The snow did not crunch beneath his feet.It parted. Yielding, like it knew him.
Valek walked through the half-dead woods at the edge of Druvadir's southern spires — where the trees had long since ceased to whisper and simply… watched. Their branches stretched like ribs around him, bent in reverence or warning, he no longer knew which. His white cloak dragged frost in its wake. The mirrored mask across his face shimmered with the reflection of a hundred dying stars.
Each step echoed not in the world… but in memory.
You spared him.Why? You said you'd bury the next one.
The voice in his skull slithered like smoke. It was not one voice. It never had been. It was fragments. Shadows. Remnants of the Rift he once stood before. The Rift that did not choose him — but marked him all the same.
Valek paused near the crest of a ridge where the trees thinned. His breath curled beneath the mask. He looked toward the ruins below — now empty once more. The Riftborn and the Frostfang were gone. Their scent faded. Their heat vanished.
But the mark remained.
He could still feel it in his chest, pulling like a silent tide.
He is not like the last.
Stronger? Weaker. Hungrier.
The whispers argued in silence, clawing through his skull. He let them. That was the price.
Once, he had been whole. Sereth Valek of Cindralis Prime. Disciple of the The High One. First of the White Cloaks. He had believed in the Order. In the Prophecies. In the need to contain what came from the Rift.
Then the first Riftborn appeared.
And everything changed.
He hadn't killed that one either.
You hesitate. Always. That is why you failed. That is why the stars burn wrong.
He took off the half-torn mask.
The cold bit deep into the scarred side of his face — a ruin of fire and void, melted by power not meant for flesh. His right eye, once a luminous green, was now a hollow well of black. A piece of the Rift stared back at the world.
The cost of surviving the first fall.
He should have died then — swallowed by that maelstrom, like the rest. But something had spared him. Something within that ancient tear had seen him… and left a sliver of itself behind.
A seed.
The Order who he once serve, thought him to be a hunter.
But he was a warning.
A reminder.
He saw your reflection in the blade. He remembers your stance. Will he learn it? Will he surpass you?
"No," Valen said aloud, voice like frost breaking stone. "He's not ready."
The Riftborn's form still haunted his peripheral memory — awkward at first, wild with fear, but then… rhythm. Precision. The hint of muscle memory that had nothing to do with this world.
Games. That's what the boy had called them.
I fought the last Riftborn with a thousand years of war behind him, Valek thought. But this one wields fiction like instinct. Reflex like ritual.
He was dangerous. Not because of what he was now…But because of what he might become.
You will have to kill him eventually. You know this. Or kneel.
Valek's grip on his sword tightened.
The blade — Voidforged — hummed faintly at his side. It did not speak like the shadows. But it remembered. Every clash, every parry, every soul it had drunk in silence. It, too, was marked.
He stepped forward. The trees parted again. Below him, mist coiled over a frozen stream — untouched.
No trail. No footprints. They had vanished like ghosts.
He did not follow. Not yet.
Instead, Valek turned toward a half-buried shrine nearby — once devoted to an Archon, now hollowed by age and ivy. He knelt at its edge, brushing away snow. Beneath the frost, the sigil remained:
A cross - The old glyph for Fate.
He placed his palm against it.
And the feeling of The Rift inside him stirred.
Visions flickered across the edges of his vision — not sights, not exactly. Echoes. Moments. A hand reaching through flame. A crown buried in ash. A scream, swallowed by silence.
And then — violet eyes. Staring back. Not at him. Through him.
He tore his hand away, gasping.
The mark beneath his collarbone pulsed in pain — a brand long since scarred over, but never healed. He had carved it himself, after the first Riftborn fell into the void, after the Order stripped him of his position, after the Rift whispered:
"We are not your prison."
He remembered those words.
Because now he saw them in Rei.
The boy was unrefined. Fragile, even. But beneath that was a fracture in the world. A wound shaped like a man. And the Void wanted him sharpened.
Guide him. Or gut him. Those are the choices.
He stood slowly, placing the mask back over his face. The mirrored glass caught his reflection — but only barely.
There was less of him each time.
Yet something in him, fragile and aching, remained.
A flicker of something he no longer named hope. Only purpose.
"I will not fail another one," Valek murmured.
And the wind, ancient and cruel, seemed to agree.