Page 4

Lucien, finally, speaks. “You’ve been through one before.”
Elias tips his head back, his lashes low. “Haven’t we all?”
Lucien doesn’t correct him. He just steps forward, closer to the Rift’s edge, and the very air around him bends in response, drawn to him like ink bleeding into water. His presence makes the space hum with something unspoken, something waiting.
Something watching.
I exhale, adjusting my grip on my satchel. “So. How bad is this going to be?”
Elias lets out a short, amused breath. “Scale of one to catastrophic?”
I arch a brow at him. “Let’s start with one.”
He grins. “Then we have nowhere to go but up.”
Lucien lifts his hand, pressing his palm toward the Rift’s edge, his fingers barely grazing the swirling, shifting space where reality ends and something else begins.
It flickers, the color shifting between black and indigo, pulsing like a heartbeat. A ripple spreads outward, distorting the world around it, and I swear I hear something whispering just beyond the threshold.
Not words.
Not even voices.
Just sound.
A beckoning.
Lucien’s voice is quiet but firm. “Stay close.”
Then, without hesitation, he steps through, and the Rift swallows him whole.
Elias grins at me. “Well. No turning back now, little star.”
And then he follows, disappearing into the void. I hesitate only for a second, inhaling, steadying my pulse. Then I step forward.
The moment I step through the Rift, the world ceases to exist. Not in a violent, cataclysmic way. Not in a rush of wind or a sharp pull through space. No, it’s worse than that. It’s absence.
I don’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I don’t hear the sound of my breath. My body isn’t mine, it’s nothing, and yet, I am aware.
It’s like stepping into a space that was never meant to be touched by something as fragile as flesh. The void doesn’t pull me in, it releases me, the way a body expels a foreign object. I feel the moment I stop existing in the place I was before, and start existing here.
Wherever here is.
Shapes flicker in the darkness, things that aren’t fully formed, caught between being seen and being imagined. Shadows without a source. Glimpses of landscapes that vanish the moment I try to focus on them.
The Rift isn’t a place. It’s between places. A wound where reality fails to hold itself together. A passage through something that should never be traveled.
And inside it, I am nothing.
I don’t have lungs, but I feel the ache of breathlessness. I don’t have skin, but there’s a sensation of touch, a thousand needlepoints dragging over me, whisper-thin claws tracing down my spine. My body flickers at the edges, dissolving and reforming with each step, my limbs no longer moving in the way they should. I walk forward, or at least, I think I do, but there is no direction, no time, no sensation beyond the slow, creeping wrongness that wraps around my bones like smoke.
And then, the bond snaps back into place. Not violently. Not the way it was before. But I feel it. A thread pulled taut, frayed at the edges, distant but unmistakable.
Silas.
Riven.
They are there. Alive. Somewhere on the other side of this.