Chapter — The Barrier of Stars
The nights were the worst.
When his body begged for rest, when his mind floated on the edge of darkness, the dreams came. Not of the past. Not of the faces he had already lost. No… these were crueller.
He dreamed of the future.
In those visions, his wife's hands guided their son, the boy stumbling, laughing, lifting off the ground. "Father, higher! Higher!" the child cried, his small arms reaching for the sky. His wife's smile was soft, radiant. Together, they stood in the open field, teaching the boy to fly as if the heavens belonged to him.
And Aelric laughed with them. He felt their warmth. He felt alive again.
But every time, the dream collapsed. The boy vanished into smoke. His wife's hand turned to ash in his palm. He woke with his gut twisting, muscles tight, face wet with anger and shame. The silence afterward was worse than death itself.
It was in those moments that his fury grew. He remembered the thunder from the night he swore his oath. The lightning that shook another world. That was no coincidence. That was not nature. Someone had done this. Someone had shattered his life.
And if they existed, then so did revenge.
The stars had never felt so close.
Aelric rose again, body screaming, breath ragged, every step upward carved from sheer defiance. The higher he climbed, the heavier the air pressed down. It was not wind, nor storm, but an unseen weight—an invisible wall stretched across the sky.
At first, it was poison.
His skin blistered, flesh turning black, peeling as though eaten alive by acid. His chest heaved, lungs filling with fire, each breath a knife that tore him from within. Blood spilled from his nose, his ears, his eyes. He fainted—once, twice, a hundred times. He lost count. Each time he awoke, the stars were still there, just as distant, just as merciless.
But he kept moving.
One inch. Another. His bones cracked, then ground themselves into new shapes. His muscles tore apart only to knot together harder than before. His organs writhed like beasts caged inside him, twisting, reshaping under the crushing pressure.
At first, the barrier felt like poison—death sinking its teeth into him. But as the hours—or days, or years, he no longer knew—dragged on, the poison shifted. What had once burned now pulsed like fire warming his chest. What had once rotted his skin now coursed through him like new blood.
And still, he climbed.
There was no thought of stopping. No memory of ground below, no sense of time. Only the stars above and the oath that chained his soul.
I promise.
The words thundered in his chest, louder than his heartbeat, louder than the screaming of his ruined flesh.
And then—
With a final push, every vein straining, every bone breaking once more—he tore through.
The weight vanished. The world opened.
He found himself adrift in silence, surrounded by a vastness beyond reason. Stars blazed like endless fires, so close he could almost touch them. Planets spun in the void. A horizon without end stretched before him. His hope, long buried, flared alive once more.
But the victory was brief.
Something vast and unseen stirred. A force greater than anything he had ever known seized him, pulling him down, dragging him deeper into the unknown. His body, still trembling, sank helplessly into the new world's gravity.
And then darkness.
When Aelric opened his eyes, he was no longer in the sky.