The wind screamed through the bones of the ruined city.
What remained of the once-great metropolis were shattered spires jutting from the cracked earth like the ribs of a long-dead beast. Time had forgotten this place, and so had men. The skies above churned with perpetual dusk, and the ground was littered with fragments of old magic — half-melted glyphstones, rusted ceremonial blades, and brittle remnants of armor and bone.
Deep within this graveyard of a bygone age, a boy moved like a shadow.
He was lean, cloaked in tattered gray, no older than seventeen, but his silver-purple eyes gleamed with something that didn't belong in this world — not yet. His hair, once perhaps black, had long since faded into a silvery sheen that caught the fading light with unnatural luster. It hung past his neck, matted with dust and dried blood. He moved with purpose, silent and watchful, like an animal born to survive the ruins.
Kaelen did not know who he truly was. He remembered no mother, no father, no name whispered in love. He had only ever known this broken place — a wasteland of old wars and forgotten horrors. He had named himself after a word etched into a half-buried statue of a long-dead king: Kaelen.
He liked how it sounded. Sharp. Regal. Like it belonged to someone who would never be forgotten.
His stomach growled, but he ignored it. Hunger was constant. Fear was constant. The ruins taught him how to be quiet, to listen before acting, to never trust anything that moved. Especially not the creatures. Especially not the scavengers.
Especially not the voices.
The whispers came sometimes when he slept too close to the deeper cracks in the ruins. Some said they were echoes of the first world's death. Others claimed the Riftborn — creatures born of the cataclysm — spoke through broken time itself. Kaelen didn't believe in either. He believed in instincts. And instincts said: run when they whisper.
He crouched beside a shattered archway, fingers brushing against the dirt. Tracks. Fresh. Not animals.
People.
His heart didn't race. He simply moved. Silently. Swiftly. Not because he feared the newcomers. Because he was curious. And curiosity had kept him alive longer than most.
As he climbed a collapsed wall and slipped into the shadows of a half-standing tower, he saw them.
Three figures. Well-fed. Clean armor. One bore a glowing lenspiece — an arcane scanner. Another had a branded gauntlet with micro-runes pulsing softly: aether detection gear.
Treasure-hunters, perhaps. Or worse — researchers.
Kaelen tensed. He'd seen others like them before. They didn't come for gold. They came for remnants. For reactive corpses. For flux anomalies.
For people like him.
He should have fled. Melted back into the ruins. But something held him there. Not fear. Not arrogance.
Something else.
The scanner beeped.
The man holding it frowned. "There's a reading here. High-level distortion. Space-time anomaly, minor. But recent."
Kaelen's breath slowed.
They were here for him.
"Keep the containment runes ready," the woman said, her voice clipped, commanding. "If we find it, we isolate it. No mistakes like last time."
Kaelen didn't understand what he was yet. But these people did. And that was dangerous.
He turned to leave. Silent as a shadow.
Too late.
A flash — a sigil igniting near his foot. A trap.
Pain.
Searing, red-hot agony tore through his leg. Not a blade. Not flame.
A flux snare. Temporal disruption. His body seized, like time itself tried to collapse in on his bones.
He fell, his mind screaming—but even then, even through the haze of pain and fire and rage, something inside him shifted.
Just for a moment.
Reality warped.
The rune under him sparked — then shattered.
The air shimmered as space folded. His body blurred, shifted a half-second to the left — and the pain vanished.
He didn't understand it.
They did.
"There! It's him!"
The woman raised a containment shard. Kaelen tried to move, but the world swam, his head heavy, vision doubled. He barely saw the sigil explode in light—
Then there was only darkness.