Aarav didn't remember falling asleep.
But when he woke, the glow of the cathedral had dimmed, and something cold and wet was seeping through the ash under him. Not water. Not quite.
It shimmered—silver-blue threads curling like smoke through the cracks in the stone. When he touched it, the surface rippled… and a broken glyph emerged.
It floated mid-air, flickering like a faulty hologram.
He reached out instinctively. The spiral in his blood pulsed, responding.
As his fingers brushed the rune, pain exploded in his palm — but it wasn't physical. It felt like his thoughts were being stretched, twisted, rewritten. A foreign memory bled into his mind:
"Sigils are not words. They are intentions bound in form. A broken one can burn the body, but a true one? It binds time to will."
The rune glowed brighter.
Aarav flinched—but didn't let go.
He let the knowledge sink in like cold rain. Unfamiliar diagrams, sequences, pulses. The foundation of a Vein Rune.
Not a complete spell. Not yet. But something close.
His bloodline reacted almost protectively—spirals forming beneath his skin, crawling in faint light like tattoos born from within. The dagger at his hip hummed in response. His palm now held a seared imprint of the broken glyph, as if it had branded him.
The pain faded into a warm thrum.
He stood, breathing hard, the world around him sharper—colors deeper, air thinner.
Something in him had changed.
Not strength. Not speed.
But awareness.
He looked at the walls again. Dozens more runes. Some shattered. Some flickering. A few still dormant.
Aarav couldn't read them yet—but he could feel them now.They called to him.
He touched the dagger again. Its edge shimmered faintly with the same silver-blue glow.
His first Vein Trace… not yet castable, but growing.
He turned to leave the ruin. Creatures howled in the distance. Shadows moved oddly against the dying sky.
But Aarav walked with a straighter spine and burning curiosity.
The Shatterfold was bleeding.Its power leaking in fragments.And he was learning to drink from it.
The sky above the Shatterfold flickered like a dying circuit board. Aarav had grown used to the strange rhythms of the realm—the inconsistent hum of gravity, the sudden shifts in temperature, the distant roars that seemed to echo from every direction at once.
But today, something new caught his attention.
As he moved away from the rune-marked cathedral, he noticed a field of black glass. Smooth. Polished. Impossible in a place where everything else was torn and jagged.
It stretched in an oval about thirty meters wide. At its center rose a spire, about his height, formed from interlocking obsidian shards. Its surface was etched with spirals, veins, and a glowing core embedded at the top—pulsing with a rhythm eerily similar to his own heartbeat.
It didn't feel abandoned.
It felt asleep.
Aarav approached cautiously. The air around the spire was warmer—electrically charged, like static before a storm.
As he neared it, the dagger at his side vibrated again, and the rune burned faintly in his palm. The core flared brighter.
Words—not spoken but thought—filtered into his mind:
Chrono Beacon: Primary Anchor Node.Access denied. Bloodline mismatch—partial resonance detected.Calibration sequence: unstable. Proceed at risk.
Aarav blinked. "Anchor node?" he whispered.
The spire responded.
Its black glass surface cracked open in segments, revealing inner mechanisms—rotating rings of crystal, layered with shifting symbols that rearranged themselves every second. Time felt… off. Slower. His footsteps left after-images. His breath echoed longer than it should have.
This wasn't just a machine.
It was a temporal anchor—a stabilizer that once kept the Shatterfold from collapsing under the weight of its own chronal energy. But now, fractured and running on fumes, it was leaking time like a cracked dam.
A small pedestal emerged from the base of the spire.
Aarav hesitated, then placed his marked palm on it.
Agony.
Not physical—but mental, like thousands of clocks grinding into his brain. He saw moments—a woman singing to a child under silver trees, a battle in the sky, the same spire standing tall as lightstorms danced across the horizon. Then, ruin. Cracks in the world. Screams swallowed by silence.
And finally: a message.
If you are seeing this, then you bear the Spiral Vein.This realm was once a forge of futures. We failed to hold the flood.Gather the anchors. Reignite the Core. The Gate must be sealed… or undone.
The device retracted. Silent again.
But not dead.
In his palm, a new glyph pulsed dimly—a rudimentary one. A fragment of an interface rune. Not usable on its own, but a building block for future control.
He staggered back, nose bleeding, breath shallow.
The vision had left him drained.
But he knew something now:
The Shatterfold hadn't just died.
It had been overrun by time.
And if the core anchor systems could be revived, they might hold the key to either restoring or escaping this world.