The doors groaned open like they had not been touched in centuries. Outside was not the dead wasteland Mae expected. It was worse. The ground twisted in ways the eye rejected. Horizon lines bent wrong. Stone spires floated, some sideways, some inverted. Clouds spun in spirals, not across the sky but around something unseen.
The sky itself was cracked, thin veins of pale light slicing through black clouds like shattered glass half-mended. It was wrong. Not broken like ruins. Not destroyed like wastelands.
Warped. Bent. Twisted. Reality itself undone. Mae shivered. Skin prickling. Every nerve screaming: You shouldn’t be here. Nothing should. This is the fracture. Riven stepped out first, boots crunching against ground that looked like crystal shards pretending to be grass. Mae followed, ca
