They called it Fracture's Dawn—the day the world split open and everything they knew bled into something else. That was sixteen years ago.
Now, every year on its anniversary, the sky dimmed. The light fractured slightly. And every sixteen-year-old in the world stood beneath that same broken sky, waiting for fate to notice them.
Cinder sat alone on the rusted roof of an abandoned rail station, one boot dangling over the edge, the other braced against cracked metal. The city loomed far in the distance—NARC, the New Asia Republican City. Concrete towers wrapped in neon veins, half of them unfinished. The others leaned into the sky like bones reaching for something they couldn't grasp.
Around him, the wind whispered through broken glass and dead wires. The air tasted faintly of copper and dust, like it always did this time of year.
His scarf—a deep, worn red—fluttered in the breeze, its ends fraying just slightly. It had been hers. His foster mother. Gone ten years now, buried in a pauper's lot beyond the outer gates. No marker. Just soot.
He still remembered her hands, though. Rough, cracked, but gentle.
The way she'd said, "You don't needto fight to survive, Cinder. Just the will to keep running. Being a coward and running away to fight another day has never killed anyone."
He exhaled through his nose. That kind of wisdom didn't fill your stomach.
Below the rooftop, the streets churned with people preparing for The Rite—that's what they called it now, the moment the awakening came. No one knew what they'd inherit. Not unless you were part of a Great Family, the ones who'd carved out inheritance rights like blood bound contracts after the world broke.
The rest? The poor?
They got fate raw. Blind and burning.
Cinder stood, scarf trailing behind him like a second shadow, and slung his battered pack over one shoulder. Inside: three ration bars, a cracked data-slate, and an identification card with his name and academy number. That was all he had.
That—and the scar across his chest, faint and pale. A memory he didn't own, from the night he was found in the blackened ruins outside NARC. They said he hadn't cried. He'd just been sitting in the ash, staring up at the broken moon.
He dropped from the roof, landing light. The echo of his footsteps vanished into the silence as he started toward the city's edge. Toward the Academy Grounds, where all sixteen-year-olds would be locked down for the Awakening.
He didn't know what would come.
The sun didn't rise the way it used to.
It fractured—thin, pale bands of red-orange light filtering through a sky still scarred from the Shattering. They said the atmosphere never healed. That the sky had bled out and turned brittle. Like glass just before it broke.
Cinder walked the cracked side road, boots whispering across loose rubble and old signage. There were no hover-lines in the Slum Crescent. No sleek railcars or transit pads. Just sunken alleys, refuse fires, and the smell of old metal and wet smoke.
He pulled his scarf up over his mouth—not for warmth, just to keep the air from scraping his lungs—and kept moving.
The other kids from the outer zone were gathering near the checkpoint.
He recognized a few of them. Toma, who had once tried to sell Cinder a knife with a broken handle. Mirei, who stole water from the ration center every week like it was her right. A pair of twins, feral-eyed and sharp, always whispering to each other like they shared thoughts.
None of them had any of the great family's blood. No training, no whispered names from beyond. Just scars, lean bodies, and eyes that had already seen too much.
"Yo," Toma called as Cinder passed. "You think they'll let us keep our clothes after we awaken, or strip us and sell the gear to pay for the medicals?"
A few chuckled—thin, dry laughs. Cinder didn't answer. He just gave Toma a look. That quiet, flat kind that meant: You're not funny enough to matter.
"Still as warm as an old grave," Mirei muttered, blowing a strand of greasy hair from her grey eyes. "You really think you'll get something? Something strong?"
Cinder looked at her.
"No," he said. "I don't think. That's the difference."
She blinked, taken aback, and muttered something under her breath.
They weren't friends. Just survivors in the same wreckage. Slum dwellers were dust waiting for wind, as one instructor once put it.
The checkpoint ahead was marked by tall metallic gates and two armed drones drifting silently above. A holographic seal—burnt bronze with the fractured world map embossed—hovered in the air, flickering slightly.
[Mandatory Awakening Academy – District 9
Rite of Fate: Year 101]
Cinder stopped just before the gate and looked up.
Beyond it was the courtyard where the ritual would begin. Students from every background would gather. Some afraid. Some eager. A few already arrogant, heads held high, crests on their uniforms marking which clan or house they belonged to.
Cinder had none of that.
Just a name. A scarf. And a whole lot of dust.
The drone scanned his ID chip. The gate hissed.
He stepped through without looking back.
The gate slid shut behind him with a sound like a blade sheathing.
Cinder didn't flinch. He kept walking.
The courtyard stretched ahead in tiered platforms of black stone and tempered metal, circling a massive open-air dome at the center. Dozens of students milled about in designated zones—each marked by thin glowing lines etched into the stone. Richer districts had cleaner uniforms, pressed and neat. Some bore gilded emblems at the shoulder or high-tech weave inserts stitched into their jackets.
Cinder's uniform was secondhand, faded and a little too short in the sleeves. His scarf stood out like blood on dirt.
His pale skin and charcoal colored hair in deep contrast, his dark freckles splattered across his face like ash falling from the sky. Dark grey eyes like extinguished embers.
They noticed him. The clean ones. The legacy hopefuls. The branded sons and daughters of people who'd bought their children a path through fate.
They always noticed the dirt that walked in on its own.
He headed to the outer ring—Zone D—where the unmarked gathered. The "unclaimed" as some called them. No sigils. No family crests. Just raw chance.
No one greeted him. A few looked his way, then looked away again. Some with wariness, some with pity. Mostly with indifference.
He leaned against a concrete pillar near the edge, eyes drifting up toward the dome. It was huge—massive, almost sacrilegious in design. Eight pillars surrounded it; each etched with names that burned faintly red in the dim morning light. Thousands of names.
Those who had survived their awakening.
Not everyone did.
From somewhere behind the main structure, a low chime rang out. It vibrated in the bones, humming like something ancient and mechanical, shaking the dust loose from cracks in the walls.
People quieted.
A few legacy students stood straighter. One girl—rich jacket, pale skin, eyes like tempered steel—smirked at her own reflection in a polished panel. Confidence radiated off her like perfume.
Cinder watched her a moment, then closed his eyes.
He could feel something. Faint pressure, like being at the edge of a cliff and knowing the fall had already started. The air had changed. Or maybe he had.
The scarf fluttered at his neck, light against his skin.
He didn't remember her voice anymore. But sometimes, in moments like this, he swore he felt her hand on his shoulder again.
The chime rang once more—louder this time.
Some students winced. A few grabbed their heads.
The sky flickered. Red seeped through the clouds like bruises rising under skin.
It was beginning.
The students were corralled into formation beneath the dome next to their sleeping pods—hundreds of them standing in quiet ranks under the dim, red-flecked light. The air had gone still, thick with the tension of waiting. Teachers, officials, and drones moved along the perimeter in silence.
'Fate will find you.'
That's what they said.
A tall woman in white stood at the center of the dome, her voice augmented when she spoke.
"On the 101st cycle of Fracture's Dawn, you stand here by right of blood, birth, and breath. Some of you carry legacy. Others come empty, as ashes before the wind."
Cinder's jaw tightened.
"Let fate be unkind or kind—it is no longer yours to shape. Enter your pods."
They did. Most of them hesitant, scared, but The Judgement wouldn't wait for them.
The light shifted. The sound vanished. Not quiet—gone. Utter and absolute silence, like the world had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale.
Cinder felt it then.
Something pulling at him. Not from above, like most said it would come, but beneath. A strange, magnetic weight, like the ground had recognized him. He entered his pod and looked around as he did. Praying he would survive.
But Cinder felt nothing. No warmth. No pull from the sky.
Just cold.
Cinder's eyes drift shut, the last thing he remembers a flicker of ember light behind his eyelids and the dry weight of sleep pulling him down like cooling iron.
Then—silence.
He awoke with stillness pressing against his skin like old smoke. The world around him is ashen grey, a dead man's canvas stretching endlessly in all directions. Weapons—swords, spears, broken axes—jut from the blackened soil, as if they grew there. None gleam. Every blade is dulled, rusted, or heat warped. no wind just perfect stillness.
Above, the sky bled.
A blood-red void loomed above, covered the sky, and at its center hangs a charred moon, cracked and glowing like a corpse caught mid-cremation. Its light falls like embers, not warmth—each ray a smoldering breath across the ruined battlefield.
He could hear something, faint and distant. Not sound—memory. Like the battlefield itself was trying to remember the screams that had once been screamed here. Not voices. Agony. Fury. Purpose.
In the distance, beyond broken war banners and shattered helms, lies something impossible.
Cinder staggered forward, breath catching in his throat.
A figure.
It took him a moment to realize what it was. Not a monument. Not a ruin.
A colossal humanoid skeleton, half-buried in soot and ash, lay crumpled on its side as though felled mid-step. Its skull had been caved in, the bone charred and cracked like brittle porcelain. One massive hand reached skyward, fingers frozen in a clawed grasp toward the moon.
And before it—kneeling, unmoving—was an obsidian knight.
Charcoal-black armor, body bowed, one gauntlet clenched around the hilt of a shattered blade stabbed into the ground.
Even kneeling, the knight radiated weight. Not mass. Meaning.
Cinder tried to breathe but tasted only iron and smoke.
The world pulsed.
His heart—
No.
Something in his chest lurched. A twist of pressure, not pain. His breath caught.
The knight's head lifted, ever so slightly, toward him.
And Cinder remembered.
He remembered being here.
He remembered this ash. This light. This moment.
Not as a dream.
Not as a story.
As a life.
His knees buckled. His vision blurred. The battlefield darkened around the edges.
And the knight rose.
Not with violence. With purpose.
Each movement burned into the bones of the world.
Cinder could not run. He couldn't even try.
The black knight stopped before him. The blade was gripped lightly in his hand.
Cinder trembled.
Then, without a word, the knight's other clawed gauntlet reached out plunging into Cinder's chest.
He screamed. Pain coursing through his very being.
It was a harrowing, violent thing. Like tearing his soul apart and fixing it repeatedly. It burned worse than anything he had ever felt.
As the knight's fingers wrapped around something inside him—his soul, his fate, his fire—Cinder saw it.
Not the battlefield.
Not the knight.
Himself.
Burning.
Bleeding.
Kneeling on ash with a sword in his hand.
And the sky watching.
Cinder hit the ground hard—his scream swallowed by ash and silence.
The pain was beyond flesh. It dug into bone, into memory, into things he didn't even know had names. His body seized and arched, fingers clawing at the scorched soil beneath him as smoke poured from his mouth, his eyes, his ears, from every pore his body could no longer contain.
He choked—ash catching in his throat, lungs burning with heat that wasn't real but meant something.
"You are being rewritten," something whispered in the marrow of his being.
"You are not dying. You are remembering."
Above him, the Ashen Knight stood still towering, both silent and unmerciful, helmet tilted downward as if examining the frailty before him. Not judging. Not even curious. Just watching what was already decided.
Cinder's skin cracked along his chest like parched earth, and from beneath it, something began to glow—not bright, but deep. Embered. Beautiful.
A mark, born not of ink or blade, but burnt into his soul.
It spread like fire-laced veins across his ribs and shoulder. A sigil that danced like blackened flame, faintly iridescent, as though ash had learned to shine.
And in his eyes—behind the pain—embers flickered to life.
Not fire. Not light.
He gasped as his body finally collapsed, smoldering, twitching. The smoke rose slowly into the red-dark sky.
The Ashen Knight knelt again—but this time not in reverence.
He leaned closer, the shattered helm tilting as if to whisper. But no words came.
Instead, he drove his sword into the earth beside Cinder.
The battlefield shook. Weapons rattled. The skeleton of the titanic being in the distance shifted slightly, as if remembering the moment it fell.
Where the knight's sword struck, the ground burned outward in a perfect sigil—a ring of black fire, lines scorched into the dirt like a seal of fate accepted.
Then, like dust blown from a forgotten blade—
The world shattered again.