The Rift was back.
Not the physical crack that had once torn through the Verdant Expanse—but something subtler, stranger, and more human.
It began as a rumor: a figure in dark robes seen near the south rail sector, where entropy levels spiked like a skipped heartbeat. Then came sightings of resistance caches left untouched, attacks averted at the last second. The whisper spread like fire in dry underbrush: Saren had returned.
But no one knew for sure.
Luma crouched beside a railway transformer, her gauntlet scanning the unstable field around it. The cables trembled even in still air, like they were caught in a silent scream. Juno adjusted a makeshift entropy gauge nearby, balancing it on a rail spike and a broken spoon.
"Entropy levels are bouncing between nonsense and nightmare," Juno muttered. "Something's interfering."
Ion didn't respond immediately. He stood a few meters away, staring down the trackline where the distortion shimmered like heatwaves.
Luma noticed. "You think it's him, don't you?"
Ion's jaw tightened. "If it is… he's not hiding anymore."
A flicker danced across the rail—a sharp, soundless ripple that bent the steel ever so slightly before vanishing. Luma's gauntlet chimed. Directional trace detected. Source unstable.
Then… footsteps.
From the mist, a figure emerged.
Tall. Hooded. Cloak tattered at the hem, and shoulders squared as if burdened by the weight of a thousand choices.
Saren.
He stepped into view like a ghost forcing itself back into flesh. His mask was gone. His face looked older—drawn, tired, but human. One eye still carried the faint flicker of augmented scanning tech, but the other… that eye looked at Luma.
It saw her.
"Saren," Ion said, not as an enemy greeting a rival—but as someone standing in the shadow of lost hope.
Luma stepped forward, her voice dry. "Here to melt more brains or save a few?"
Saren didn't smile, but his lips twitched, like a man remembering how.
"I didn't come to fight," he said. "I came to stop what I started."
No one spoke for a long time. Just the wind in the wires.
Flashback:
Saren, inside the Underlight Citadel. Years ago.
He stood beside Kaelen's prototype—an entropy engine still in its infancy. Ion's voice echoed down the hall.
"You don't understand what it'll do to people," Ion had shouted. "This isn't just energy—it's erosion. Of truth. Of memory. Of trust."
But Saren had believed then. Believed that controlled entropy could bring order. Now, he saw the cracks.
And he'd been trying to patch them ever since.
Back in the present, Saren kneeled beside the rail line and pulled something from his coat—a tiny sphere of crystalline alloy, pulsating softly.
"A stabilizer?" Luma asked.
"A gift," Saren said. "It'll neutralize the worst of the entropy in this sector… for now."
Ion stepped forward. "And after that?"
"I help you end it. All of it."
Juno folded her arms. "Why now?"
Saren finally met her eyes. "Because I saw what you've built. People thinking. Laughing. Learning. I thought I was serving balance—but I was feeding decay."
Luma studied him. This was the man who almost broke them. Who had stared into the core of reality and chosen control.
And now?
He looked like someone who'd fallen into the rift—and clawed his way back out.
She extended a hand. "Welcome to the resistance. Rules are: don't betray us, don't blow stuff up unless we really mean to, and always bring snacks."
Saren stared at the hand… and took it.
The rift had returned. But this time, it might just help heal.