Before them, the city stood like a monument to oblivion, a once-thriving metropolis now reduced to hollow bones. It was forgotten by time and forgotten by the world, but he couldn't get rid of that haunting feeling that it still remembered, still whispered. The ruins were cold, yet deeper beneath the coldness, there was something deeper, something far more haunting. It seemed the city itself had been consumed by that very force it birthed: the Rift.
A weight was in the air, the feel of decay made heavy with something more. There was no wind, no songs of birds. There was only silence. And silence, Kaelen knew too well, had a voice.
"The heart of the Regime. or what's left of it," Erynn's voice cut through the heavy silence, a mix of disgust and mourning oozing from her words. She stepped ahead, tracing the outline of an old building, its skeletal remains barely clinging to the earth. "This is where the experiments began. Where they first tried to understand what the Rift really was. Where they failed, and in their failure, they became something. less."
Kaelen didn't answer immediately. He couldn't. His mind was lost in the depths of his thoughts, spiraling further down with every step. The Rift, the Regime, the Overseers-he was starting to understand. No, not understand. He was beginning to feel it-to feel the inexorability of it all. Truth wasn't something that he could grasp with his hands or his eyes. Something deeply residing within, being a part of him, is a dark reflection of everything he feared to turn himself into.
They walked deeper into the ruins down narrow pathways seldom crossed, save by the crunch of shoes and feet upon the brittle earth. Before them stretched out ruined labs-twisted wrecks of technology sat amidst glass tanks that once held terrors now long forgotten. Equations and symbols smeared the walls, faded now-fine lines promising knowledge, which somehow became warnings.
"This is where it all began," Erynn said softly, her voice distant, as her fingers brushed over a cracked panel. "The Rift wasn't just an experiment. It was meant to be salvation. The Overseers, they wanted to transcend. They thought they could use the Rift to elevate themselves, to break free from the bonds of mortality."
Kaelen's heart thudded painfully in his chest. Transcendence. He had heard that word before, too many times. It had become some kind of sickening mantra for the Regime's twisted ambitions. But standing in the ruins of their failure, the word lost meaning-as if it had been hollowed out, its original purpose bled out of it. Transcendence was supposed to be pure. Divine. But now, it was just another kind of greed, another frantic cheating of death.
"They didn't transcend," Kaelen spat with bitterness, his voice low, a whisper. "They fell. And what they became. it's not even human anymore."
Erynn looked at him, her eyes distant. "Isn't that what we all fear? Becoming something less than we are, all for the sake of immortality, or power, or just survival? The Regime wasn't wrong in wanting to free themselves from the chains of their bodies. But they failed to see that the chains they wanted to break weren't physical. They were internal, the ones that bind us to our humanity."
Kaelen's mind was reeling. Humanity. He was beginning to question what that word meant. What did it mean to be human when the very world you lived in demanded you sacrifice your soul to stay alive? Was it worth it? Could it ever be worth it to lose everything just to keep breathing for a little longer?
His mind went dark, spiraling inward, questioning everything he had ever known. He could feel the Rift calling to him once more, its terrible, seductive pull, as if it offered an answer to the gnawing emptiness inside him. The temptation was overwhelming.
I'm not even sure I know what it means to be human anymore," Kaelen muttered, his voice heavy with doubt. "If I'm constantly fighting just to survive, am I any different from the Overseers? If I let myself be consumed by the Rift, by this endless battle. am I any less lost than they were?"
Erynn stepped closer to him, her gaze intense. "Is this what you are willing to do, Kaelen-become the monster you're fighting against? It is not in the Rift, it is not in this war. It's in what we choose to hold onto. Ultimately, it is not the world around us that defines us. It's the choices we make, the things we decide to fight for. You can fight for your humanity, if that's what you want. But you got to know what you're ready to give up."
Kaelen's chest constricted. Her words-cold, sharp, and unrelenting-cut through the fog in his brain. All along, he had been so set on the end, on winning, on vengeance, that he'd forgotten how it was to live. To live, not survive.
They reached the heart of the ruined laboratory, the heart of the experiment. It was here that they had first attempted to breach the Rift, to understand it, to control it. And Kael felt the air thick with the residual of their attempts. The shattered glass tanks, the shattered equipment, the soft hum of machinery that refused to die-all told him something. But now it wasn't a whisper; it was a roar. A roar of all the lost souls consumed by this madness.
"The Rift wasn't their salvation," Kaelen whispered hoarsely. "It was their destruction. They thought they could control it. But they didn't. They became part of it. Just like everyone else who ever tried."
"Perhaps they did not try to control it," Erynn said in a quiet tone. "Maybe they were only trying to understand it. Perhaps they thought the Rift could give them the answers they were too afraid to face. But it didn't. And they paid the price for their arrogance."
Kaelen closed his eyes, the weight of her words settling upon him like a thousand tons. He wasn't sure he could face what the Rift had in store for him. He wasn't sure he could face what he might have to become to fight it-to fight the Regime, to survive.
And yet.
He opened his eyes, and there she was, staring back at him, a burning question in his chest. "What if the Rift holds the answers we need?"
Erynn held his gaze, hers unreadable. "The answer is never what you expect, Kaelen. The question is what you're willing to lose to find it.
A silence fell between them, thick and heavy with unspoken truths. Kaelen felt the weight of that silence, the pressure of the decision he was standing on the edge of. But in that moment, as he stood amidst the ruins of the city, the wreckage of all their dreams, he realized something: he was already losing. Not to the Regime, not to the Rift, but to himself.
He had no choice but to go on, but with every step, the cost was growing clearer. Yet somehow, perversely, the darkness around him seemed calling out to him, a part of him reaching for it, for what it offered. The truth of the Rift was just another lie, but it was a lie he was ready to believe.
For now.