The rain on the day of the funeral was a cliché Arlan Thorne would have scoffed at in a story. In life, it was a blunt, physical misery. It needled through the black umbrella his uncle held listlessly above them, spotting the pristine dress uniform of the casket guard with dark, accusing polka dots. The air smelled of wet earth, cut grass, and the faint, sickly sweetness of too many white lilies—the official flower of the Valor Guard, bestowed upon those who fell in the line of duty.
Who fell. The words in the official notification were so passive. As if his parents had simply tripped.
They hadn't tripped. They had been erased. That's what happened when a spontaneous, unstable B-Class Rift tore open in the downtown financial sector during rush hour. The phenomenon they called a "Mana Surge" had spat out a tide of crystalline-skinned horrors—Gazerlings—their central eye-beams slicing through alloy and concrete like paper. Captains Alistair and Lyra Thorne, 5th Order Commanders of the Metropolitan Rift Response Division, had been first on the scene.
They'd held the line. They'd saved an estimated three thousand civilians by containing the breach until reinforcements could deploy a Stabilization Array.
They had not saved themselves.
Arlan, sixteen years old and four years past his own disappointing, silent Awakening Day, stared at the twin caskets. They were closed. The official said it was out of respect. He knew it was because there hadn't been enough left to fill one, let alone two. The emptiness inside him was a yawning chasm, a void that threatened to swallow the gray sky, the droning priest, the muffled sobs of his younger sister, Elara, who clung to their aunt's side.
He felt nothing but the cold. It wasn't the rain. It was the absence of their warmth, their light. His father's booming laugh that shook the dinner table. His mother's quiet humming as she worked spatial equations on the light-screen, her fingers dancing with an elegance her combat spells mirrored.
He'd inherited her affinity. The rarest of the rare: Space. Diagnosed at his twelfth-year Awakening Ceremony to gasps and immediate, overwhelming expectation. The "Prodigy of the Thornes." The future 9th Order Imperial who would seal Rifts with a thought.
Except his mana core had remained stubbornly quiet, a dormant star. He could feel the potential, a vast, silent ocean within him, but he couldn't summon a drop to the surface. No spatial folds, no pocket dimensions, not even a minor tremor in the air. Four years of tutors, therapies, and expensive mana-densification treatments had yielded nothing. The prodigy had become the puzzle. The heir to a legacy of heroes had become a ghost in his own home.
The shame had been a cold companion, but it was nothing compared to this. This was the absolute zero of loss.
"...their sacrifice, etched into the foundation of our safe city…" the priest continued.
Safe. The word was ash in Arlan's mouth. A city safe because two people who loved him were now atoms scattered across a dimensional threshold.
The ceremony ended. People in black drifted forward, offering hands and hollow phrases that shattered against the armor of his silence. He nodded, his jaw clenched so tight it ached. He saw the looks, pity now layered over the faded disappointment. Poor Arlan. No power, and now no parents. What will become of him?
His uncle, Kaelen, a bear of a man with his brother's eyes but none of his light, placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. "The house is yours. The pension… it's substantial. You and Elara will want for nothing." The words were practical, a man trying to build a dam against a flood of grief with bricks of logistics.
"I want them back," Arlan said, his voice a rough scrape of sound, his first words of the day.
Kaelen's hand tightened, then fell away. There was no answer to that. No power in any Order could reverse entropy, could stitch a soul back from the void.
That night, in the too-quiet, too-big house, Arlan stood in his father's study. Awards lined the walls. A hologram on the desk cycled through family pics: a vacation to the floating islands of Azure, Elara's tenth birthday, Arlan as a hopeful twelve-year-old standing on the Awakening dais. The future had been so bright, so certain.
He picked up a simple, brushed steel paperweight from his father's desk. It was cool and heavy in his hand. His father had used it to hold down blueprints of rift stabilization arrays. A tool for a protector.
The anger came then, not as a fire, but as a collapse. A gravitational pull from the void inside him. It wasn't fair. It was so violently, universe-shatteringly unfair. He was powerless, and the powerful were gone. The world was a chaotic, cruel machine that chewed up good people and asked for more.
He hurled the paperweight at the wall. It didn't clatter. With a sound like a sigh, it vanished halfway across the room, leaving only a brief, silent distortion in the air before the wall plaster cracked where it should have hit.
Arlan stared, his breath catching. A flicker. A microscopic, involuntary spatial warp. Born not from disciplined practice, but from a black hole of grief and rage.
For the first time in four years, his inner ocean had rippled. And it had felt like drowning.
He sank to his knees amidst the relics of a hero, the cold from the funeral seeping into his bones, becoming a part of him. The rain tapped against the window, a relentless code. In the darkness of the room, for a fleeting second, the shadows in the corner seemed to deepen, to pulse in time with the ragged beating of his heart. Then it was just a trick of the light.
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