The night after the sky cracked open was quieter than it should've been.
No birdsong. No insect hum. Not even Reeko's customary pre-bedtime musical whimpering. Just the wind, and even that seemed hesitant—like the world was holding its breath.
Mira stood at the edge of their makeshift camp, eyes locked on the sky where the violet crack had briefly marred the stars. Though it had faded, she couldn't forget its shape—like a claw mark across the heavens.
"Just when I thought things might start making sense," she muttered.
The silver Die pulsed faintly in her satchel, as if acknowledging the moment. She pulled them out and ran her fingers across their polished surfaces. Since the shard, they felt different. Heavier, yes, but also… more responsive. As though they were listening.
She didn't roll them. Not yet. This wasn't the time for action.
Not until she had answers.
Behind her, Pipla was snoring softly into a nest of cloaks, clutching her warhammer like a teddy bear. Reeko had fallen asleep with a quill still behind one ear, an unfinished ballad about "The Lovely Lady of Lethal Luck" lying half-written on a scroll across his chest.
Jory, naturally, was nowhere to be seen—but his boots were hanging from a branch, which usually meant he was nearby. Possibly upside down.
Mira let out a sigh and sat down, curling her legs under her and staring up at the night sky. The stars here were unfamiliar. Different constellations. Some twinkled green. One pulsed like a heartbeat.
And yet, the longer she looked, the more she began to imagine the old stars—home stars—just out of reach. It reminded her of Eli. Her husband. Her real world. The scent of morning toast. The flicker of the kettle. The stupid dance he did when trying to avoid doing laundry.
He would've loved this. Or hated it. Or both. Probably both.
She swallowed hard.
"Alright, brain," she whispered. "Get it together. One existential crisis at a time."
A rustle to her left.
She turned quickly, fingers instinctively wrapping around the Die. But it was just Jory, emerging from the bushes like a theatrical ghost.
"Trouble brews in root and ash," he said, tossing a pebble into the fire. "The air tastes of change."
"Does it?" Mira asked. "I thought that was Pipla's roasted turnip."
Jory ignored the joke. "Something stirs beneath the Tower. A thread pulled too far."
She frowned. "Beneath Sunspike Tower?"
He nodded, then looked up. "And above."
They both turned their eyes back to the heavens.
Another flicker. Just for a moment. Like someone trying to peek through a keyhole in the cosmos.
Mira stood. "Wake the others. We're not waiting for answers to come to us anymore."
They returned to Sunspike Tower by dawn. The living spire greeted them with the same surreal shifting walls and whispered riddles as before, but now the structure felt… unsettled.
Even the flame-lilies in the garden flickered inconsistently.
Therian the Arc-Seer stood at the base of the Tower, barefoot as ever, staring at a swirl of runes that circled one open palm. His violet eyebrows twitched slightly as they approached.
"You felt it," he said without turning.
Mira nodded. "You mean the bit where reality cracked open like an Easter egg?"
Therian's eyes narrowed. "The veil is thinner now. Velcrath's influence grows bolder. The shard has awakened more than just your bond."
She glanced down at her palm where the shard now hung in a leather pouch. It radiated a faint hum, warm and insistent.
"I thought this was supposed to help," she said. "Why does it feel like we're making things worse?"
"Because healing wounds can sometimes cause pain," Therian replied. "A broken world resists repair. Especially when the one doing the breaking has claws the size of prophecy."
Pipla stepped forward, slamming the head of her hammer into the ground. "If this Velcrath wants a fight, I say we go knock on his door."
Reeko nodded. "Preferably with a song of encouragement and a tactical plan that involves very little stabbing of me personally."
Jory simply whispered, "The dark has teeth."
Mira turned to Therian. "We need to know where he is. What he wants. Why me."
Therian gave a small nod and beckoned them into the Tower.
As always, the inside defied physics. They walked up a spiral staircase that turned into a ramp, which turned into a hallway that smelled faintly of burnt almonds. At last, they arrived in a chamber shaped like a hollowed-out crystal, with images flickering across the walls like memories trapped in ice.
Therian raised his hands. The room darkened, and a shape formed in the center—tall, cloaked, with violet flames dancing in its chest.
"Velcrath," he intoned. "Once a guardian of fates, now a devourer of threads. He seeks not to rewrite the world—but to unravel it entirely."
Images flickered across the crystal walls: threads snapping, cities collapsing into voids, stars blinking out like candles in the wind.
"His power was bound long ago by the first Fatebinder," Therian continued. "Split into seven soul shards. The one you hold was the first."
"Let me guess," Mira said. "We need to find the rest?"
"Yes. And no. Velcrath is already searching. He has… agents. Echoes of himself, scattered through the world. You saw one at the rift. That was merely a sliver."
Pipla cracked her knuckles. "Then we find these agents and break them into slivers."
Therian's expression was grim. "You'll need more than brute force. The next shard lies hidden beneath the city of Caldrith Spire—buried in a vault sealed by riddles and blood."
Jory hissed softly. "Old blood. Locked blood."
Mira nodded. "Then that's where we go next."
But even as she said it, she felt the weight of the Die shift in her satchel.
The world was tilting again.
The Vault Beneath Caldrith
Caldrith Spire was visible for hours before they reached it—a twisting city of dark towers and gleaming steel that rose from the plains like the fingers of a buried god reaching for the sky.
"Cheerful place," Mira muttered, gazing at the skyline through a haze of heat and low cloud. "Looks like someone tried to build a city out of guilt and pointy bits."
"It's a monument," Reeko said, straining to sound grand as they trudged along a dusty road. "A place built on oaths and old magic. Its foundations are older than the First Rhyme."
"Pretty sure that's the ballad you wrote about laundry, mate," Pipla said, elbowing him.
"No," he said with mock indignation. "That was The Second Rhyme. The First Rhyme was about doom."
Jory remained uncharacteristically quiet, which meant he was either very worried or thinking about something wildly unrelated like the flavor of shadows. Mira suspected the former.
Therian had given them little beyond a destination and a cryptic warning: "Trust not the doors, nor those who guard them. Only the Die know the true path."
They reached the city gates by dusk. The walls of Caldrith Spire were not stone, but obsidian streaked with veins of glowing quartz. The entrance was guarded by two massive statues of eyeless watchers, arms crossed, mouths open in eternal silent scream.
And the guards? Less terrifying. Mostly bored teenagers in black armor embroidered with purple thread.
"Halt," said one with a sigh. "Declare your—hang on. Are you the Die-lady?"
Mira blinked. "I… guess?"
The guards exchanged nervous glances.
"Right. Uh. You'll want to speak to the Archivist. She said you'd be coming."
Mira raised an eyebrow. "Did she now?"
"Yeah. Said fate was itchy this week."
They were escorted through towering archways and shadowed boulevards, past ancient statues wrapped in chains of ivy, through plazas shaped like clock faces, and into the heart of the city: the Librarium Undone.
It wasn't a library in the traditional sense. It was a library if the shelves were alive, and the books occasionally muttered criticisms about your choice of footwear.
The Archivist was waiting on a throne made of open tomes.
She was impossibly old, with hair like cobwebs and eyes like candle flames, Cloaked in layered robes that shimmered like ink-stained parchment, the Archivist seemed less a person and more a sentient constellation of memory. Their face was obscured by a smooth porcelain mask etched with flowing script in a forgotten language—letters that shifted subtly when you weren't looking. Long fingers, jointed too many times for comfort, hovered in perpetual motion over phantom tomes. A quiet hum surrounded them, like the turning of pages no one else could hear.
"Mira Wrenlow," she said, voice brittle but powerful. "Bearer of the Die. Harbinger of Mess."
"I prefer 'reluctant fate-wrangler,'" Mira replied.
The Archivist gestured, and the books beneath her throne shifted. The floor opened, revealing a spiral staircase descending into darkness.
"The vault lies below," she said. "It hasn't been opened in five hundred years. Not since the last thread was cut."
Mira stepped toward it. "And you're just… letting me in?"
"Of course not," said the Archivist. "There is a test."
Of course there was.
The descent was cold. The air grew thick, heavy with old spells and regrets. Runes glowed faintly along the stairwell, whispering half-formed thoughts in languages Mira didn't know but almost understood.
At the base of the stairs was a circular door carved with symbols—moons, spirals, and a pair of hands holding a thread.
Above the door: THE THREADS MUST NEVER TANGLE
"Well," said Reeko, squinting at it. "That's not ominous at all."
As they approached, the door pulsed, and a voice echoed from the stone:
"Roll to remember."
Mira reached for the Die. The moment her fingers touched them, everything stopped.
The world froze. Air ceased to move. Time itself folded.
She stood in a space of silver mist and starlight, alone except for the Die floating before her.
She whispered, "I request a roll."
The Die spun in midair and dropped onto a surface that wasn't there.
18
The mist parted. Mira gasped.
Before her, a memory—vivid, burning, alive.
Her younger self, on her first date with Eli. He'd spilled wine across the table and tried to hide it with a napkin and a terrible pun. She'd laughed so hard she snorted, and he'd fallen in love with the sound.
The mist swirled again, and she was back before the door.
The symbols shimmered and rearranged. The door unlocked.
"Well," she said breathlessly. "That's new."
Jory touched her arm. "The Die show what you need, not what you want."
Mira nodded, blinking away the ache in her chest. "Let's keep going."
The vault beyond was vast—walls etched with winding lines of fate, as though reality itself had been diagrammed in gold. At the center, hovering above a pedestal: another shard.
This one was deep red. Like the last heartbeat of a dying star.
It pulsed once—and the room shuddered.
Something stirred in the darkness.
"Oh no," said Reeko. "I've read about this. We're about to be tested.
The shadows coalesced into a shape—human, almost. A man cloaked in rags of velvet and bone, with eyes like black suns and fingers made of thread.
"You seek the shard," the figure said. "Then show me your path."
Jory hissed. Pipla raised her hammer.
But Mira stepped forward.
"I'll roll," she said.
The world stopped.
The Die floated.
She whispered, "I request a roll."
6
The Die dropped with a clatter.
The cloaked figure laughed.
And then the room changed.
They were in London. Or some twisted version of it. The bank was on fire. Customers screamed. Eli stood outside the doors, looking right at her—but didn't see her.
She ran toward him and Shouted.
Nothing.
He was frozen.
The city melted around her like wax.
The cloaked figure appeared beside her. "Fear," it said. "Failure. Weakness."
She turned to him, heart racing. "This isn't real."
"It is if you let it be."
The Die pulsed in her pocket. Not floating. Just… warm.
She reached for them again.
"I request a reroll," she whispered.
The world shifted
19
Suddenly, she was in the same place—but she moved. The fire died. Eli turned, saw her, smiled And then the illusion cracked.
She was back in the vault.
The cloaked figure staggered. Its threads unraveled.
"You see the path clearly," it said. "Take the shard."
It vanished in a burst of silver threads.
Mira stepped forward and took the red shard.
It sank into her palm.
The Die in her satchel began to glow.
Power surged up her arm.
She gasped. And laughed. And for the first time—felt ready.
They returned to the surface changed.
The Archivist waited, holding an ancient book.
"This," she said, handing it to Mira , "is a map to the next shard. But beware. Velcrath knows you now. He will not test you again."
Mira nodded. "Then I won't test him either."
Outside, the stars flickered. One winked out.
And far to the north, beyond the Griefwaters and the Obsidian Briar, a storm began to rise.
The threads were tightening, The final game was beginning and Mira and the party where off to Marrowdeep, the next location given to them.