The moonlight dripped like molten silver over the ruins, casting long shadows that stretched almost with a will of their own. The city was but a shell-a tomb for a world long since forgotten. The winds of time had worn its magnificent structures to nothing more than jagged skeletons of stone and steel. The air was dead, with no sound but the periodic whispered wind through broken remnants of what once gave life to civilization.
Kaelen just stood there, stuck in an awkward stillness; he could feel in his senses something uncomfortable-a cold shroud, the sensation of weight pressing down on him due to the presence of some unnatural force. The air, tonight, was alive and buzzing with electricity from some unnatural, unseen presence touching it with their hand.
Then he heard them.
A voice.
It was soft at first, so faint that Kaelen thought it might have been the wind. But it lingered, lingering in his mind long after the first note had slipped into the night. He turned to see Erynn standing amidst the ruins, her back to him, head tilted slightly toward the sky. Her eyes were closed, her lips moving with the slow, deliberate cadence of a song Kaelen had never heard before. It wasn't a song of sorrow or joy-no, it was something different. Something ancient.
It was as if her voice reverberated through the air, vibrating within the fissures in the stone beneath her feet. It was raw, a painful beauty-like the sound of something breaking and healing all at once. The melody pulled at his heart, a tugging upon the fabric of his being. It called to him, yet pushed him back-a push and pull of oppositional forces fighting for dominance.
At first, he thought it was because of the song-the beauty of it a thing that turned him drunken to draw him closer despite himself. But then something changed: the air thickened with weight, like an oppressive mist that crawled his skin, tightened his chest, and he knew his mind raced to comprehend it-something wasn't right here, this didn't sound right.
"Erynn." His voice cracked, and, with a step towards her, it was as if the words themselves were swallowed by the air, by the song.
She said nothing.
The wind changed and carried cold into his skin, yet the steam coming from Kaelen's lips had nothing to do with this sudden coldness. No, it was because of the weight-the invisible, but real, weight in the air above him, hanging around, as if lingering just at the edges of his peripheral vision, as would a shadow opposing the luminous rays of the moon. And he felt-it-a creeping sense of dread seeping into his bones.
Abruptly, the song stopped. Erynn's lips quieted, and her eyes sprang open, gazing through and beyond Kaelen out into the barren wasteland of the city ruins. Her face was far away, inscrutable.
"They have come," she breathed.
A chill dread flowed through Kaelen's veins. He knew exactly who she spoke of. He could feel it-the sensation of something else, something that did not belong in this world.
The Watchers.
A flicker of movement tugged at his eyes. The shadows of the city stretched and writhed, forming shapes that were not quite right. They were not human, not quite. Distorted, half-formed, as if they struggled to retain any kind of existence at all. Kaelen's heart quickened as the shapes firmed up, became more distinct, more real.
The Observer stood before them.
A nightmare creation; it moved with a continuous changing of shape that was never truly solid, no more substantial than a mirage, a phantasm pulled from the substance of reality. There was nothing focused in its face; darkly misted, as though the creature held no real identity, no self. This thing was the living, breathing manifestation of the Rift-a something of it and from it.
Erynn took another step backward, and her face emptied into no emotion whatsoever. Her body was shaking, but not out of fear-no, it was something else. It was what her connection to the Rift had done to her. Kaelen noticed the slight quiver of her lips, the way her hands clenched into fists at her sides. He didn't know whether the song had summoned the Observer or if the creature had been drawn simply by the Rift's echo, but he could feel the weight of her vulnerability, the way it hung around her like a suffocating fog.
She wasn't afraid. She was exhausted.
"The song," she said, her voice low but strained. "It calls them. It always has. They are the correctors, Kaelen. They come to fix what's broken."
Kaelen didn't need to ask what she meant by that. The Rift. The fractures in reality. He could feel the weight of it pressing against him, clawing at his thoughts, trying to slip inside.
But he couldn't let it. Not now.
He turned to Erynn, his heart racing. There was something else in her eyes-something that made him pause, a flicker of something that could have been fear. It was gone in an instant, but it was there. And it terrified him.
Erynn wasn't just an ally. She wasn't just a guide. She was tangled in the Rift, bound to it in ways he couldn't yet understand.
"Erynn…," he said, his voice quiet now, a quiver entering. "What happens to you if we survive this? What happens if we make it out, and the Rift is still inside of us?"
She didn't answer at once; she moved closer to him, her eyes searching his face as if to read him, trying to understand him. Her fingers brushed against his hand in a light touch, enough to run shivers down his spine.
"It doesn't matter," she finally said. "It's inside me already. It has always been inside me. The question is, Kaelen—are you willing to let it inside of you, too?"
The Observer loosed a low, uncanny howl-a shriek that seemed to reverberate into Kaelen's chest, clacking his bones one against another. The world around him stuttered, warped, as if reality was straining, tenuous threads of connection, trying not to tear free. He could sense the Rift, could feel it in the uncooked power throbbing along beneath his skin: an electric heartbeat of chaos begging him to seize it.
Kaelen gritted his teeth, pushing the panic down. He didn't know how to control it, how to make sense of it. But he knew one thing-if he didn't act, they would both die here, lost to the Rift and its servants.
With a cry, he reached deep inside, tugging on that strange energy that he had felt before. A storm, unruly and wild, choked through the Rift, the alien power coursing through him like blood. He felt it thrumming beneath his skin, in the bone marrow, to consume him where he stood.
But Kaelen mastered it. For now. He focused, bringing it together, forming it, tugging it into something more. Something that could fight back.
The Observer screamed, but it was no match for the force Kaelen had unleashed. In that instant, he harnessed a burst of raw power and sent the creature backward, twisting and warping its form as if it had been struck by something beyond its comprehension. It screamed once more, a deafening, maddening sound, and then it was gone, ripped apart by the energy Kaelen had summoned.
The silence that followed was oppressive, suffocating. Kaelen straightened, still panting, his chest heaving. His hands were shaking, his body still quivering from the after-effect of what he had done.
Erynn just stood beside him, her gaze unreadable. She did not say anything. There was no need to.
Kaelen turned to her, his heart still racing, a thousand thoughts tumbling in his mind. There was a connection between them now, something forged in the chaos of the Rift, something impossible to ignore. He didn't know what it meant, didn't know where it would take him, but he did know one thing: he was tangled up in this world now.
And he wasn't sure if there was any way out.
Erynn leaned in close to him now, her voice low, barely louder than a whisper. "You are learning how to harness it, Kaelen. Yet be wary; the Rift has its price-a toll it always takes for an investment of power."
Kaelen didn't respond. He didn't need to. The price was already becoming clear.