As I lay unconscious beneath the rubble, my body numb and breathless, I drifted somewhere past the present beyond the ache in my ribs and the grit in my teeth. I slipped into a void that pulsed like a heart left behind. It wasn't the cold emptiness I'd imagined as a child. It was luminous, as if unseen lungs were breathing in the dark.
The black stretched infinitely, yet shimmered with strange color, like stars had bled their light into the abyss and it refused to die. Around me floated broken fragments: slabs of stone, jagged mountain peaks, entire trees twisted midair, their roots braided like knotted hair. Patches of ground hovered intact with moss and clinging flowers, as if a living world had been torn apart and left suspended caught between ending and memory.
What is this place.
It was beautiful in a dead, hollow way. A place that looked like it had died yesterday, yet carried the silence of centuries.
This can't be home, it feels different. Is it a memory.
I drifted slowly, turning through a scatter of impossible wreckage: the corner of a home with the window still unbroken; a staircase that led nowhere; a rooftop hanging sideways with a wind-battered flag that couldn't move. No people, no footprints. Just dust suspended, each grain caught like a tiny planet.
A realm that had stopped breathing.
Some unseen force cradled me weightless until it didn't. It let go without warning. Gravity remembered me, and it came back with a vengeance.
I dropped.
The air tore past my ears, my stomach lurched to my throat, my arms pinwheeled for a grip that didn't exist. I opened my mouth and the scream went nowhere swallowed by the void. The deeper I fell, the heavier I became, as if the world below had chosen me, claimed me, dragged me down to complete a sentence it started long ago.
THUD.
The silence cracked as I hit hard enough to punch a crater into the ground. Dirt geysered up and rained back in slow, choking clouds of ash. The earth hummed under my ribs. For a long breath, I didn't know if I was alive. Then small things returned: the ache in my shoulder, the metallic taste in my mouth, the prickle of dust in my eyelashes.
I rolled to my side, coughing, and pushed myself up with shaking arms. My fingers sank in the fractured soil like it was tired of holding itself together.
The world had changed.
Cracked earth spread in all directions, a patchwork of old wounds that never healed. The sky wore a scorched film too bright and too dull at once, like light trying to burn through smoke that would not move; no trees, no birdsong. The wind came thin and brittle, as if afraid to touch anything.
Ruins littered the ground: broken helmets shaped for heads I couldn't picture, splintered spear shafts, rusting swords half-eaten by grit. Tiny homes had collapsed in upon themselves, doorways turned to mouths full of dirt. Every breath tasted like ember and iron. Every step answered with the soft, papery crunch of a place that had forgotten how to bloom.
This place… was a graveyard.
Not of bodies, I didn't see any, but of breath. Of mornings that never came back.
I took a careful step and something rattled under my shoes: a string of beads carved from pale stone, each with a spiral etched in the middle. I crouched, touched the spiral with my thumb, and a shiver ran up my arm, like a muscle remembering an old habit.
The air shifted.
Flashes hit me, memories not of mine, but something the ground insisted on showing me.
A figure towered up in my mind's eye: skin the color of fresh blood, not smooth but marked striped with black lines that crawled like a living script. His eyes burned like iron pulled from the furnace accompanied with twin horns that curved backward from its forehead. Two fangs pressed past his lower lip like small daggers, and long black hair snapped in the wind as if made of wire. In his fist, he swung an iron bat bristling with spikes, each spike stained the color of long-dried rust.
He moved with brutal rhythm; swing, crack, swing, each arc tearing through a crowd of green-skinned humanoids who lived here. Their bodies were sinewy and frog-like, long jointed limbs built for leaping, noses narrow and sunken, eyes wide with the animal terror of knowing. They fought back with slings and knives and desperate shouts but to him, they were waves against a cliff.
He laughed between breaths, not joyful exultant, feral.
"I am the greatest! Vanik'shur Teluvahr"
My body froze as my mind remembered who he was. Vanik'shur.
Even their strongest fell with dull, final thuds.
He finished with a scream that didn't sound like a voice at all, more like a collapsing wall of air with shockwaves. The last standing house shattered into powder, the sound reaching into the stone and telling it to stop being stone.
Then the vision snapped shut like a jaw.
Back to the Rubble
I sucked in a breath that scraped my throat and found myself still buried under what had crushed me before back in the now, back in my body. A shard of cement dug into my side. I pushed, grit grinding under my nails, and forced both knees under me. The rubble shifted, complained, and finally gave way. Light spilled across my hands.
I was awake again, heart beating too loud, the afterimage of iron eyes fading in my skull.
Somewhere above, the day was still moving without me.
---
On early Wednesday morning, before the crowds learned how to be noisy, Grandma Elunara stood across the street from a tower that pretended it was a mirror. The building's skin threw the pale sky back at itself, a cold sheet of light. Above the revolving doors, silver letters stretched in a clean, arrogant line:
NO POWER, NO COMMAND.
She read them once and felt her jaw square. A muscle jumped near her temple, the only sign of what she swallowed.
"Damn it," she said, quiet enough to disappear into traffic noise. "I hate that this is my only option."
She adjusted the cuff of her coat, a small, practiced gesture that let her breathe and crossed the street. The doors opened with a soft hiss and the clean bite of glass cleaner and metal greeted her like a smile that wasn't meant for her. Soft lights hummed. Floors were polished to the kind of shine that tried to make you look down and watch your step.
She didn't.
The elevator recognized the card she held too fast of course it did and lifted her without ceremony to the 54th floor. When the doors parted, her reflection sliced into three on the brushed metal walls, and then became her again as she stepped into a hallway that swallowed footsteps.
At the end waited a door marked:
SALIN CLICK.
She stood for a breath, neither knocking nor leaving. Her hand hovered, then curled into a loose fist a fist that could break a man's nose, or knock gently.
She knocked.
"Come in," came a voice that always sounded like velvet drawn over something sharp.
Sunny Behind the Desk
He sat at a wide, black desk that seemed to be trying too hard to be modern. He didn't have to try at all. Salin looked like early forties on paper, but paper didn't know the way he wore time lightly, like a suit that fit. Crimson hair gathered low at his nape; a white shirt that didn't dare wrinkle; a red tie placed with the kind of care that looked effortless. When he looked up, fox-like eyes narrowed, but not in anger. In recognition.
A slow smile arrived at one corner of his mouth, a familiar map unfolding.
"Elunara," he said, her name soft and shaped, as if he were tasting it to make sure it hadn't changed. He tilted his head the way he always had when he pretended to be surprised. "What a pleasant surprise."
She closed the door behind her without turning. Her fingers lingered on the handle for a fraction too long, then let go. She didn't move farther into the room than she needed to, nor did she smile either.
"Tell me you have nothing to do with it."
Salin's smile thinned. A gleam slid across his irises like a cat stretching.
"What do you mean by that?"
She took one step closer; the room seemed to breathe in. "My grandson has been missing for two weeks." Her voice didn't tremble, but her hands found each other—thumb circling thumb once—then fell to her sides. "Tell me you know nothing about it."
A chuckle rolled out of Salin, lower than a laugh, warmer than a scoff. He leaned back, the leather chair whispering as it accommodated the memory of him. "Two years since we last saw each other," he said, spreading his hands, palms open as if showing he carried no weapon. "And that's how you greet me? No 'how are you,' no 'you look thinner,' no kindness for an old—" His eyes flicked down and back up, quickly. "—friend?"
"You're obsessed with science, invention, and dangerous experiments," she said, chin lifting a degree as the light caught the silver at her temple and made it luminous. "A hundred percent chance you're involved."
Salin rose with unhurried precision. His shoes clicked once on the floor like a metronome finding tempo. He came around the desk, stopping close enough that she could smell his cologne: citrus under clean steel. His right hand lifted, hesitated near her shoulder and dropped to his side.
"You're right," he said. "I'm obsessed with science." A smile that almost apologized ghosted across his mouth. "But tell me… is this really the only place you thought to look?"
Her eyes didn't leave his, but her breath pressed thinner. "Don't play the maze with me."
Salin tilted his head again, softer now. When he leaned in, his voice shifted, no performance, just the tone people use at a bedside. "How about I help you find him?"
Her mouth parted; a reply was ready. Then she shut it. A small line appeared between her brows, the one he knew from years ago, the line that meant she cared too much to be careless.
"Not a chance, you'd take him to one of your facilities."
He took the half-step back first, giving her space she hadn't asked for because he knew she'd never ask. A beat of naked something crossed his face, something like pride or hurt or both. Then the old mask returned, light, almost playful. He slipped his glasses on as if he needed them; the lenses caught the ceiling and hid his eyes.
"You know me, Elunara," he said, resettling on the edge of the desk rather than the chair closer to her height, less above. "I always ask for permission first."
"You always ask after you've already started," she said.
A corner of his lip admitted defeat, then pretended it hadn't. "Semantics."
She exhaled, neither a sigh nor a laugh. For an instant, her gaze dropped to his mouth the way a soldier glances at a map she used to trust. Her steady hands brushed invisible dust from the cuff of her coat, and she looked like she might say something not about her grandson.
But instead, she turned for the door. He didn't stop her either. He didn't offer his hand because he knew she wouldn't take it, and he would not like what it would do to him if she did.
"Hope I see you again soon," he called, aiming for lightness and missing by a heartbeat. The door closed on the rest of the sentence.
He stood very still. The room listened for him.
"She hasn't changed a bit," he said, almost to his tie, "Still stunning."
He adjusted nothing on his desk and sat back down, as if the arrangement of objects might survive this morning if he didn't touch them.
Outside, the city had remembered how to be loud. Grandma Elunara stepped into it without flinching. She took out her phone; the screen lit her face with a cold square of morning.
Thalor stared back from the favorites list.
Her thumb hovered over it, a tiny tremor passing through. She locked the phone and slipped it into her pocket.
"I don't want to worry him," she said to the street, which didn't answer. She looked up. The silver letters over the glasses gleamed like clean teeth: NO POWER, NO COMMAND.
"Lie all you want," she told the letters under her breath. "You're full of both."
She started walking. Her shoulders were straight, but her hand brushed the pocket where her phone lived, like a promise she wasn't ready to break.