The sky above the city of Orr'Kai was a perfect lie—polished obsidian swirling with false stars, projected by divine systems to mimic a living cosmos. The real sky had been sealed away generations ago, archived beneath laws no mortal dared touch.
But tonight, something cracked.
A single point of failure. A line of forbidden code unraveling across the sky like a wound. The Archivists, cloaked in silver and scripture, rushed to contain it, murmuring counter-protocols and prayers in the tongue of the Old Scribes.
He had already fallen through.
Al'Zaein Nullom Aetheris landed in silence.
No comet's blaze. No divine herald. No system alert.
Just a breath of wind that smelled like ash and ending
He stood at the edge of the city, cloaked in void-thread and dust. The world around him recoiled. He felt it in the stones, in the air, in the quiet dissonance of a reality trying to reject him. Code lines around his presence flickered. Sigils dulled. The city's divine lattice blinked—momentarily unsure of its own shape.
"Identify," barked a Sentinel Golem, its voice cold and crystalline. "Present fate string."
Al'Zaein looked up.
There was no fear in his eyes. No confusion. Only stillness.
"I have none."
The golem hesitated. That was not a valid input. It repeated, more forcefully, "Present. Fate. String."
"I have no string," he said again. "I was severed."
And with that word—severed—every system in Orr'Kai trembled
High above, in the Grand Temple of Ascendants, bells rang in silence. A monk's blood turned black. An oracle vomited stars. And deep within the Codex, in the forbidden columns where redacted names were never meant to exist…
A new line began to burn itself into the page.
"He is not bound."
"He is not written."
"He is the flaw in the grand design."