The Breaking Point
1316 Words
The voice didn’t whisper this time.
It roared.
Nyra dropped to her knees in the center of the war room, clutching her head as the Fold’s echo surged through her mind like molten lightning. Her eyes flickered—pupils dilating, iris shifting color, until for a second, they glowed white-gold.
Zaire was first to her side.
“Nyra—look at me!” he shouted, grabbing her shoulders as her whole body began to tremble.
Keal pushed through the others, unsheathing his blade as a precaution. Aeryn, meanwhile, activated a rune flare from her palm, scanning Nyra’s aether signature.
“She’s being anchored,” Aeryn said, voice tight with alarm. “Not possessed—tethered.”
Seraphina stepped forward, scroll in hand. “The Fold’s choosing her as its speaker. Just like it chose Verion.”
“She’s not ready,” Zaire snapped. “You know that!”
“No one ever is,” Seraphina said flatly.
Nyra suddenly went still. Her breathing slowed. Her hands dropped to the floor.
And in a voice that was hers—and not hers—she spoke:
“The shape has chosen the vessel.
The memory will burn.
One must be unmade for the gate to close.”
Wind screamed through the windows. The stones of the stronghold walls began to vibrate. Cracks formed in the etherstone pillars. The Fold was here now—not just pressing in from the edges of the world, but pushing through.
Keal barked, “Aeryn, seal the room—now!”
She slammed her hand against the wall rune, flooding the chamber with a temporary null-field. It distorted light and sound, enclosing them in a time-stretched bubble. A soft hum rose—just enough to silence the Fold’s scream for now.
Nyra collapsed again.
Zaire caught her.
“She's burning up,” he said. “It’s like her blood’s reacting to it.”
“She carries Verion’s resonance,” Aeryn murmured. “That seal in the vault? He didn’t just lock it with magic. He locked it with bloodline memory. She’s the key… and the door.”
Nyra blinked, slowly returning to herself.
“I saw everything,” she whispered. “Every version. Every death. Every world.”
“And?” Keal asked.
Her voice shook. “In all of them… someone close to me dies. Every time I choose truth.”
Later, in the High Garden, the family met under the shadow of the Ether Tree—a crystal-veined relic that had survived the Collapse and stood now as both warning and witness.
Aeryn laid out the map of the Fold’s activity.
“It’s moving inward. The closer it gets to the stronghold, the more stable its form becomes. We’re dealing with a force that learns every time we resist it.”
Seraphina looked at Nyra, still pale, still distant.
“What else did it show you?”
Nyra stared at the tree bark. “It showed me your death.”
That silenced them.
Nyra continued, quiet but resolute. “In most timelines, you fall before me. It’s how I’m forced to ascend—how I’m broken open. It needs you to die, so it can use my grief to rewrite me.”
Keal clenched his jaw. “And if we defy that loop?”
Aeryn answered grimly. “It simply finds another way.”
Lima stepped forward. “Then maybe it’s time to do what it doesn’t expect.”
“Which is?” Zaire asked.
She drew her sword. “Attack it.”
The Fold’s epicenter had shifted east—hovering above the ruins of the Old Observatory, now cracked and suspended in anti-gravitational rings. From within, voices echoed. Some familiar. Some not.
Zaire, Nyra, Aeryn, and Lima approached under the cloak of night.
The landscape distorted as they neared: trees reversed direction, moonlight curved in impossible arcs, time lapsed in strange fits. They moved forward, yet the stars stayed still.
A jagged breach hovered ahead—like a rip in silk, ten feet above the ruined steps of the Observatory.
Lima signaled: wait.
Zaire leaned close. “What now?”
Aeryn activated a device on her belt: a resonance spike tuned to Nyra’s blood. “We draw it to the physical. Force it to manifest.”
“And then what?” Nyra asked.
“Then we make it bleed.”
The moment the spike activated, the world lurched.
All four of them dropped to their knees as gravity failed for a heartbeat.
Then a figure appeared in the breach.
Not a shadow. Not a voice.
A person.
Verion.
Or at least—a version of him. His body half-translucent, face serene, his mouth opening to speak…
…But instead, the voice that came out was not his:
“You seek a war you cannot win.
You think choice is salvation.
It is the prison.”
The real Verion’s memories flickered around the being like moths circling a flame. Images of the vault. Of the throne. Of Nyra as a child.
Zaire growled. “That’s not him.”
“No,” Nyra said. “But it used him. Just like it wants to use me.”
Lima hurled her blade straight at its chest.
The blade passed through harmlessly—but not without effect. The projection twitched, and one of the images broke—an image of Verion holding baby Nyra in a memory no one had ever seen.
“You hurt it,” Aeryn said. “It’s built from memory threads. Disrupt enough—”
Nyra was already moving.
She drew her dagger—a relic Verion had gifted her when she was thirteen—and slashed at the image.
Pain exploded in her mind. The being screamed. Its face shattered—revealing no flesh beneath, only more mirrors.
“The fire is lit.
The dream awakens.
The vessel opens.”
A shockwave hurled them all back.
They regrouped at dawn.
Ava had arrived in the night with a dozen elite guards, helping to reinforce the stronghold. Word had spread—other nations were experiencing strange fluctuations. The Fold was not limited to them anymore.
In the war room, Keal stood before the full council.
“We can’t treat this like a spiritual threat anymore. It’s tactical. It studies us. Tracks how we adapt. Then tests new variables.”
Aeryn spoke next. “And the only constant it wants—across every outcome—is Nyra. Her blood. Her choices.”
Zaire’s expression darkened. “So what do we do? Lock her in a cell?”
“We empower her,” Seraphina said.
Silence.
Seraphina laid the scroll on the table.
Verion’s final spell sequence.
“Project Requiem wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint.”
Keal frowned. “For what?”
“For unmaking a false god.”
That night, Nyra stood beneath the Ether Tree once more.
Zaire joined her. This time, he didn’t speak.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I am too,” he admitted.
“Every version of me that chooses power… loses you.”
Zaire looked at her. “Then maybe this version doesn’t.”
She looked at him for a long time. And nodded.
They didn’t kiss. They didn’t need to.
They just stood together. Silent. Steady.
Waiting for the Fold to knock again.
It didn’t knock.
It tore through the sky.
Above the stronghold, the stars folded inward—like a vortex was forming in the night.
People screamed. Soldiers raced to posts. Aether cannons were activated. Shield walls flickered.
Nyra turned to the others.
“It’s not waiting anymore.”
Seraphina drew her blade. “Then neither are we.”
And somewhere, in a world not quite born, a hand turned a page in a book that hadn’t been written yet.
And across it, in gold:
Chapter 1: The Queen Who Remembered Too Much.
- Writer
