The rift swallowed the Aurora's Spear whole.
For a moment, Kaelen thought they had died—the stars vanished, sound ceased, and even his own heartbeat seemed muted. Then reality shivered, and the ship was hurled into a churning ocean of fractured light. Space was no longer black—it was a prism of shifting colors, galaxies bent into spirals that fed themselves, time looping and snapping like broken threads.
"By every god I've ever heard of…" Rhyss breathed. "This isn't space. It's—"
"Alive," Ceyra finished grimly. "The rift isn't a passage. It's a being."
Something moved in the distance—a shape so vast Kaelen couldn't comprehend its scale. Limbs of star-matter, eyes like collapsing suns, wings of void-energy. It watched them.
Alarms shrieked.
"Incoming energy surge!" Rhyss yelled.
"Brace!" Kaelen shouted.
A tendril of darkness lashed out, slamming the ship sideways. Consoles exploded in showers of sparks. Ceyra was thrown from her station; Kaelen barely caught her before she hit the deck.
"Shields at thirty percent!"
Kaelen wiped blood from his brow, fury igniting in his chest. "Find Lyra. Lock onto her signal. Now."
Ceyra's fingers flew across the cracked console. "I've got a trace—faint, but it's there. Deep in the core of this… thing."
"Then we go through."
Rhyss stared at him like he was insane. "Kaelen, this place is tearing us apart molecule by molecule!"
"Then we fly faster than it can kill us," Kaelen snarled. "Punch it!"
The Aurora's Spear roared forward, engines screaming against the living rift's grasp.
Inside the Core of the Rift
Lyra swung the Seed's light like a blade, carving through the Architect's attacks—torrents of shadow, illusions of her deepest fears, voices whispering her every doubt.
"You cannot win," the Architect thundered. "Even if you destroy me, something worse will take my place. Power breeds hunger. Hunger breeds ruin."
Lyra gritted her teeth, slamming the Seed's radiance into one of its forms. "Then maybe it's time someone broke the cycle!"
For the first time, the Architect faltered.
And in that pause, she felt Kaelen's presence—distant but unyielding—charging toward her through the impossible.
She smiled through the chaos. "Hold on, Kaelen. I'm almost there."
The Architect's many eyes narrowed.
"Then I will kill him first."
It vanished—slipping from her mindscape into the rift beyond.