The wind screamed like a dying god, barreling in from the west as a colossal wall of ochre dust that devoured the sun, smearing the sky crimson with the hue of dried blood. On the Forgotten Fringe—this forsaken Strand where hope was as scarce as untainted water—they called such tempests the Breath of the Hollow. It was a name whispered in huddled camps at night, a caution etched into the collective memory of survivors. Children, wide-eyed and trembling, were drilled from infancy to seek shelter at the first distant moan slithering over the cracked plains. Adults, hardened by years of unrelenting hardship, merely muttered curses and tugged scarves tighter over weathered faces. For them, hiding was no longer a viable option; it was a relic of a softer era, a luxury afforded only to those who hadn't yet learned that survival demanded confrontation with the storm's fury.
Elara Voss was seventeen years old, and in all her life, she had never once chosen to hide. It wasn't bravery, not really—just the stubborn grit born from losing everything too young. She remembered the day her parents vanished: the Thread Storm ripping open the sky like a wound, swallowing their caravan in a swirl of fractured realities. Screams cut short, wagons twisting into impossible shapes before blinking out. She'd been left alone in the dust, seven and feral, scavenging her first meal from a dead pack animal's saddlebags. That memory fueled her now, a fire that kept the cold at bay. She scavenged solo, trading finds for water tabs and protein strips in transient markets that popped up like mirages after each storm.
Perched precariously on the jagged lip of a half-collapsed watchtower, her fingers curled like claws into the crumbling stone, she allowed the gale to lash at her exposed skin, stripping away layers of grit and resolve in equal measure. The tower, a skeletal remnant of a bygone age, groaned under the assault, its rusted rebar vibrating like the strings of some forgotten instrument. Elara held firm. She knew the patterns of these storms as intimately as the scars on her hands—scars from digging through razor-sharp debris, from fights over scraps of food, from nights when the cold bit deeper than any blade. This particular Breath would rage for precisely an hour before exhausting itself, retreating like a defeated beast to lick its wounds. And in its wake, the ever-shifting dunes would unveil fresh secrets: twisted girders from ancient sky-ships that had plummeted from the heavens long before her great-grandmothers drew breath, fragments of iridescent black glass that hummed with an otherworldly vibration when pressed to the ear, or—on those rare days when fortune smiled—a hermetically sealed crate bursting with pre-Collapse rations, enough to sustain a ragged scavenger clan through another merciless cycle of days.
But today, as the dust clawed at her eyes and filled her lungs with the taste of desolation, the stories whispered by elders around flickering campfires offered no kindness. The Fringe was a graveyard of dreams, a place where the Eternal Weave—the vast multiverse of interconnected Strands—seemed to fray at the edges, unraveling into chaos. Scholars from safer Strands might romanticize it as a "frontier of possibility." Still, to Elara, it was home: a brutal, unforgiving cradle that had shaped her into a survivor.
Below her vantage point, the storm's fury carved merciless paths through the ruins of Outpost Kresh-9. As she peered down, the skeletal beams evoked their lost glory—a Nexus Gate that once bridged Strands, pulsing with energy as aquatic beings bartered with crystalline entities amid a hum of alien languages. But its keystone had shattered in cataclysm, leaving only a titan's ribcage half-buried in sand. No portals flickered now, yet Elara dug on, driven by the faint hope of unearthing artifacts to purify water or heal wounds. She'd found a water-purifier once, a device that hummed to life with a drop of blood, turning brackish sludge drinkable—traded for a month's supplies, its glow a reminder that the old world lingered.
Elara's mended coat flapped wildly behind her like a tattered flag of defiance. Her goggles—bartered dearly—were caked with dust, but she made no move to wipe them clean. In the Fringe, visibility was survival. If you couldn't spot the storm's approach, couldn't discern the subtle shifts in the dunes that heralded buried dangers—like hidden sinkholes or dormant automatons from the pre-Collapse era—then you deserved the oblivion it brought. Her braid whipped across her cheeks, stinging like tiny lashes. She scanned the horizon, noting how the storm warped the air, creating fleeting mirages: glimpses of green fields from other Strands, or shadowy figures that vanished when you blinked. The Breaths didn't just move sand; they thinned the veil between worlds, birthing hallucinations of what could have been. Elara had learned to ignore them, but sometimes they whispered truths—alternate lives where her parents survived, where the Fringe bloomed instead of withering.
A subtle tremor vibrated through the stone under her palms, distinct from the wind's relentless howl. It wasn't the gale's doing; this was something more profound, a pulse from the earth itself, as if the ruins were stirring from a long slumber. Her heart quickened. She'd felt similar vibrations before, usually heralding a significant find—or a trap.
She leaned forward, peering into the maelstrom below.
There, partially unearthed in a fresh trench gouged by the storm's fury, a solitary shard of obsidian glass jutted from the sand like a forgotten dagger. No larger than her forearm, its surface was unnaturally smooth, polished to a sheen that defied the abrasive environment. It absorbed the scant light filtering through the dust, creating a void where illumination should have reflected—an anomaly that made Elara's skin prickle with unease. Even amid the swirling chaos, she could perceive it clearly: a rift in the fabric of reality, a spot where colors bled away into nothingness, as if the shard were a portal to an abyss that hungered for existence.
And it was singing to her.
Not audibly, not in notes that could be captured by the ear, but in sensations that invaded her senses unbidden. A mounting pressure built behind her eyes, throbbing in rhythm with her pulse. The metallic tang of copper flooded her mouth, sharp and unwelcome. And woven through it all was an inexplicable certainty, a pull as inexorable as gravity: if she turned away now, abandoning this enigma to the sands, she would carry the weight of that regret through every remaining day of her brief, starvation-riddled life. But regret wasn't the only whisper; doubt crept in. What if this was another hallucination, a storm-born trick? She'd chased phantoms before, wasting precious energy on nothing.
Elara spat a glob of dust-laden saliva onto the ground and began her descent.
The watchtower, in its heyday, had soared thirty stories into the sky, a sentinel overseeing the gate's operations. Now, reduced to a fractured spine of weathered concrete and exposed rebar, each level was a perilous drop waiting to claim the unwary. She navigated it with the ingrained agility of all Fringe-born children: hands gripping precarious holds, toes wedging into fissures no wider than a blade of withered grass. The wind buffeted her, threatening to pry her loose, but she pressed on, muscles honed by years of such climbs burning with familiar strain. Halfway down, a loose stone gave way, sending her sliding for a heart-stopping moment before she caught a protruding bar, swinging precariously. Pain shot through her shoulder, but she bit it back—noise attracted predators, human or otherwise. Finally, she released her grip for the last eight meters, executing a controlled plummet that ended in a crouch, her impact sending an explosive plume of dust billowing outward like a smoky exhalation.
The singing intensified as she approached, resonating now within her chest, manifesting as a secondary heartbeat that discordantly syncopated with her own. It was alive, this sensation—pulsing, probing, as if assessing her worthiness. She traversed the trench in deliberate strides, her boots sinking into the soft sand, each step kicking up mini-whirls that mimicked the larger storm.
She dropped to one knee before the shard.
Up close, its blackness was profound, an absolute void that mirrored nothing—not her face, not the storm-ravaged sky, not even the faint glimmers of hope in her eyes. As her shadow draped over it, the interior depths appeared to undulate, a subtle ripple suggesting that something on the other side was gazing back, appraising her with an intelligence both alien and ancient.
Elara paused, her breath catching in her throat. The scavengers' lore was replete with warnings about such finds. Touch the wrong relic, and your blood might transmute into fine sand, sifting away through your veins until you collapse into a desiccated husk. Touch another, and you could awaken babbling in tongues extinct for millennia, your mind fractured by echoes of dead civilizations. Worst of all were the tales of those who vanished, their forms dissolving into ether, leaving only neatly folded garments as a mocking epitaph to their existence. Her grandmother's stories echoed: an uncle who touched a glowing orb and aged decades in seconds, crumbling to dust. But Elara wasn't her uncle. She was stronger, sharper. Or so she told herself.
Yet, despite the chorus of cautionary voices echoing in her mind, she extended her hand.
Her bare fingers, calloused and dirt-ingrained, encircled the shard.
In that instant, the world ceased to be.
Not with cataclysmic flames or deafening thunder, but in an absolute silence, like submersion in an endless ocean. The storm's roar evaporated. The oppressive sky dissolved into nothingness. Even the gnawing hunger clawing at her insides—a constant companion since her last meager meal of dried jerky three days prior—faded into irrelevance. All that remained was the shard, radiating an unnatural warmth against her skin, and the undeniable sense that it was observing her through a multitude of eyes that had never beheld light, eyes forged in primordial darkness.
A voice—that was not a voice, more a vibration resonating in the hollow recesses of her consciousness—uttered words that bypassed her ears entirely.
You are the echo I left unfinished.
Then, a flood of memory surged forth, but it was not her own—a borrowed vision from epochs long past.
She beheld an infinite ocean composed not of water but of liquid starlight, stretching vast and frigid across dimensions beyond comprehension. Interlaced within this cosmic sea were threads, innumerable and intricate: millions, billions, each representing a world, a life, a destiny. They intertwined into a grand tapestry, so immense that it possessed its own horizons, curving away into infinity. At the tapestry's core stirred an entity, primordial and nameless, predating the concepts of beginnings and endings. It extended an appendage fashioned from pure absence—a void-hand—and delicately plucked a solitary thread from the weave.
The thread convulsed in agony, emitting a silent scream that reverberated through the void.
That scream transmuted, becoming her own guttural cry.
Elara slammed back into reality, crashing onto the sand on all fours, her body wracked with convulsions as she retched up a mixture of dust, bile, and the remnants of her scant breakfast. The shard remained clutched in her fist, but its warmth had dissipated, leaving it inert and mundane—a mere fragment of black glass. The storm persisted in its howling symphony, the world reasserting itself with cold indifference.
But an intruder had accompanied her return.
She sensed it coiling within her shadow: an entity patient yet ravenous, curious yet insidious, as if a fragment of that cosmic void had hitched a ride into her soul. And as it settled, a sliver of her memory eroded—the sharp clarity of her mother's face blurring at the edges, like a storm-warped hallucination. Panic flickered: was this the cost? The Fringe's Breaths didn't just shift dunes; they twisted reality, birthing glimpses of alternate lives. But this felt different, deliberate—a feeding. The entity wasn't just empowering her; it was consuming pieces of her past to anchor itself.
The crunch of footsteps pierced the din, approaching from behind.
Three figures materialized from the swirling dust, their forms shrouded in makeshift bandit attire—scarves wound tightly across their lower faces to filter the abrasive air. The leader, a burly man with eyes like chipped flint, casually slung a rust-encrusted rifle over his shoulder, its barrel scarred from countless skirmishes. His companions gripped shock-mauls, primitive weapons jury-rigged from salvaged tech, their heads crackling with arcs of stolen electricity that danced like captive lightning. Their coats, pieced together from the faded canvas of obsolete gliders, bore the sun-bleached patina of the Fringe. Still, there was a cruelty in their stance, a predatory gleam that marked them as raiders rather than mere survivors. Elara recognized the type: opportunists who preyed on lone scavengers, taking what they couldn't find themselves.
"Well now," the leader drawled, his voice muffled by the scarf but laced with mocking amusement. "Looks like our little raven has pecked up quite the shiny trinket."
Elara rose to her feet with deliberate slowness, the wind tossing her hair across her vision in wild strands. She made no effort to clear it; in moments like these, every action was a calculation, every hesitation a potential advantage. Her mind raced: fight or flee? The entity stirred, a calm presence assessing the threat.
The leader cocked his head, his gaze flicking to the shard in her hand. "You know how it works out here, girl. Relics ain't for the weak or the lone wolves. They belong to those strong enough to claim 'em and keep 'em. Hand it over nice and easy, and maybe we'll content ourselves with just snapping one of your pretty legs. Make it two if you fuss."
Within her shadow, the nascent entity stirred restlessly, as if sampling the rapid thrum of their heartbeats and gauging their vitality, like a connoisseur of fear. It pulsed with hunger and curiosity—testing her resolve.
Elara parted her lips to respond—to negotiate, to plead, to unleash a torrent of defiance, she couldn't yet decide—but the words lodged in her throat, unspoken. Instead, she felt the entity nudge her thoughts, whispering possibilities: shadows could twist, time could bend.
The leader's patience evaporated. He leveled the rifle with practiced ease, finger tightening on the trigger.
And for the second time that day, the world fractured.
This rupture was auditory, explosive. The rifle's muzzle erupted in a brilliant flash, illuminating the storm like the birth of a fleeting sun. The bullet hurtled toward her, a harbinger of death slicing through the air.
But it never connected.
Mere inches from her chest, the projectile halted abruptly, suspended in defiance of physics, rotating lazily as if ensnared in an invisible web. For a single, interminable heartbeat, it lingered there—a mundane slug transformed into a suspended artifact, gleaming dully like an insect preserved in ancient resin.
Then, with a whisper of reversal, it retraced its trajectory.
Accelerated, unerring, it surged back along its original path, embedding itself in the leader's forehead with a visceral crack that abruptly silenced his derisive chuckle. He crumpled to the ground soundlessly, a puppet with severed strings.
The remaining bandits registered the horror in a frozen instant, their eyes widening in disbelief, before their own shadows betrayed them.
Rising from the sand at their feet came ebony appendages—featureless, devoid of joints, crafted from the same abyssal material as the shard. They latched onto ankles, wrists, and throats with an unyielding grip. The first bandit, panic surging, swung his shock-maul in a desperate arc; the weapon phased harmlessly through the shadow as if it were mere vapor, only for the darkness to coalesce momentarily, snapping his arm at the elbow with a sickening pop that echoed his anguished scream. He dropped the maul, clutching the ruin of his limb, but the shadow wasn't done—it wrapped around his torso, squeezing until ribs cracked like dry twigs. The second pivoted to flee, boots churning sand in futile flight. His shadow elongated unnaturally, morphing into a constricting noose that hoisted him skyward. He thrashed wildly, legs kicking in vain, fingers clawing at the intangible rope, until the storm's howl mercifully drowned the sharp snap of his vertebrae.
Three lifeless forms thudded onto the dust, the air heavy with the metallic scent of blood and discharged energy.
The shadowy manifestations dissipated, melting into the ground like spilled ink absorbed by thirsty parchment.
Elara remained solitary amid the abrupt hush that descends in violence's aftermath. Her hand throbbed; the shard's keen edges had sliced into her palm during her vise-like grip, crimson droplets pattering onto the sand and vanishing instantaneously, as if the earth craved sustenance. She stared at the bodies, breath ragged. This wasn't survival; this was slaughter. The entity had acted through her, but at what price? Another memory slipped: her father's laugh, once a booming comfort around the campfire, now fading like an echo lost in the Weave. Tears stung her eyes—not for the dead, but for the pieces of herself eroding away.
The gale subsided as swiftly as it had arisen, the stormfront lumbering eastward, bequeathing a sky tinged with the dull sheen of tarnished bronze.
She regarded the shard intently, then the sprawled corpses, and finally her own quivering digits, slick with blood.
Deep within her chest, the anomalous heartbeat emitted a soft, inquisitive chortle—ancient, knowing, and faintly amused.
Her hands shook as she knelt by the bandits' bodies, methodically rifling through their pockets. A few water tabs, a rusted knife, ammunition for the rifle—she claimed it all, slinging the weapon over her shoulder. It was heavy, unfamiliar, but necessary. In the Fringe, waste was unforgivable. She found a small pouch on the leader: faded holo-chips, perhaps tradeable in the markets for stories or tech. As she pocketed them, the entity hummed contentedly, a companion she neither wanted nor could reject. It whispered fragments—images of other Strands, gates reopening, worlds unraveling. Was it sharing visions, or planting seeds of madness?
Elara tightened her grasp on the obsidian fragment until the sting anchored her fraying composure.
With resolve hardening her features, she set out on her trek.
Behind her, the cadavers began to cool, the relentless dunes initiating their eternal task of interment, layer by layer erasing evidence of the confrontation.
Ahead lay the interminable Fringe, a merciless panorama punctuated by the skeletal remnants of inoperable gates and the dilapidated husks of perished worlds.
She refrained from glancing rearward, her steps purposeful despite the tremor in her limbs.
In the newfound tranquility, the entity ensconced in her shadow murmured a solitary word, teetering on the brink of comprehension.
Begin.
Elara paused briefly, the whisper lingering in her mind like a half-remembered dream. What had she unleashed? The shard pulsed faintly in her hand, a reminder that her life—already a threadbare tapestry of loss and endurance—had irrevocably altered. The Fringe had always been a place of hidden dangers. Still, now, with this power awakening inside her, she wondered if she had become the danger itself. Rumors of "Echoes"—mystical manifestations tied to the Weave's more profound mysteries—flickered through her thoughts. Were the old tales true? Did relics like this one awaken dormant forces within the soul, only to consume it from within?
She shook her head, pushing the questions aside for now. Survival first. She knelt again, double-checking the bodies for anything missed—a map etched on leather, pointing to a hidden cache? No, just more scraps. Rising, she pressed on toward the distant silhouette of a scavenger camp, smoke rising like a beacon. But as she walked, she spotted movement: a lone figure on a ridge, watching the scene unfold. A witness. Word would spread—raiders' kin seeking vengeance, or opportunists hunting the "shiny trinket." The stakes had risen; she wasn't just a scavenger anymore.
As the sun dipped lower, casting elongated shadows that seemed to dance with newfound life, Elara realized she wasn't just surviving—she was the storm, and it hungered for more. The entity stirred again, offering a glimpse: a gate flickering to life, threads reconnecting. But at the edge of the vision, her own face dissolved into a void. Gift or curse? Only the Weave knew, and it wasn't telling.