POV: Arthur Starlight
It started with a tremor.
Small. Subtle. The kind most people wouldn't notice—unless the world around you always held its breath for you. The trees didn't sway, but their leaves rustled. The light in the dome flickered—not dimmed, just… confused. Like the sun itself blinked.
I was outside the Sky Garden for the first time in weeks.
A rare walk. Balthen had followed at a distance but kept his mouth shut. Even he understood—when I wandered, something was pulling.
The wind here carried the scent of steel and wild frost. The outer palace terraces were less tended. Less alive. I liked that. Things didn't pretend out here.
I stepped onto the overlook path. The spires of Solara stretched far behind me like gleaming fangs of gold. Below, beyond the enchanted barriers, the horizon cracked open into wilderness—rolling mist, endless trees, skyfracture cliffs that hovered instead of sank.
And then I saw it.
A shimmer. Far below the cliffs.
Like a storm cloud caught mid-breath. But it wasn't a cloud. It was moving up.
And the twitch in my red eye started.
I didn't have time to think. The barrier to the overlook—pure etherglass, stronger than steel—shattered in front of me. No sound. Just light bending, then a fracture, then air being ripped apart.
And then…
It was here.
A Riftbeast.
Category: C-Rank.
Size: Irrelevant.
Logic: None.
It didn't walk. It didn't fly. It existed, in too many directions at once. Bones made of thought. Eyes in places that shouldn't exist. Flesh that folded inside out and kept repeating itself. Every time I tried to see it, something inside me recoiled.
The air screamed.
Not from sound. From wrongness.
My legs didn't move, but the world around me pushed. Magic flared from the terrace stones. Guards shouted. Arcanists screamed commands into sigil-plates. Defensive protocols should've activated instantly.
They didn't.
The Riftbeast wasn't here to fight.
It was here to observe.
No. Not even that.
It was here to find something.
It turned—all of it, none of it—and its gaze, if it had one, landed on me.
And everything stopped.
The sky fractured. Not cracked. Fractured. Like a window pane under cosmic pressure. I felt something inside me answer—a pull from beneath my ribs, like a key being turned in a lock I didn't know existed.
The air around me shifted.
I blinked.
My hand was holding a sword.
I hadn't moved. I hadn't summoned it.
It was already there.
Black steel, etched in molten characters I couldn't read—but knew.
The Riftbeast paused.
Not from fear. Not from confusion.
Recognition.
Like it saw me and remembered something it wasn't supposed to.
And then—it folded in on itself.
Gone. No noise. No smoke. No ripple of magic. Just erased. As if reality itself hit back and forced it to un-be.
I stood still, heart hammering.
Around me, the guards finally arrived. Too late.
Balthen's voice cut through the silence.
"Arthur…" he said, staring at the sword in my hand, "what did you just do?"
I didn't answer.
Because I didn't know if I'd done anything.
Or if the story inside me had simply decided—
It was time to turn the page.
Elanor's POV
It didn't roar. It didn't charge. It didn't speak.
It just pulsed.
A low, vibrating distortion, like a heartbeat from beneath the floor of reality itself. The Riftbeast hovered above the ground without wings, without weight—its form flickering between states: bone, smoke, starlight, shadow. A jagged wound shaped like a creature, held together by the memory of what a monster should be.
The books said Riftbeasts weren't alive.
They were echoes.
Glitches in the weave of the infinite.
Born from collapsing realms, forgotten timelines, or stories that should never have been imagined. They didn't breathe. They didn't hunger. They weren't summoned. They just appeared—where the fabric of the world grew too thin to hold itself together.
And this one… was C-Class.
Not the strongest by far. But enough to shatter cities. To erase mountains. To unwrite a village like mine.
I remembered it now—the light twisting. The way trees bent sideways. The way screams never got finished before they were pulled inside out.
The last thing I saw before blacking out was my mother's shadow folding like paper… and vanishing.
This one wasn't the same Riftbeast.
But it moved the same.
Bent the same.
Felt the same.
Wrong. Heavy. Like gravity forgot its rules. Like silence was screaming. Like a dream trying to escape its dreamer.
And then it bowed.
Or maybe it unraveled trying not to.
Its spined limbs creaked, warping space as it lowered itself—fractal jaws parting in something like reverence. Its face had no eyes, but I could feel it looking at him.
Arthur.
He didn't step back.
Didn't speak.
Just stared—expression unreadable. Like this wasn't unexpected.
Like it was normal.
And that's what shook me the most.
I wasn't afraid of the Riftbeast.
I was afraid that he wasn't.
Because whatever was in him…
Whatever his Evolvanth was…
It made the kind of monsters that destroy realities kneel.