The Fork was breaking apart.
Everywhere Kaito looked, the sky was splitting open. Huge black cracks stretched across the heavens like veins, and from them poured a pale, flowing light. It didn't feel warm or gentle. Instead, it stung the eyes, sharp and painful, as if looking at an exposed nerve. Staring at it for too long made Kaito's vision ache.
The towers that once stood tall and steady began to bend. Their spires stretched and twisted, pulled by invisible forces, as though some giant hand was tugging them out of shape. It was the sound that unsettled him most—their very foundations groaning, a grinding noise like stone being chewed between teeth.
On the ground, shadows spread where they shouldn't have been. They were too dark, too sharp, as if carved into the world itself. They shifted and crawled across the earth even when nothing was moving to cast them.
And beneath everything, deep under the world itself, Kaito felt it—the beat of something vast.
A heartbeat.
