The morning after the anomaly felt deceptively ordinary.
For the first time in days, Mael woke up without the sound of alarms, shattering glass, or distant screams. The sky above the Sanctuary was still cracked with faint lines of pale, unnatural light, but nothing new had fallen through. No new distortions. No new creatures. No new deaths.
It was a silence that didn't comfort—only warned.
Mael stood on the balcony of the eastern watchtower, overlooking the ruins beyond the barrier. His hands rested on the cold metal railing as the wind carried a faint trace of burning wood, and something older, something metallic—like dried blood that never fully washed away. The world was still dying, just slower today.
Elyndra joined him without speaking. She didn't need to. Her presence always announced itself, not with footsteps or breath, but with that faint ripple of energy that lived beneath her skin—something not fully human, not fully divine, something between.
"You didn't sleep," she said quietly.
"I did," Mael replied. "Just not long enough."
"You dreamed again."
He didn't answer. She already knew.
The dream had returned—the void of hands, the voice with no mouth, and the same sentence, spoken like an echo stamped into the bones of the world:
"The light does not save. The light remembers."
He didn't know if it was a warning, or a promise, or a threat… but it was always the same.
Before he could speak, a distant bell rang through the Sanctuary—three slow chimes. Not an alarm. Not an attack.
A summons.
Council meeting.
Elyndra exhaled, eyes narrowing. "They're going to ask about the fractures again."
"They want answers," Mael said. "They think I'm hiding something."
"You are hiding something."
Mael didn't deny it. He was hiding something—something he wasn't even sure he fully understood. Something that woke inside him when the second rupture opened. Something that made the creatures stop moving when he stared into them. Something that made reality bend, just slightly, when he was angry enough.
A power that didn't feel like it belonged to him… or to anything human.
He turned to leave, but Elyndra caught his arm.
"You need to decide," she said. "If you keep pretending you don't know what's happening to you, it will destroy us before the ruptures do."
"What do you want me to say?" he snapped. "That something inside me is changing? That I'm hearing things no one else hears? That the world is breaking and somehow—I'm connected to it?"
"Yes," she said. "Exactly that."
Mael looked past her, toward the fractures in the sky, still pulsing with that faint impossible glow.
"If I admit it," he said quietly, "then I have to accept it. And if I accept it, I have to use it. And once I use it…"
He didn't finish.
He didn't have to.
Elyndra's voice softened. "Power isn't evil, Mael. It's what you do with it."
"No," he said, staring at his hands. "Power changes what you do. And then it changes what you are."
Before she could respond, a soldier sprinted up the tower steps, sweat on his face, breath shaking.
"Commander—Mael—you're needed now. The council chamber… something's wrong."
Mael didn't run. He walked.
Fast. Silent. Focused.
But when the doors opened, he froze.
The council room wasn't filled with voices.
It was filled with bodies.
Half the council members lay slumped over the table, eyes open, pupils white, faces twisted in agony. No wounds. No blood. No sign of struggle.
They looked like they had died in the middle of a sentence.
Only one man was still breathing—Councilor Brevan—trembling on the floor, clutching his head, whispering the same words again and again:
"The light… the light… the light…"
Not like a prayer.
Like a curse.
Mael knelt beside him. "What happened?"
Brevan's eyes widened—not at Mael, but behind him, as if something was still there.
"It spoke," Brevan rasped. "We tried to question it. We thought it was… a message. A signal. But it wasn't a voice from above…"
He began choking, body convulsing.
"It was inside us."
Elyndra crouched beside them. "What spoke?"
Brevan looked straight into Mael's eyes—and smiled with blood on his teeth.
"The light that should not be."
Then he stopped breathing.
And the walls began to crack.
Not from impact.
From inside, as if reality itself was being peeled apart.
Mael stood slowly, pulse racing, breath frozen.
The calm was gone.
And the world was no longer waiting.
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