The Fracture Awakens
1241 Words
The sky split open over the eastern cliffs.
Not metaphorically. Not magically.
Physically.
Where once there was open sky and morning light, there now hovered a bleeding seam of black-violet energy—pulsing, twitching, dripping tendrils of Fold-light into the sea below. It hummed in unnatural frequencies. Time around it rippled. Birds froze mid-flight. Aether currents stalled.
Aeryn stared up from the stronghold ramparts, one hand raised toward the anomaly. Her skin prickled with pre-activation static.
“This isn’t a breach,” she whispered. “It’s a birth canal.”
Zaire stood beside her, pale, silent.
“You think it’s Nyra?” he asked.
Aeryn shook her head slowly. “No. It’s what wants to come through her.”
In the containment chamber, the silence cracked.
Nyra hovered midair, locked in the memory-stillness field that Keal had forged with Seraphina’s help. Her eyes were closed. Her limbs still. But the Fold was no longer waiting.
It pushed.
And reality gave way like rotted wood.
The field sparked, shimmered, and collapsed in a burst of dull light. A single wave of mirrorlight burst outward—shattering every containment glyph, every null-rune.
And Nyra… opened her eyes.
They were no longer just eyes.
They were windows.
Seraphina felt it the moment it happened. In the old war chapel, where she had been rereading Verion’s sealed documents, her vision blurred. Her heartbeat faltered. The crystal lamps shattered.
And then the memories came back.
Not her own.
Verion’s.
The night he came to her, bloody, broken, barely holding himself together.
He had told her of the Fold’s first whisper. Its promise of rewriting fate. Of restoring what Aldric’s war had broken. And the cost.
Memory.
Truth.
Self.
And then he gave her the seed.
A glass orb. Simple. Cracked. Alive.
“If she fails,” he had said. “If she becomes what I couldn’t resist… use this. But only then.”
The orb now pulsed in her palm again.
“Requiem’s Edge,” she whispered. “A weapon forged from guilt.”
Keal sprinted through the ruined east wing.
He’d felt it too—the moment Nyra's seal collapsed. Every part of him screamed to get to her.
The corridors were already warping—walls bending subtly, doors breathing in and out like lungs. The Fold was no longer knocking.
It had stepped through.
He reached the shattered containment chamber just as Nyra was rising from the rubble.
She wasn’t floating.
She was ascending.
Wreathed in flickering mirrorlight, shadows whispering around her, half of her body phasing slightly—unstable, like it couldn’t decide which dimension it belonged to.
But her eyes—still Nyra’s.
Still fighting.
“Father,” she said, voice echoing as though through a canyon of time.
“I’m here,” he said, sword at his side, but not raised.
“I… I didn’t mean to break it,” she said, trembling. “It just happened.”
“I know,” Keal whispered. “I know.”
Her hands flexed. Reality bent.
“I can’t hold it much longer.”
Zaire stood at the war table, breathing hard. Lima and Aeryn flanked him. Ava was at the tower window, staring at the seam in the sky.
“We waited too long,” Ava said.
“We didn’t have another option,” Aeryn snapped.
Zaire slammed his fist on the table. “We do now. We always did.”
Lima looked at him sharply. “Don’t say it.”
Zaire’s jaw tightened. “The Fold isn’t just anchored to Nyra. It’s anchored to the version of her it wants. And I’ve seen that version. I remember her.”
Aeryn turned. “What are you saying?”
Zaire met their eyes.
“I know how to break its hold. But it means breaking me.”
In the ruins of the containment chamber, Nyra convulsed.
Not in pain—but in tension.
The Fold wasn’t fully in control. But it was close. Every second she resisted, it pushed back harder. Her own memories flickered in front of her eyes like fragments:
Her first time holding Aeryn’s blade.
Zaire’s laugh during winter training.
Keal, lifting her onto his shoulders.
Verion’s final message.
And behind them, always behind them—the voice.
“You are almost ready.”
“The world needs clarity.”
“Let me remake you.”
She screamed and fell to her knees, hands on her head.
Keal grabbed her, shaking her. “You’re not done! Don’t let it overwrite you!”
“I’m trying!”
Then Seraphina arrived.
She held the glass orb aloft—Requiem’s Edge—and the moment it entered the room, the Fold’s whisper stopped.
Silence.
Nyra looked up, eyes wide.
“What is that?”
Seraphina didn’t speak.
Keal turned, stunned. “You said you destroyed it.”
“I lied.”
“You said—”
“I lied,” she repeated, voice flat. “Because if you knew it still existed, you would’ve used it too early. And killed her.”
Zaire entered the chamber.
“I’m not letting her die,” he said.
Seraphina raised the orb. “This doesn’t kill her. It resets her to before the Fold marked her. She’ll lose everything after age twelve.”
Nyra’s breath caught. “That’s… that’s when I met Zaire.”
Her voice cracked. “When I found Aeryn. Learned my blade. First spell.”
Keal stepped forward. “You’re asking her to lose her entire life.”
Seraphina nodded. “Or we lose the world.”
Silence reigned.
Then Zaire stepped forward.
“There’s another way,” he said. “But you won’t like it.”
Nyra looked at him.
Zaire pulled from his chest a blade. Not physical. A memory-shard.
“This was given to me in the Fold. I never knew what it was until now.”
He looked at Nyra.
“It lets one tether another’s soul. If I use it… I can hold your identity in me. You’ll lose access to it, but it won’t be erased. It’ll just be… hidden. I’ll be your anchor.”
Keal’s eyes widened. “You’d bind your soul to hers.”
Zaire nodded. “If she breaks, I break.”
Aeryn stepped forward. “That’s suicide.”
“No,” Nyra whispered. “That’s love.”
Zaire smiled faintly. “Finally got you to say it.”
They stood in a circle.
Keal. Seraphina. Aeryn. Lima. Ava.
And in the center—Zaire and Nyra, hand in hand, the memory-blade hovering between them.
“You don’t have to do this,” Keal said.
“I know,” Zaire said. “But I will.”
The ritual began.
The blade burned blue, then red, then black.
It sank into Nyra’s chest.
She gasped.
It reappeared in Zaire’s.
He groaned—pain unlike anything. His spine arched. Light spilled from his eyes. His hands burned.
And then it was done.
Nyra collapsed. But when Keal caught her—
Her aura was still.
The Fold had stopped pushing.
Because now it had two souls to reckon with.
Above, in the sky, the seam closed.
Not completely.
But enough.
For now.
In the distance, the Fold shrieked.
Its voice carried on the wind, bitter and broken.
“They bound what must break.
But the seal is flawed.
The fracture remains.
And soon… the storm will come not to whisper—
But to devour.”
- Writer
