The wind shrieked over the high cliffs as Kaelen moved away from the desecrated temple, his cloak fluttering behind him like a broken banner. The taste of the Rift still clung to his breath—cold, metallic, and ancient. The images haunted him: the throne of shattered stars, the whispered title, "Weaver," and that distant, formless consciousness brushing against his own.
He hadn't slept. Couldn't. The sensation of that eldritch network still lingered beneath his skin, like a second pulse. But exhaustion was a weakness, and weakness was a cage. So he walked.
Through scorched hills. Past crumbled watchtowers. Into valleys where the air shimmered with unreality. He followed the threads his instincts wove, pulled toward the next rupture in the world's fabric. The deeper he wandered, the more the world twisted. Trees grew in impossible spirals. Rivers flowed uphill. Even the stars above seemed to shift their constellations when he wasn't watching.
And he wasn't alone.
---
It began with shadows.
Figures on the edges of his vision. Whispers that followed no wind. Sometimes laughter. Sometimes screams. He dismissed them at first, remnants of Rift-sickness perhaps. But then came the tracks. Deep claw marks in the stone. Displaced soil. Burned grass that hadn't been touched by flame.
Riftborn. But not like before.
These weren't creatures mindlessly drawn to power. They were hunting. Waiting.
Kaelen adjusted his pace, wary. He refused to be prey.
His path took him into a narrow ravine, the cliffs pressing close like stone jaws. There, he found the remnants of an old battle. Blackened bones lay in twisted heaps. Rusted weapons fused into the ground by heat or something worse. And at the center, half-buried in ash, stood an obelisk carved with symbols Kaelen instinctively recognized.
Temporal glyphs. Fracture markers.
A Rift had once bloomed here—not naturally, but forced open. Someone had tried to control it.
He studied the patterns, eyes glowing faintly. Whoever etched this had knowledge far beyond the average mage. This was deliberate, calculated rift-weaving. Something he himself was only just beginning to understand.
He reached out, brushing his fingers against the obelisk.
A pulse of energy surged through him—not hostile, but overwhelming. He staggered as visions flooded in:
An army marching beneath shattered banners.
A masked figure wielding time like a whip.
A laboratory suspended in a space between worlds.
A voice, whispering again:
*"You are not the first to awaken. But you may be the last."
And then—silence.
Kaelen collapsed to one knee, gasping. He slammed his palm into the earth, grounding himself as the resonance faded.
More than just instinct now. These places were connecting. Each Rift left echoes, fragments of those who had touched them.
But why him?
Why now?
---
He camped in the ruins that night, building a fire between broken statues. He didn't sleep, but instead stared into the flames as the Rift's whisper coiled around his mind. He spoke aloud to the silence, not expecting a reply.
"What do you want from me?"
Only the crackle of fire answered.
But something watched. He felt it.
When the Riftborn struck, they came in silence—smaller this time, four-legged things with chitinous plates and glowing spines. Pack creatures. Coordinated.
Kaelen was ready.
He let them circle, let them believe he was unaware. Then, in a single motion, he folded space, appearing behind the lead beast and snapping its spine with a concentrated matter surge.
The others reacted instantly, lunging—but he bent time, slowing their perception. He moved through the moment like smoke, lashing out with fists sheathed in compressed force.
Two more fell.
One remained.
It shrieked, its form flickering—not from damage, but from instability. This one was a scout, partially phased between dimensions.
Kaelen narrowed his eyes.
He channeled, not brute force, but control. He locked its place in space and time simultaneously, anchoring it.
The creature spasmed violently, then burst into raw flux.
Silence returned.
Kaelen breathed heavily. He hadn't just fought. He'd commanded. His power, once volatile, was beginning to obey.
---
By morning, he continued his journey, leaving the broken corpses to fade in the sunlight. But something shifted in him that day.
He was no longer just surviving.
He was tracking.
Each Rift, each ruin, each whisper from the past left trails—faint, but now recognizable. He began marking patterns, sketching fractured maps in an old leather book he scavenged. Coordinates. Leylines. Disruption nodes.
He was learning.
And he would find them. The ones who opened the first Rift. The ones who tore the First World asunder. The ones who still watched from the shadows.
For Kaelen, vengeance was not enough.
He would dominate the chaos.
He would become the Weaver.
And the world would kneel, or break.
To be continued...