The air on the observation deck tasted of ozone and despair—the particular flavor of a world that had stopped believing in tomorrow.
Elara leaned against the cold railing, watching the city below through the atmospheric dome. New London wasn't dying with fire or ice or plague. It was dying of quiet. A slow, meticulous unraveling of the laws that held reality together. Light sometimes forgot to bounce. Sound occasionally chose not to travel. Last Tuesday, gravity had taken a fifteen-minute nap over sector seven, and three hundred people had drifted gently up toward the dome before remembering to fall.
Her terminal diagnosis had come six months ago, but she'd known long before the doctors confirmed it. Cellular Ontological Decay—a fancy way of saying her body was rejecting its own existence. Her cells were forgetting how to be cells, just as the universe outside was forgetting how to be a universe. They said she had 23 days left. She suspected the world had less.
"Elara."
Professor Aris's voice was softer than usual, which meant the news was worse than usual. She turned. His lab coat was frayed at the cuffs, his eyes the color of old tea. He'd been her mentor since she was eighteen, back when physics was about discovering how things worked, not documenting how they stopped working.
"They're ready," he said.
She nodded. The Tear. Humanity's last, desperate prayer. A wound in spacetime that had appeared six months ago—coinciding perfectly with her diagnosis, though no one but her seemed to notice the symmetry. A shimmering vertical scar in the air above what used to be the Pacific Ocean, visible only through certain instruments. A hole in reality that didn't lead anywhere anyone could map.
And she, Elara Vance, 28-year-old physicist with nothing left to lose, was the only one small enough, broken enough, and curious enough to step through.
The walk to the lab was silent through empty corridors. The population was a third of what it had been five years ago. Not from death, but from drift. People would simply... stop being somewhere. They'd fade from photographs. Their names would slip from databases. The universe was editing itself down to a simpler story, and humanity was excess prose.
The lab hummed with the sound of machines trying to impose order on chaos. In the center of the room hovered the projection—a real-time feed of the Tear. It looked like a vertical sheet of mercury standing on end, rippling with colors that didn't have names.
"The stabilizers will give you five minutes of coherent passage," Aris said, handing her the slim pack that contained everything she would bring. A water filter. Nutrient bars. A journal and pen. A photograph of her mother, already fading at the edges. "After that, the field collapses. There's no coming back."
"I know."
He hesitated. "We've detected... conceptual layers. As if you won't just be passing through space, but through... ideas. Foundational principles. The readings are... theological."
Elara almost smiled. "You think I'm walking through someone else's Ten Commandments?"
"I think," he said slowly, "that you're walking through the architecture of a different kind of reality. One that might still remember how to be solid."
She looked at the Tear. The colors shifted—blue that felt like a scream, gold that tasted of promises, purple that hummed with forever. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing left in the world.
"Why me?" she asked, though she knew the answer.
"Because you're already half-gone," Aris whispered. "Your decay resonance matches the Tear's frequency. You're the key that fits the broken lock."
She nodded. No grand speech. No last words. She'd written her letters yesterday. They were already fading on the paper.
The platform hummed beneath her feet. The air crackled. The Tear widened—not like a door opening, but like a wound remembering it was supposed to bleed.
"Five minutes," Aris said. His hand brushed her shoulder. A goodbye.
Elara took a breath—the last breath of her dying world—and stepped forward.
---
The first thing she noticed was the sound.
Not a sound, exactly. A pressure. Like being dipped in liquid concept. She was falling, but not downward—through. Through layers of... meaning.
LAYER ONE: A GALE THAT PROMISED NOTHING.
Wind that whispered you are free while simultaneously weaving a cage of every possible choice until choice itself became meaningless. She felt her own memories of indecision crystallize, then shatter. The wind wasn't air—it was option, pure and overwhelming.
LAYER TWO: THE WEIGHT OF WORDS MADE STONE.
Every promise she'd ever made—to her mother, to Aris, to herself—solidified into contracts that wrapped around her bones. I'll be home for dinner. I'll finish the research. I'll keep breathing. Each vow became geological, sediment layering upon sediment until she was drowning in the fossil record of her own intentions.
LAYER THREE: A MOMENT STRETCHED INTO FOREVER.
The instant her doctor had said "terminal" stretched out like taffy. Not just the memory, but the feeling—the cold shock, the hollow behind her ribs—made eternal. Grief became a climate. She was breathing it.
LAYER FOUR: KNOWLEDGE AS A ROOM WITH NO DOOR.
Every fact she'd ever learned, every equation, every theory, arranged itself on shelves she couldn't reach. Wisdom became architecture, beautiful and imprisoning. She knew everything and understood nothing.
LAYER FIVE: A SCALE THAT WEIGHED STORIES, NOT TRUTH.
Her life played out as a trial where the verdict kept changing based on how interesting the narrative was. Her childhood trauma: tragic backstory or boring exposition? Her illness: meaningful metaphor or clumsy plot device?
LAYER SIX: A FIRE THAT BURNED WITHOUT FUEL.
Conflict without cause. Struggle without stakes. She fought nothing, against no one, for no reason, with all her strength. Exhaustion as an aesthetic.
LAYER SEVEN: A LOVE THAT LEFT NO ROOM TO BREATHE.
Her mother's face, smiling, telling her to be safe, be careful, be home soon, be good, be happy, be, be, be—until the affection became a smothering blanket, warm and airless.
Seven baptisms. Seven violences done to her soul. She wasn't just passing through space—she was being remade in the image of a world that had its own sickness, its own broken dreams.
When she hit the water, it was almost a relief.
Cold, salt, reality. She broke the surface, gasping, her pack miraculously still strapped to her back. The sky above was wrong—too blue, too clean, with clouds that looked painted by a meticulous hand. Two moons hung where there should have been one, and the stars...
The stars were in constellations she didn't recognize. They seemed to be watching.
She swam toward shore, her body aching with the memory of those seven layers. They'd left marks on her soul like psychic bruises. Her cellular decay—the thing that was killing her—hummed differently here. Not gone, but... changed. As if this world's sickness was talking to her own.
The beach was white sand that glittered with crystalline fragments. As she dragged herself onto it, she saw the footprints.
Boot prints, leading from the treeline to where she lay. Fresh.
She looked up.
He stood ten feet away, silhouetted against the double-moon light. Tall, armored in dark metal that seemed to drown out the light, with a cape that moved when there was no wind. His face was half-hidden by a hood, but one eye glowed faintly blue. Not with technological enhancement, but with something older, sadder.
He watched her with the weary expression of a coroner examining a body he'd expected to find.
"You're late," he said. His voice was like stones grinding underwater. "But then, I suppose punctuality is the first casualty of falling through the Firmament."
Elara pushed wet hair from her face. "Where am I?"
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he knelt, picking up a handful of sand and letting it trickle through his fingers. The grains didn't fall straight down—they swirled in a miniature spiral before hitting the ground.
"In the receiving room of an asylum," he said finally. "Welcome to Teyvat, Fourth Descender. The one the Irminsul records couldn't predict." He looked at her, his glowing eye seeing not just her body, but the seven layers still clinging to her soul like phantom limbs. "You have no idea how broken this world is. But you will. Oh, you will."
He extended a hand. Not to help her up, but to show her his palm. On it, etched in faint light, was a symbol—a tree with roots that became branches that became roots again, caught in an infinite loop.
"My name is Dainsleif," he said. "I was once the Bough Keeper. Now I'm just a witness. And you, Elara Vance, are the only clean thing to touch this world in five hundred years."
He smiled then, a thin, bitter curve of lips.
"Let me show you what freedom looks like when it forgets how to be free."