the rest.
I was still kneeling when the first flicker cut the air above me — a thin, vertical wound seething with not-light, an iridescent shimmer that bled both color and void. I recognized it not from memory but from instinct.
It was a Rift.
A true one.
Not simulated. Not summoned.
Awakened.
Reality didn't split with thunder. It unfolded, peeled like flesh torn from thought. And beyond that rip: stars spiraling like screams, chains stretched across dimensions, thrones orbiting a heart that was not a heart — pulsing, massive, made of every version of me that had ever failed.
The Rift pulsed again.
And this time… it spoke.
But not in words.
In knowing.
A flood of truths surged into my mind, each one a blade.
—I had ruled.
—I had died.
—I had broken worlds, kissed gods, begged the void to swallow me.
—I had erased my own name to escape my fate.
—And the universe, in mercy or fear, tried to forget me.
But I was never truly gone.
I was buried.
And now?
Now I was digging my way out.
The mirror fragments still hovered in the air around me, suspended like frozen tears. In each shard, I saw something different.
Me, crowned in flame.
Me, cradling a body I couldn't name.
Me, laughing with blood on my hands.
Me, kneeling… just as I was now.
You are the echo that doesn't fade.
You are the twelfth failure's thirteenth breath.
You are the Riftborn Sovereign. And the Path rejects you.
The crack split wider.
And this time, something stepped through.
Not a creature. Not a god.
A shape made of memories — mine and not mine — wrapped in shifting armor that bent time around it. Its face was hidden, but its presence was absolute.
And I knew.
I was looking at the thing they built to replace me.
"Target reacquired," a voice behind me said. "Do not engage alone. Repeat, do not—"
A scream.
A body.
A collapse of logic.
I didn't turn.
Because I could feel the Rift-Entity's attention.
It tilted its head. Not like a man.
Like a mirror wondering how the crack got there.
And then it spoke.
"Aetherion Vale," it said, in a voice that sounded like mine stripped of soul, "you were not supposed to return."
My lips parted.
I stood.
The stars behind the Rift blazed.
And I answered, softly:
"And yet here I am."
The Rift flared open in full behind me — vast, endless, screaming with a thousand lifetimes' worth of echoes.
The cell cracked.
The air fractured.
Time stuttered.
I didn't know what would happen next. I didn't know if I'd live another second.
But I did know this:
The path had rejected me.
Which meant…
I was free to make a new one.
"And this time," I whispered, "I walk the path no one dares write."