Aiden's world erupted in light.
Not the soft glow he'd imagined as a child, lying awake at night and wondering what colors looked like. Not the flickering warmth of torches or the harsh glare of city lamps.
This was something else entirely.
It wasn't just light.
It was sight.
And it shattered him.
Aiden's breath caught in his throat, his pulse hammering in his ears. His vision trembled—the edges too sharp, too vivid, the depth of everything wrong. His brain screamed, trying to process an overload of information it had never handled before.
Colors. Shapes. Motion. Distance.
The Rift wasn't black—it was alive. A writhing, twisting mass of impossible shapes, layers of reality stacked and folded like a nightmare origami. The buildings around him weren't just abandoned structures; they breathed, their surfaces pulsing like stretched skin over bone, veins of glowing energy coursing through their walls.
The ground itself shifted beneath him, warping, distorting, as if refusing to stay solid. The air rippled, dense and charged, humming with unseen forces.
And the creatures—
Aiden's stomach twisted violently.
They were wrong.
Shadows peeled themselves from the walls, limbs twisting at angles that defied logic. Their bodies flickered between solid and formless, stretching, shrinking, distorting like reflections on rippling water. Some hung from the buildings, eyeless heads turning toward him, jaws splitting open too wide. Others slithered between cracks in the pavement, their elongated fingers dragging behind them, bodies writhing like puppets with severed strings.
And they were watching him.
A voice, layered with thousands of whispers, rippled through the air.
"He sees."
Aiden's breath hitched.
His fingers dug into the shifting ground, his entire body locked in place. His mind was drowning, overwhelmed by the flood of perception. Every creature had patterns in their movement. Every surface was lined with fractures where the Rift was weakest. His eyes—no, his vision—followed the shifting layers of reality, watching possibilities unfold before they happened.
A Hunter's body being dragged into the dark. Another being torn apart before the creature even moved.
Futures.
Aiden was seeing them before they happened.
No.
This wasn't right.
The Rift pulsed.
Something shifted.
And then—
A glitch.
[SYSTEM ERROR—PROCESSING FAILURE.]
[UNKNOWN SENSORY ACTIVATION DETECTED.]
[RECALIBRATING…]
[ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.]
[USER STATUS: UNDEFINED.]
Aiden gasped, his hands shaking. His own body felt unreal, as though it wasn't just his vision that had changed—something deeper, something fundamental had altered within him.
The System was reacting.
Not guiding him.
Just struggling to process him.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
A figure stepped forward from the shadows.
Tall.
Wrong.
Its face was smooth, featureless, but its presence was suffocating. It stood apart from the other creatures, as if the laws of reality refused to touch it.
The moment Aiden's gaze locked onto it, his vision fractured.
A warning burned in his skull.
[UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED.]
[SYSTEM ERROR—DATA CANNOT BE PROCESSED.]
[UNKNOWN TRAIT INTERFERENCE DETECTED.]
The thing tilted its head.
The Rift shuddered.
Aiden's body locked up as the weight of its gaze crashed down on him.
The whispers grew frantic. The other creatures backed away.
"Not him."
"Not yet."
The figure did not speak. It did not move.
But Aiden felt it reach for him.
His vision split apart.
His mind cracked open.
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE ATTEMPT: FAILURE.]
[UNABLE TO PROCESS USER'S STATUS.]
[ERROR. ERROR.]
[ERROR.]
And something deep inside him stirred.
Something that had been waiting.
Aiden's breath hitched.
This wasn't just sight.
It was something else.
The System hadn't given this to him. The Rift hadn't forced it onto him.
This had always been there.
It had simply awakened.
A voice, deeper than anything human, thundered inside his skull.
"Wake up, Seer."
Aiden screamed.
And then—
Everything collapsed.