The first crack in the sky did not thunder. It whispered.
Solus Onelight froze, hand still hovering above the stack of firewood he'd been gathering. The world around him was alive — the village markets thrumming with life, the clang of a hammer on iron, the shouts of merchants, the shrill laughter of children darting between carts.
And yet, beneath it all — a soundless groan unfurled.
Solus tilted his head upward, toward the flawless blue sky. A breeze tugged at the rough linen of his tunic. Banners stitched with prayers for a bountiful harvest flapped over crooked rooftops. Smoke from the smithy's forge curled into the air, drawing lines toward the sun.
But above it all, past the clutter of color and noise, he saw it.
A thin, trembling fissure slicing across the heavens.
No one else noticed.
The blacksmith kept hammering. The merchants kept shouting. The children kept laughing.
But Solus stood still, his heart slowing, as though recognizing something the mind had not yet caught. The crack was not a wound of blood and bone — it was a wound of silence, bleeding a color that had no name.
He took a step back. Then another.
The noise of the world grew distant, blurred by a strange, heavy pressure that pressed against his skin. The very air shivered — as if existence itself strained to hold together.
A second crack branched from the first, delicate as spider silk, yet carrying a weight that made Solus's knees weaken.
This time, the world noticed.
The hammer slipped from the blacksmith's calloused hand, clattering against a stone. The old merchant woman selling herbs gasped and clutched her chest. A baby began to wail — a high, thin sound that cut through the thickening air like a knife.
The priest at the village altar dropped to his knees, whispering a prayer not meant for mortal ears.
Solus Onelight stared at the sky as the sun itself seemed to flicker, its light distorting — softer, harsher, wrong.The cracks yawned wider.
And from their depths, something fell.
Not rain.Not ash.Not stars.
Shards.
Fragments of something that had existed before worlds had names.
The first shard struck the ground near the center of the village square. It didn't impact with a crash, or a roar, or an explosion. It unmade sound.
The blast was silent — yet every structure, every stone, every fragile body within reach crumpled inward, folding as if they had never been real at all.
Solus staggered, a terrible stillness flooding through him.
The Rift had come.
And no prayer, no sword, no wall could stop it now.
Solus ran.
Not toward safety. There was none.
He ran because something primal, something deeper than thought, screamed inside his blood to move, to survive — to exist.
The village around him twisted and folded like a wet cloth in a storm. Stalls collapsed inward, their woodturning to brittle dust before hitting the ground. People stumbled, clawing at the air, mouths opening to scream but making no sound.
A second shard plummeted from the rift above — larger, slower, inevitable.
The ground beneath Solus's feet warped, buckling in impossible angles. Gravity loosened its hold, tugging in wrong directions. He stumbled forward — no, downward — then sideways, the world skewing as though some drunken god had tilted the land itself.
He dove, rolled across splintered cobbles, and slammed into the stone wall of a crumbling granary. Pain flared bright across his shoulder, sharp and grounding.
The second shard hit.
This time, he heard the world end.
A deep, crushing silence that vibrated through his bones.A silence so dense it became deafening.
Structures collapsed inward as if the center of gravity itself had inverted. Flames snuffed out mid-leap, leaving trails of smoke that hung frozen in the air.
Time itself seemed to fracture — moments stretching thin, snapping back without warning.
Solus clutched his side, forcing himself up. His vision blurred, not from injury, but from something worse — a rupture of what was into what should never have been.
Shapes moved in the distance. Twisting. Watching.
Things that had no right to exist inside a sane world.
He staggered toward the edge of the village, where the crumbling fields gave way to forest. Somewhere, he thought, he might hide, might survive — if only for a few more breaths.
But even as his legs carried him forward, Solus knew. The Rift was not something you could run from. It had already found him.
The third shard fell.
It wasn't faster or heavier than the others — but it knew where it wanted to land.
Directly above him.
Solus looked up — and for a moment, in the heart of the falling silence, he saw it.
Not just the shard — but the space beyond it.
A blackness deeper than night, stitched with thin, hungry colors that hurt to look at. A weight of meaning — foreign, beautiful, terrible — pressing against the torn sky.
The shard hit.
The world inverted.
Solus Onelight was torn away from the earth — from air, sound, and time.
From himself.
He was not flung backward. He was unmade.
Everything he was — muscle, mind, breath, memory — scattered like dust into the endless, silent storm.
And he fell.Down.Through.Beyond.
There was no sky here.
No earth. No breath. No heartbeat.
Solus floated in a place beyond places, his mind snagging on the edges of things he could not name.
Shards of lost time drifted past him — memories that weren't his, futures that might never be.
Everything blurred into a single, slow-motion spiral of becoming and unbecoming.
He reached for something — anything — and his fingers closed around a handful of silence.
It clung to him like frost.
In the distance — if distance could be said to exist here — a pulse shimmered. Not light. Not sound. A calling.
It throbbed once, twice, dragging Solus toward it with a pull deeper than gravity.
His body — if it could be called that anymore — responded instinctively, folding along the invisible currents. His thoughts unraveled, threads of memory slipping through unseen cracks.
His village.The sky.The pain.The running.
All of it faded.
All except one thing:
His name.
Solus Onelight.
A fragile anchor in a world eager to forget him.
He clung to it, wrapping the syllables tight around his existence like armor. And in doing so, he noticed something he hadn't before.
A second pulse.Weaker. Sharper.Buried inside his being.
It wasn't calling him outward — it was pulling him inward.
He hesitated.
Before him, the greater pulse shimmered again — vast, cold, inevitable. It promised power beyond reason. To follow it was to be reborn, reshaped.
But the smaller one...The one inside...
It promised something different.
Not power. Not rebirth.
Survival.
Real survival.
The kind that came not from surrendering to the Rift's hunger, but from forging a place within it.
Solus chose.
He closed his eyes — or maybe he didn't have eyes anymore — and reached inside himself.
And there, in the hollow center of what he had become, he found it:
A light.
Small. Pale. Flickering. But alive.
He wrapped his soul around it.
The Rift shrieked — a soundless roar that made the world tremble.
The greater pulse raged, trying to tear him away, to drown him in endless becoming.
Solus held on.
The light inside him flared — fragile, stubborn — and for a moment, the Rift recoiled.
A seam tore open in the void.
A way out.
Without hesitation, Solus hurled himself through it.
The light snapped — and he fell, truly fell, down into a world half-remembered, half-forgotten.
Through storms of memory, through rivers of broken stars, through empty echoes of prayers never spoken.
Until—
The ground caught him.
Real ground.
Cracked stone. Cold air. Gravity is heavy and reassuring.
Solus Onelight gasped, lungs burning, throat raw.
He was back.
Not where he had been — no village welcomed him, no sky smiled down.
Only ruins stretched in all directions, bathed in a strange, wrong twilight.
But he was alive.
Changed. Marked. Awakened.
Above him, the rift still loomed — a wound bleeding colors without names.
But for now, for this single moment, Solus Onelight was whole.
And somewhere deep inside him, the Rift still whispered.
Not a threat. Not a command.
A promise.
"You are no longer theirs."