The sky over the Fractured Veil was a war of color and sound. Electric mauves and emerald streaks fought across the clouds as thunder rippled—not in booms but in glitches, like reality buffering. Every few seconds, a bird—or what used to be a bird—flickered into a fish mid-air, splashed through a patch of sky that behaved like water, and then vanished in a puff of upside-down snow. The veil was bleeding unreality into itself.
Luma stared at it, awestruck and mildly terrified.
"Okay," she said, adjusting her gauntlet. "That sky is either a portal to another dimension… or reality just gave up and went full abstract painting."
Ion, hood flapping wildly in the distorted wind, grunted. "If we're lucky, it's just quantum foam turbulence. If we're unlucky, it's the Entropy Engine amplifying probability fields at a regional scale."
"Oh good," Luma said dryly. "For a second I was worried."
Behind them, the Resistance team was mobilizing. Toma, the older of the two, barked out orders in short bursts of clicks and hand gestures. Acoustic pulses bounced between trees like jungle drums. Beside him, his daughter—Toma the Younger—double-checked the resonance compass, a device that whirred in different frequencies depending on the stability of reality.
"You sure that thing isn't just picking up static?" Luma asked.
Toma the Younger looked up. "If this was static, we'd be inside out by now."
Luma blinked. "Helpful."
They marched. Or tried to.
Every few meters, gravity did something dramatic: pull sideways, let go entirely, or turn into that slow-motion dream feeling where your legs work but the world forgets how to move.
They used walking sticks with motion stabilizers, calibrated through Ion's modified tuning forks. Luma named hers Stabby, since it occasionally sparked and zapped her when reality fluctuated too hard. "That's just its way of saying hello," Ion said helpfully.
As they approached the Rift Gate—the pulsing, doorway-shaped distortion up ahead—their surroundings morphed. Trees twisted into corkscrews, their leaves shimmering like scales. One tree split into two mid-sentence and started arguing with itself in Morse code.
"This place needs therapy," Luma muttered.
"Entropy has no pattern. No code. It doesn't destroy by force—it unravels the agreement that things should stay put," Ion said.
"Sounds like a bad roommate."
"Exactly."
They reached the first checkpoint: a stone outcropping where the Riftwalkers had marked the last known stable coordinates. From here, things got strange.
The rocks were warm. Not sun-warmed. Emotionally warm. Like hugging a memory.
Toma the Elder touched the rock and flinched. "It's remembering something."
Ion nodded. "Residual memory fields. The Entropy Engine is breaking down the linearity of time here."
"Cool, cool," Luma said, voice tightening. "Time isn't real. Got it."
"You alright?" Toma the Younger asked her gently.
"Nope," Luma answered brightly, eyes wide. "But let's go."
The march resumed. This time, in near silence.
Ahead, the Rift Gate loomed—a jagged oval of light pulsing between frequencies. It rippled with a sound that wasn't quite music and wasn't quite static. It sounded like forgotten lullabies and emergency sirens having an argument.
Leo's courier device, strapped to Luma's belt, buzzed.
LEO: "We've got less than two hours before the engine enters overload mode. If you're going in, do it fast. Also, bring back snacks."
Luma snorted. "He wants snacks."
Ion cracked the faintest smile. "In case we die, at least he dies fed."
"Priorities."
The Rift Gate's perimeter surged with chaotic frequencies. Luma reached into her satchel and pulled out the modified resonance compass. Ion had recalibrated it to detect directional coherence—basically, which way reality was still pretending to function.
The needle spun wildly, then slowed… and pointed forward.
"This is it," she said.
Toma nodded solemnly. "Once you step through, we can't follow."
Luma looked at Ion. "Ready?"
He looked up at the sky, where lightning flickered backwards.
"Not even slightly," he replied.
And they stepped through.
The transition was like being pulled through liquid glass. One moment, the world was jagged noise. The next, it was silent.
The space inside the Rift was dim, violet, and vast. An impossible canyon stretched before them—floating islands spun lazily in anti-gravity. Twisted machinery grew out of stone like roots. Metal cables snaked from the sky into the ground with no visible source.
And in the center: The Entropy Engine.
It pulsed like a giant heart—each beat shifting the color of the air. Crystalline panels surrounded it, rotating on invisible axes, each one humming with unreadable script. It wasn't just a machine. It was a living equation trying to rewrite reality in real-time.
Luma whispered, "That's not science. That's a mad god with a calculator."
Ion scanned it. "It's processing fluctuations in entropy and amplifying them. But it's also consuming something. Energy. Time. Memory—"
He froze.
"Luma," he said. "It's feeding off you."
"What?!"
"Your gauntlet. Your imprint. The Spire's data signature is compatible with the Engine. It's accelerating because it recognizes you."
Luma backed up. "You mean I've been a living key this whole time?!"
Ion grimaced. "Possibly a failsafe. Possibly a trigger."
"Awesome. Fantastic. I love being an unintentional doomsday switch."
Movement.
A shadow dropped from the ceiling like a whisper. Saren.
He landed silently, armor flickering.
Luma reached for her weapon—but Saren raised a hand. "Don't. I didn't come to fight."
Ion frowned. "Then why did you come?"
Saren's voice was tired. "To choose."
He looked at the Engine, then back at them. "I saw Kaelen once. Years ago. He told me entropy wasn't death—it was possibility. But this…" He gestured to the Engine. "This is distortion. Not freedom. Not order. Not even chaos. Just noise."
Luma hesitated. "Then help us stop it."
Saren looked at his hands. Trembled. Then nodded.
"Alright."
Ion passed him a field stabilizer. Saren accepted it without a word.
Together, they approached the Engine. Ion instructed Luma to disrupt the three rotating panels using her gauntlet's polarity, while Saren rerouted the circuit's feedback loops. Ion climbed up to manually disengage the central node.
The storm around them grew louder—time warping, echoes of future screams and past laughter reverberating around them.
Luma slammed her gauntlet into the first panel—sparks flew. Her fingers sizzled but she forced it.
Second panel: it shrieked like a dying animal, then shattered into pure light.
Third—resisted.
Saren leapt from a floating ledge and kicked it mid-spin, breaking the rhythm.
Ion screamed from above, "NOW!"
Luma slammed the gauntlet into the core node.
A pulse erupted. White-hot. A soundless detonation.
And then—silence.
The storm ceased. Colors calmed. Gravity… returned.
The canyon began to collapse—not destructively, but like a sigh of relief. The twisted terrain reshaped into coherent stone. Trees grew where cables had hung. The Rift was healing.
Saren lay crumpled nearby, gauntlet smoking.
Luma rushed over. "Hey. Hey! Stay with me."
He looked at her, bleeding from his side.
"I made my choice," he rasped. "Tell Leo… he was right about me."
And then, mercifully, he passed out—but breathing.
Ion staggered over, bruised and soot-streaked. "It's done. We bought the world time."
Luma laughed. Not from joy—from sheer adrenaline. "We always do."
As they emerged back through the stabilizing Rift Gate, the Resistance cheered.
Toma the Younger ran to them. "The storm—it stopped! The compass stabilized!"
Luma collapsed onto a rock, grinning like a lunatic. "Yup. Just had to punch reality in the face."
Ion sat beside her. "And rewire entropy."
"Same thing."
Above them, the skies cleared. No more glitch-birds. No more time-loops. Just wind, soft and normal.
But the road ahead was still long.
The Entropy Engine was only part of the mystery.
And somewhere out there… the Masters of Entropy were watching.
Waiting.
Plotting their next move.