---
The horizon was black fire.
The light that had once symbolized unity now flickered like a dying memory.
In the aftermath of Veyra's destruction, silence spread faster than the blast itself. No one spoke of casualties. There were no bodies to count, no ruins to dig through. Only glass plains, cooled into obsidian, stretched where the city once stood. The wind whispered through them like an elegy.
The Accord convened in panic. Representatives shouted across the Grand Chamber. Old allies pointed fingers.
"The southern fleet attacked the shipment!"
"No! The western reactors were unstable!"
"The prophets warned us this would happen!"
Lysara sat in the high seat, her eyes hollow. For the first time, she understood why Kael had built Afterlight beneath the mountains. People were safer in the dark.
"Enough," she said quietly. But no one heard.
Then she slammed her hand on the armrest. Ether surged through the marble veins of the floor, crackling blue and white. The chamber froze.
"Veyra's gone," she said. "Arguing won't bring it back. We investigate. We isolate the reactors. We rebuild. The Accord stands."
But the Accord did not stand.
By dawn, three provinces declared autonomy. Their envoys left before sunrise, escorted by militias. Trade halted. Convoys vanished. Communication lines failed.
Afterlight fractured not through war, but through silence.
---
Weeks passed. Lysara moved through the Citadel's corridors like a ghost. She spent her nights in the Observatory, staring at the Eclipse scar — a circular shadow in the sky where Veyra's reactor had bent the upper atmosphere. It looked like a black sun.
Her advisors begged her to retreat from politics, to secure the capital. She refused.
"If we wall ourselves in, we prove them right," she said. "We prove Afterlight is doomed to repeat the old world."
But privately, she began to doubt.
Every night she dreamed of Kael — not as a founder, but as a man walking through ruins, holding a shard of light in his hand. Each time she reached for it, it dissolved.
The Ether networks had started failing too. Engineers reported distortion in the flow. Some said the reactors were leaking energy. Others whispered the energy was changing — alive somehow.
In the eastern sector, soldiers went missing near the Rift, the scar where the first reactor was tested a century ago. Scouts returned incoherent, their shadows moving seconds before their bodies.
"Ether contamination," the scientists called it. But it felt older than science.
---
In the southern province of Elar, a new leader emerged: Maeron Vale, a former general of the Vanguard. He had fought during the first expansions after Afterlight's founding. He was strategic, calm, and ruthless.
Maeron gathered his council under a new banner — The True Accord. He claimed Lysara's lineage had betrayed Kael's vision. He promised order, discipline, and controlled Ether use.
"Afterlight's freedom bred corruption," he said in his broadcast. "We will bring unity through strength, not compromise."
Crowds cheered. His armies marched north.
The first skirmishes began near the Glass Plains, the site of Veyra's fall. Lysara refused to retaliate at first, hoping to avoid escalation. But when Maeron seized three border cities, she was forced to act.
Her commanders urged full retaliation. Lysara chose a different path.
"We defend, not conquer," she ordered. "We fight to protect what remains of light."
But every defensive victory was temporary. Maeron advanced like a tide. His soldiers used modified Ether rifles — weapons that hummed with black light. The captured scientists whispered that the energy they used was unstable, but powerful enough to vaporize entire battalions.
The war that followed was called The Eclipse Divide.
---
Months turned to years.
Afterlight's once-thriving cities became fortresses. Skies burned with residual Ether storms. Communication failed. No one remembered what started the war — only who they were told to hate.
Lysara's armies fought in silence, often without orders. The Citadel's voice faded under siege. Still, she refused to flee.
In her final broadcast before the Citadel's fall, she said:
> "The Accord was never meant to last forever. It was a bridge — not a home. If we burn the bridge, we burn our future. Do not let darkness rewrite truth."
Her message was cut mid-sentence as Maeron's forces breached the capital walls.
But history would not forget her.
---
Decades later, children in the southern provinces were taught that Lysara had been a tyrant who enslaved the north. Meanwhile, those in the northern enclaves spoke her name like a prayer — the last queen of the true light.
Truth fractured, like the world itself.
The Great Divide created two civilizations.
Southlight, ruled by Maeron's heirs, built a militarized empire powered by corrupted Ether, their skies permanently dimmed. They learned to manipulate shadow energy, creating machines that moved without sound, soldiers that faded in and out of visibility.
Northlight, descended from Lysara's surviving followers, withdrew into the mountains. They preserved the old teachings, rebuilding cities powered by clean reactors, guided by scholars who studied balance rather than conquest.
For centuries, neither side crossed the border. The Glass Plains — the site of Veyra's fall — became a forbidden zone. Black storms circled above it endlessly.
---
But time does not erase the pull of curiosity.
Three hundred years after the Divide, explorers from both sides began venturing into the Plains again.
Northlight scientists wanted to study the black sun's residue. Southlight warlords sought hidden technology rumored to lie beneath the glass.
None returned.
Until one did.
A scavenger named Aren Sol, born in Southlight's lower tiers, crawled out of the storm one night, covered in burns but holding something no one had seen in centuries — a fragment of pure Ether light, still glowing blue.
When questioned, Aren spoke a single sentence before collapsing:
> "The Founder still lives."
The interrogators thought him delirious. But word spread fast. Prophets, scholars, and soldiers all interpreted the phrase differently.
Some said Kael's mind had survived, preserved in Ether code.
Others claimed the Founder referred to a rebirth — a new force forming inside the storm.
Regardless of meaning, both sides began preparing.
Southlight mobilized armies toward the Plains.
Northlight activated its ancient defense systems, silent since the old wars.
The world stirred again.
---
In the mountains above the ruins of the Citadel, the last of Lysara's bloodline stood at a balcony, watching lightning strike the horizon. Her name was Eryndra Vale, though she had long dropped the family title. She was young, a scholar of the old texts, raised on both sides of history — half Southlight, half Northlight.
She held a pendant passed down from Lysara's era. Inside it pulsed a faint blue light. When she opened it, a voice whispered through her mind. Not words, but presence. Familiar. Ancient.
The same presence that had haunted Kael, Seris, and every visionary before them.
Ether itself — alive, waiting.
As the black sun began to pulse again over the Plains, Eryndra turned to her companions.
"It's waking," she said.
"What is?" asked one of the scholars beside her.
She looked toward the distant glow, where lightning spiraled into the ground like veins feeding a buried heart.
"The Founder," she whispered. "Or what's left of him."
---
The Eclipse Divide was no longer just a war of nations. It was the prelude to something greater — a convergence of everything that had been buried under centuries of pride, faith, and silence.
The glass plains began to crack. Light bled through the fractures, both white and black. The world's balance had tilted again, and this time, it would not stop at division.
It would rewrite the meaning of existence itself.
---