Episode 10: "Starbreakers"
Zephyron Prison howled around them.
Emergency sirens screamed through warped halls, their wails bending under gravitational strain. Kael and Sera sprinted through the collapsing ruins of Cellblock Theta, boots slamming against twisted steel as the world around them unraveled. The fractured sword on Kael's back pulsed in rhythm with his heart—reacting, guiding, almost alive.
Every corridor bent wrong. Light flickered sideways. Gravity didn't follow rules anymore.
They were deep now—past security gates that hadn't opened in years. Past warning signs half-swallowed by rust. Into the lower sectors—zones long forgotten, where reality itself rippled like disturbed water.
Sera (between breaths): "They never meant for anyone to come down here…"
Kael: "Good. That means they'll have trouble following."
Behind them, a muffled explosion echoed upward—the fortress groaning as another support buckled. Somewhere above, Riftguard squads were shouting into failing comms, their tactics crumbling under weightless pressure and fear.
Kael didn't look back.
The relic sword on his back hummed again—deeper this time. Drawing him forward. Downward. Toward something older than this prison.
The walls changed.
No longer cold industrial steel—now, they curved in impossible ways. Stone met metal. Relic-script flickered along the seams. The air grew heavy, layered with the scent of ionized dust and memory.
Sera slowed.
Sera (eyes narrowing): "This place wasn't built by the Riftguard."
Kael stopped at a narrow threshold ahead, where a faint light shimmered between cracked stone doors. The hum of the relic now sounded like a note, vibrating the air.
He pressed a hand to the door.
Kael (softly): "No. They just built over it."
The stone groaned.
Light surged.
And the forgotten gate opened.
Episode 11: "In Silence Burned"
The gate opened without sound.
Kael stepped through first, his breath steady but sharp. Sera followed in silence.
The relic pulsed once against his spine—subtle, deliberate. As if the thing knew it was home.
In the center of the chamber, suspended in the quiet, floated a monolith split clean down the middle. A slow hum coiled through the air, too deep for hearing, too steady for silence.
Kael moved closer. No hesitation. No words.
When he reached out, the relic in his hand responded—not with light, but with a shiver beneath the skin. A pressure. A memory.
Script unfolded in the air before them—etched in gold-threaded gravity, the letters forming themselves out of suspended dust and force:
"In silence burned the final breath,
A god made chain to conquer death."
Sera inhaled sharply.
Not fear. Recognition.
She stepped forward slowly, her voice barely above a whisper.
"That line… I know that line."
Kael looked at her. Not surprised. Just waiting.
"My mother used to hum something like it. Back when I was small. I never thought… I thought it was just a lullaby."
Kael's voice was low.
"They told it in Nemoris too. Scrambled. Half-rhymed. I remember it in festival songs… just fragments."
He stared at the words in the air.
"But it wasn't poetry. It was prophecy."
The verse hung there, glowing softly, the chamber still around them like the world was listening.
The relic hummed again. Not in warning. In response.
Sera's eyes narrowed. "That myth... the one about the god who fell into the sky and never climbed back out. Who burned the stars shut behind him."
Kael: "Maerak."
The name struck like gravity.
The monolith pulsed again—once—and then fell still.
Nothing more came. No answers. Just the echo of a forgotten line, and the weight of what it meant.
Sera (softly): "It's not just a song. It's a seal."
Kael didn't respond.
He didn't need to.
They had found one line of the truth.
But the rest still waited—buried in time, dust, and blood.
Episode 12: "The Rift That Remembers"
The monolith fell silent.
But the world did not.
A low vibration trembled beneath Kael's boots—barely noticeable at first, then steady. Then deeper. Not mechanical. Not structural.
Alive.
The relic in his grip pulsed once. Then again. Then so violently it ached in his bones.
Sera took a sharp step back.
"Kael…"
She didn't have to finish.
The ground heaved.
Far above them, somewhere in the higher levels of Zephyron, alarms warbled once—and cut out completely. The prison was no longer reacting.
It was remembering.
Kael turned, the chamber now pulsing with waves of invisible force. Walls shifted. Ceilings bent. Old metal warped as gravity twisted along paths not charted in any map.
They ran.
Through collapsing corridors and unraveling stairwells. Past crumbling relic structures and lightless voids. No soldiers followed. No voices echoed. Even the screams had vanished.
The Song had silenced everything.
The path ahead gave way to fractured stone, where gravity tugged in strange directions—upward, sideways, inward. Kael and Sera leapt across gaps, lungs burning, boots skidding on walls that no longer knew what "down" meant.
And then…
They stopped.
The corridor ended in open space.
Below them, the base of Zephyron was folding in. Collapsing, pulled into itself like a dying star. Chunks of architecture spiraled in slow, weightless ruin.
And ahead—hovering over a broken platform of forgotten earth—a Rift shimmered into being.
Not purple.
Not violent.
Soft gold, rimmed with silver shimmer. And singing.
"That Rift..." Sera whispered. "It's not theirs."
Kael stared into it.
The relic at his back thrummed gently. The same note from the chamber. The same as the fragment.
A tone that felt like invitation.
"It's ours," he said.
Zephyron groaned behind them.
Kael didn't jump.
He stepped.
They landed in silence.
The Rift closed behind them like a breath held too long.
Kael blinked—once, twice—before his knees gave way. He dropped to the earth, hands pressing into soft, moss-covered ground.
The sky above them was twilight-blue, shot through with drifting clouds that shimmered faintly at the edges.
Sera crouched beside him.
Around them, a forest stretched in every direction—tall, twisted trees wrapped in vines that drifted upward instead of falling. Flowers bloomed mid-air. Stones floated lazily between thick trunks like planets orbiting invisible suns.
Gravity here did not obey.
It listened.
Light filtered through the canopy in strange angles, casting curved shadows across roots and sky alike. The air was damp, full of life and the hum of a world untouched.
Kael stood slowly, gaze catching on something in the distance.
Through the trees, past the warped branches and floating stones—
A village.
Nestled into the base of a wide ridge, small homes glowed faintly with embedded sigils. Smoke curled softly from chimneys that bent ever so slightly upward at the wrong angle.
"Where… are we?" Kael breathed.
Sera's eyes tracked the village, her voice low.
"I think… we're where it all began."
The relic gave no warning. No urgency.
Only stillness.
And for the first time in what felt like forever—
They walked forward.