[Scene: Blackstone Keep — The Scriptorium Below]
Overseer Malrec did not kneel.
Not before gods.
Not before Archons.
Not even before the Rift.
His reverence was ink and pattern, order and reaction — not faith.
Control.
The Scriptorium breathed dust and death. Carved beneath Blackstone's deepest stones, it pulsed like the heart of a dead god. Glyphlight shimmered through the obsidian veins in the walls, pale and muted — like memories losing their voice.
Here, magic did not sing.
It suffocated.
Scrolls older than blood lined the alcoves, untouched by light or hand. Every rune, every seal, every cursed talisman was bound in silence. To speak too loudly here was to tempt entropy.
Malrec stood motionless before a floating sphere of projection — shifting data, radiant lines of violet and white, moving like clockwork inside flesh.
A silhouette danced within the core.
Subject Eighty-Eight.
No longer just a slave.
No longer just a mistake.
No longer even man.
The Riftborn.
Heart rate.
Breath drift.
Shadow activity.
Aether static.
All monitored. All measured. All catalogued.
Each pulse of data was a scripture.
Each anomaly a hymn in numbers.
Unraveler Vehris stepped into the hush, her dusksteel robes whispering along the stone, the air bending gently around her like a spider's breath. The moonstone lenses over her eyes reflected nothing.
Her voice, however, was iron.
"He's accelerating."
Malrec's head inclined by degrees. "The mark wakes early."
"It shouldn't. Not without consent. Not without…"
She hesitated. "Permission."
"He is not feeding it," Malrec murmured, rotating the sphere with two fingers. The projection turned like a planet, slow and ponderous. "It feeds through him. Passively. As if he were…"
He smiled — thin as flint.
"…a gate left ajar."
"That makes him unstable."
"That makes him divine."
Vehris's frown was nearly a wince. "That's three indicators. Entropy shift. Residual collapse. Inverted shadow. He ticks one more, and the Order will see it. We won't be able to hide him."
Malrec did not look away. "Then let them see. Let them gather and whisper. I'll give them a name worth fearing again."
He gestured to a nearby glyphplate. A red sigil pulsed into view:
VOID MANIFESTATION PROTOCOL — REVISION VII
Symptoms:
— Entropy distortion [✓]
— Shadow inversion [✓]
— Residual aether collapse [✓]
— Mental fracture [–]
— Phase-scream event [–]
Vehris's voice was barely audible now. "He's close."
Malrec turned from the sphere. "Bring me the beastkin."
Vehris blinked. "Kaia?"
"She feels the Rift. The blood in her veins sings in harmony with what lies beneath. She sees what others miss. I want to know what her eyes reveal… when she looks at him."
"She won't come willingly."
Malrec's smile did not touch his eyes. "Then bring her anyway."
Vehris hesitated.
"And if she resists?"
He looked at her at last — and his voice, when it came, was a blade drawn across porcelain.
"Then bleed her. Slowly."
[Scene: The Holding Cells — Upper Tier]
Kaia was meditating.
Not because she chose to — but because there was nothing else.
The chains had long since stopped itching. The hunger came and went like a tide.
She sat still, breath slow, head bowed. Listening to stone. Listening to silence.
Then footsteps.
Fast.
Purposeful.
Heavy boots. Two guards.
The door slammed open. No warning. No summons. No explanation.
She didn't flinch.
"Where are you taking me?" Her voice was quiet, low. A snow-wrapped growl.
The guards said nothing.
One moved to grab her shoulder.
She twisted from the touch — low, sharp, practiced. One foot hooked behind his leg, the other planted firmly — and she brought him down like a stone collapsing into riverbed.
But the second was faster — and dirty.
The punch landed not across her face, not into her side — but her stomach.
Low. Cruel. Deliberate.
She gasped, breath ripped from her lungs. The ground hit her like an avalanche.
Another blow.
Then the darkness came.
[Scene: Unknown Cell — Deeper Below]
She woke cold.
Not the cold of winter — but the cold of something else.
The kind that bit into the bone.
The kind that remembered things older than ice.
Her cell was different.
Wider. Older. Wrong.
There were no torches.
No windows.
Not even light from above — only a single thread of pale violet, trickling from a crack in the ceiling like starlight trying to flee.
She stood slowly.
Breath visible.
Frost blooming across the iron seams in the walls.
Her ears twitched.
The air here… hummed.
Not with noise — but with expectation.
Like something had been waiting for her to arrive.
Like something had already taken her measure.
Kaia turned slowly, placing her palm against the wall.
And felt it.
Beneath stone. Beneath time.
The Rift.
A pulse.
A heartbeat not hers.
A resonance. Not of presence… but of hunger.
A soundless whisper through the veins of the world:
"One walks in shadow, but sees the thread."
She stepped back.
The cell was not a prison.
It was a testing ground.
[Scene: Isolation Below — Rei's Cell]
There was no light.
No warmth.
No time.
He sat still in the cold — chains loose around his wrists, as though even they had grown wary of him. The only illumination came from the crystal above, pulsing once every few heartbeats in rhythm with the mark burned across his chest.
It hadn't spoken since yesterday.
But it didn't need to.
It watched.
And he felt it.
His knees ached.
His breath fogged the still air.
He should be starving.
Fading.
But instead…
He felt full.
Heavy.
Like something had curled inside him and decided to wait.
He shut his eyes.
Then—
"Rei."
He flinched. Eyes opened. That voice.
Not the Void.
Not the whisper.
A memory. A tone.
Feminine. Cold. Familiar.
"Who's there?" he rasped.
No answer.
But the cell had shifted.
The shadows bent toward him, not away.
He reached with his will.
The mark pulsed.
Once.
And the vision came—
Glass.
A field of shattered stars.
A girl's face — not Kaia, but someone older. A beastkin. Warrior. Pale eyes like hoarfrost.
Her voice wrapped in memory:
"You were never supposed to wake here, Riftborn.
But now that you have…
Everything changes."
He gasped.
The vision snapped.
Above him, for just a second — the glyphs rearranged.
A new sigil.
Violet.
Fanged.
Wrong.
It crawled across the stone like a scar that had always been there.
It wasn't from this world.
It wasn't for this world.
And somehow…
It was his.