The Riftlands stretched before Rose like a jagged wound in the fabric of the world.
A place where the earth cracked open, and the sky bled violet.
Here, time bent. Memory fractured. Even sound moved strangely—too slow, too sharp, sometimes echoing before it was spoken. The air shimmered faintly, as if trapped between breaths. This land had once belonged to something divine, something terrible. Now, it was neither. Just broken. And waiting.
Rose had known its name—this land of lost fragments—but seeing it was different.
The hills here bore scars, not from war, but from unmaking. Great fissures crisscrossed the ground like veins of absence. Mountains slouched toward the horizon, hollowed and unnatural, as though something had eaten their hearts from the inside out. A river of glass threa
