The wind tastes like rain, though the sky's clear.
We march south again at dawn, our boots crunching over the fractured plains. The world looks almost normal now, but only if you squint — only if you want to believe it. The grass grows in straight lines, too precise. The clouds drift, then reverse, like the wind changed its mind halfway through moving them.
The others don't notice.
Or maybe they pretend not to.
Kaede's face is buried in her visor feed. Aya keeps our pace sharp, voice crisp with orders that sound more like habit than necessity. Miyu hums softly behind me, balancing her pack of strange herbs and the occasional unexplainable crystal. And Yumi — well, Yumi's praying again. She mutters to something she swears is listening.
Me?
I'm just listening to the static behind my thoughts.
It's been louder since the shard disappeared. I hear it when I blink, like my mind trying to tune into a station that doesn't exist anymore.
Find the seam, it says.
Wake the dreamer.
He's still inside you.
I try not to answer back.
---
By midday, we reach the ridge where my second signal supposedly appeared. The Aether field here feels dense, like walking through mist that isn't quite physical. Every breath hums. My pulse throbs in rhythm with it, and I swear the air glows faintly when I exhale.
Kaede stops and scans the horizon. "Readings are fluctuating. The field's alive."
Aya frowns. "Alive as in… 'let's shoot it,' or alive as in 'don't breathe too loud'?"
Kaede doesn't answer. She never jokes when she's scared.
Miyu kneels and touches the dirt, whispering a quick charm. The soil ripples like water. "There's something buried here. Something old."
Yumi steps forward, eyes half-lidded. "I can hear them," she says softly. "The voices of those who slept beneath the dawn. They're whispering your name again, Captain."
Aya rolls her eyes. "Oh, great. Because that's not creepy at all."
But she looks at me anyway. Quietly, searching for any sign that I'm hearing it too.
I am.
The whispers aren't coming from underground.
They're coming from inside the air.
---
We camp early. The sky refuses to set. The sun hangs low and gold, caught in an endless afternoon that stretches longer than it should. Shadows keep changing direction. Time moves, but not forward.
Aya orders double watches. No one argues.
Kaede tinkers with the comm array while muttering to herself. Miyu's cooking — something with beans, rice, and faintly glowing leaves. Yumi's kneeling by the ridge again, hands clasped, whispering to a faith that's never failed her but never answered either.
I sit apart, staring at the horizon. The field below looks like glass, and if I focus too long, I can see things moving underneath it — shapes, memories, reflections.
One of them looks like me.
---
Aya joins me after a while. She sits beside me, stretching her legs with a grunt.
"You're doing it again," she says.
"What?"
"Brooding."
I sigh. "Thinking."
"Same thing, philosopher."
I almost smile. Her teasing feels real — solid in a way the world doesn't anymore.
Aya leans back, staring at the frozen sun. "You ever wonder if we actually won? I mean, the war's over, but half the world's still broken. Sometimes I think we just traded one kind of fight for another."
"Yeah," I say quietly. "A quieter one."
She looks at me. "You've changed, Haruto. You used to keep everything inside. Now it's like you're… listening to something the rest of us can't."
I don't respond. I don't have to. The silence between us hums — alive, tense.
And then, just faintly, the air itself speaks.
Do you remember what she promised you?
Aya blinks. "Did you say something?"
"No."
We both go still.
Wake up, the voice whispers again — soft, feminine, heartbreakingly familiar.
Aya stands, scanning the area. "Yumi? Miyu? That better not be one of your spirit jokes—"
The sky flickers.
For a split second, the light dims to silver, and everything freezes. The air, the wind, even the hum of Kaede's machines. Aya's mid-step, caught like a statue.
And in that stillness, she appears.
Lunaris.
Her form glows faintly, suspended above the ridge, her hair drifting as though she's underwater. She looks at me — and only me.
"Haruto," she says. The voice is faint, layered with static, as if echoing from a place too far to reach.
I take a step forward. "You're alive."
She shakes her head. "No. You're asleep."
The world flickers again.
Aya moves — time resuming like nothing happened. She doesn't see Lunaris at all.
"Haruto?" she asks. "You okay?"
But the name doesn't sound right in her voice. It comes distorted, glitched, overlapping with Lunaris's whisper.
You are forgetting which dawn is yours.
The horizon cracks.
---
When the light settles again, the world's changed.
The ridge is gone. The camp, too. I'm standing alone in a field of white flowers stretching endlessly in every direction. The air smells like salt and static. The sky above is an unbroken dome of light, glowing with no visible sun.
I recognize this place.
The battlefield — before it burned.
And standing across from me, wearing her battle armor, is Lunaris.
Her eyes are warm this time. Not empty.
"Why am I here?" I ask.
She smiles gently. "Because you never left."
Her words hit me like a blade to the ribs. "That's not true. The war's over. The world's healing."
"Is it?" she asks softly. "Or is it simply repeating the moment before it died?"
I look around. The same breeze. The same field. The same faint, unending hum.
"Everything you see, every breath you take — it's my wish, Haruto," Lunaris says, stepping closer. "The world ended that day. I refused to let it go. So I rebuilt it from what remained."
"From memory," I whisper.
"From love," she corrects.
I shake my head. "That's not living."
Her smile fades. "It's surviving."
The wind picks up. Flowers scatter like ash.
"You carry my last fragment," she continues, her voice trembling. "The pulse within you — it's me. My echo. But it's fading. And if you wake up fully…"
"What happens?"
"The dream ends."
---
Her hand touches my chest, right over my Aether pulse. I can feel her warmth — faint but real.
"I can't keep you here much longer," she whispers. "The world's unraveling. The others will start to remember too. The sky will crack, and everything I built will fall away."
I grasp her wrist. "Then come with us."
She shakes her head. "I can't. I am this."
For a moment, neither of us speaks. The silence between us stretches, full of everything we lost.
"Haruto," she says finally, "if you love this world — if you love them — you have to let it die."
The air trembles. The light dims. The field dissolves.
---
I wake up screaming.
Aya's beside me again, shaking my shoulders. "Hey, hey! You were out cold for hours!"
We're back at the ridge. The others are here — exhausted, disoriented. Kaede's clutching her scanner, eyes wide.
"Captain," she says, voice trembling. "The readings are impossible. Time loops, spatial echoes, gravity distortion. It's like we're inside a simulation that's starting to… decay."
Aya frowns. "In plain language?"
Kaede meets her eyes. "The world's breaking."
The ground rumbles softly, as if agreeing.
Miyu kneels, clutching her pendant. "I saw something in my dreams," she whispers. "Lunaris. She was crying."
Yumi adds, "She said the dawn was ending."
Aya exhales sharply. "Fantastic. The goddess is sending out apocalypse notices now."
But even she sounds scared.
---
We stay awake through the night. None of us want to sleep anymore. Every time I blink, I see pieces of Lunaris's vision — fragments of the battlefield, flashes of light, the moment before everything turned white.
It's all the same loop.
Kaede keeps adjusting her scanners, muttering equations like prayers. Miyu's silent, her usual brightness dimmed. Yumi hums a hymn that keeps skipping, like she can't remember the next verse. Aya's pacing — restless energy barely masking fear.
I sit apart, watching the sky. The stars are wrong tonight — flickering like they're reflected in water.
When I close my eyes, I see her again.
Not Lunaris this time.
Myself.
Another me, standing in the same field, watching me back. When I move, he doesn't.
He speaks — my voice, but distant, hollow.
"You were never supposed to wake."
---
The horizon bends.
Reality folds inward, like the world's surface is peeling away. The stars smear into streaks of white. The sound of the wind becomes a deep, vibrating hum that shakes the ground.
Aya grabs my arm. "Haruto, what's happening?!"
I can't answer. The light inside me — the Aether pulse — ignites again, flooding through my veins like molten glass.
Kaede shouts something, but I can't hear it.
Then the earth splits.
A column of light erupts from the ridge, spiraling upward into the sky. The false sun fractures into shards, revealing a vast void beyond — swirling colors, shifting patterns, like the inside of a dream collapsing.
I can see it now.
The cracks beneath the dawn.
They stretch across the heavens, spiderwebbing through the light. Through them, glimpses of something vast and silent — the real sky, maybe, or the void that came after it.
Aya pulls me back. "We have to run!"
I shake my head. "No. This is what she meant. The seam — it's opening."
"Haruto, the ground is opening!"
She's right. The earth beneath us quakes, breaking into floating fragments suspended in light. Everything — tents, weapons, debris — hangs midair, spinning slowly in zero gravity.
Kaede's screaming data, Miyu's chanting spells, Yumi's praying so hard her voice breaks.
I just stare upward, into the endless, burning white.
And there — amid the chaos — I see her again.
Lunaris.
Smiling through the cracks in the sky.
"Wake up," she whispers.
Then everything shatters.
---
Silence.
When the light fades, I'm lying on solid ground again. The sky's dark now — night, not dawn. The stars are sharp, clear, unmoving.
Aya's beside me, unconscious but breathing. Kaede and Miyu are sprawled nearby, dazed but alive. Yumi kneels, eyes wide, staring at something above us.
I follow her gaze.
The false sun — gone. The cracks — gone.
But in their place, a single rift remains — a vertical tear in the air, faintly glowing, humming softly like a heartbeat. Inside it, I see flickers of another world.
The real one.
Or what's left of it.
And from within that light, Lunaris's voice echoes faintly — broken, fading, but still there.
Fragments… remain.
The rift pulses once, like a dying star.
And for the first time since the war ended, the world feels real again.
Too real.
To be continued in Chapter 19: "The Dawn That Wasn't"