The sky had been broken for as long as Walliam D'Heart could remember.
Not torn by storm. Not burned by fire.
Broken like something once whole had shattered — and the pieces had never stopped falling.
He stood at the edge of the cliff where the village used to end and the world used to make sense. Wind rushed upward from the abyss below, cold and hollow, tugging at his clothes as if the air itself wanted to pull him down into the drifting graveyard of stone and cloud.
Far beneath, islands floated in slow, lonely spirals. Chunks of earth. Splintered trees. The remains of places that had slipped free from the world and never returned.
People called it the Deep Sky.
Walliam called it the place things went when they were forgotten.
"Boy!"
The voice cracked across the wind. Old Mara. Always watching.
"You planning to fall today, or you just teasing death again?"
Walliam didn't turn. "Just looking."
"There's nothing down there worth seeing."
That wasn't true. There was something down there. He felt it. Every time he came to the edge, that strange pressure stirred in his chest. Not pain. Not exactly.
A pulse.
Like a second heartbeat — deeper, slower.
Mara shuffled closer, boots scraping stone. "You stare too long into broken places," she muttered. "They start staring back."
Walliam finally glanced at her. Her gray hair whipped around her face, eyes sharp despite her years. She had raised half the village after the sky fractures took parents, homes, whole histories.
"Maybe it's already staring," he said quietly.
Mara studied him longer than usual. Her gaze dropped, just briefly, to the center of his chest — like she could see through skin and bone.
"Go help at the water lines," she said at last. "Cloud wells won't pull themselves."
He nodded and turned away from the edge. But the feeling didn't fade. If anything, it grew stronger as he walked through the remains of the village.
Houses leaned at tired angles. Wind chimes made from scrap crystal clinked softly. Above, the sky shimmered — faint veins of light threading between distant floating landmasses.
Some said the lights were the bones of old gods.
Others said it was just what happened when the world cracked.
Walliam didn't know what to believe.
He only knew the pulse inside him matched those lights.
The cloud well stood in the village center — a metal ring anchored over open air. A faint mist spiraled upward, captured and condensed into drinkable water through filters salvaged from Aetherfall traders decades ago.
Walliam took the crank and began turning. The mechanism groaned.
"You're late," Lysa said, dropping two empty containers beside him.
"I was thinking."
"That's usually when trouble happens."
He smirked. "Then I'll stop."
She didn't smile back. Her eyes drifted toward the horizon — toward the darker stretch of sky where clouds swirled wrong.
"You feel it?" she asked.
Walliam didn't pretend. "Yeah."
The air felt heavier. Charged. Like before lightning, but deeper.
Then came the sound.
A distant crack.
Sharp. Glass-like. Too big to belong to anything human.
Both of them froze.
Another crack followed. And another.
Above them, the sky brightened along a thin line — a seam splitting open.
People stepped from houses. Conversations died.
The seam widened.
Light spilled through.
Not warm sunlight. Not star glow.
Something colder.
Something falling.
"It's another fracture," someone whispered.
"No," Mara said behind them, voice tight. "It's worse."
A streak tore across the sky — silver fire wrapped around a dark core. It screamed as it fell, not like wind, but like metal bending, like reality protesting.
Walliam couldn't breathe.
The pulse in his chest slammed hard enough to make him stumble.
The streak crashed beyond the forest ridge.
The ground shook.
Birds erupted upward in a storm of wings.
Silence followed.
Heavy. Waiting.
"No one goes," Mara ordered. "We don't know what—"
Walliam was already running.
Branches tore at his sleeves as he pushed through the forest. Roots snagged his boots. The air tasted like iron and cold rain.
The pulse guided him.
Faster. Louder.
Like something calling home.
He burst through the treeline into a clearing that hadn't existed before.
A crater smoldered in the earth.
At its center lay a crystal.
Small. Jagged. No bigger than his palm.
But it was alive.
Light pulsed inside it — faint, rhythmic.
Matching him.
He stepped closer without meaning to. Heat brushed his skin, but it didn't burn.
The world around him blurred. Sound dulled. The wind stopped.
Only the crystal remained.
And the heartbeat.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
His own chest answered.
The crystal's light brightened.
Images flickered at the edges of his vision — cities floating in golden skies, armies of light and shadow, a crown of crystal thorns, a figure standing alone as the sky broke apart.
Walliam gasped.
The visions vanished.
Behind him, a twig snapped.
He turned sharply.
At the edge of the clearing stood a shape where no shape should be — darker than shadow, edges flickering like smoke. Two pale lights glowed where eyes might be.
It tilted its head.
Hungry.
Walliam's pulse spiked.
The crystal flared.
The creature moved — fast, silent, wrong.
Instinct took over.
He grabbed the crystal.
Pain exploded through him — not burning, not freezing, but too much. Light raced through his veins. His vision went white.
The creature lunged.
Something burst outward from Walliam's body in a ring of force. Air cracked. Leaves tore from trees.
The shadow thing screamed — a sound like tearing cloth — and shattered into drifting ash.
Silence crashed down.
Walliam fell to his knees, crystal clutched in his hand.
Smoke rose from his skin. Faint lines of light glowed beneath the surface, branching like cracks in glass.
His heart pounded.
So did the crystal.
In the same rhythm.
Footsteps approached behind him — villagers, voices, fear.
Walliam looked down at the thing in his palm.
It felt warm now.
Familiar.
Like it had been missing.
Like it had come back.
Above the clearing, high beyond the clouds, something vast stirred.
And somewhere far away, a man with a crown of crystal fragments opened his eyes — and smiled.