15 Years After the shatterpoint
In the city of laster, even the air was tired.
The red sun hung low behind the haze of concrete dust and magnetic shielding towers, casting long shadows over half-built buildings and faded murals that tried too hard to pretend hope was still a currency.
Kael wiped the grime from his face with the sleeve of his orange work shirt, the rough fabric smearing more than it cleaned. His boots scraped across the metal scaffold, each step dragging like the weight of his own body was heavier than usual. Maybe it was.
He was 1.6 meters tall, lean from hunger rather than training, with shoulders hardened by labor. His dreadlocks, matted and long, hung like roots down his back — uncombed, uncut, uncaring. A life spent trying to forget.
At sixteen, Kael had more calluses than memories.
The people called it The Stillness the day the sun blinked, when time stopped moving and the world remembered it was mortal. Half of humanity died in those minutes. His parents among them.
He had been one.
He didn't remember much about the day, only the cold a frost so sharp it had cut through the lungs like glass. Survivors said the sun returned, but the world never really warmed again. Some said the planet still spun only because Fate now pushed it, thread by invisible thread.
Now, fifteen years later, the governments had long since shattered and Federations had formed loose alliances of necessity, not trust. Africa had become its own fragmented haven, cities reborn on top of ruins. Freedom was one such city a walled dome of salvaged tech and reinforced dream-wards. It survived because it knew it couldn't win.
Beyond the dome, the Imaginative Creatures hunted through collapsed villages and dream-eaten wastelands.
Inside? You paid to stay alive.
Kael trudged into his flat. The door buzzed angrily, flickered, and let him in. The lights didn't work, but that was normal.
What wasn't normal was the stack of printed warnings sitting just inside the doorway.
CITY OF LASTER – DUES PENDING
Final Notice: You are behind on zone security taxes. Failure to pay will result in eviction to Outer Ring.
Total Owed: 37,000C
Deadline: 4 days.
Kael stood still. He didn't touch the papers. Didn't breathe.
His fingers curled into fists, the black under his nails darkening. A low, strangled growl formed in his throat as he kicked the metal table over, sending it crashing into the wall with a clang that made the lightbulb flicker above him for the first time in weeks.
"Why did I even survive that day?" he muttered.
"Why am I alive in a world that was meant to die?"
"Why me? Why now?"
The light above him blinked once.
Then again.
Then a third time and didn't return.
The room went dead silent.
And then, a ripple passed through the walls. Not a sound. A warping, like the air itself had become a sheet of fabric being slowly pulled at the edges. Kael's breath caught in his throat as the space in front of him cracked, not like glass, but like story.
A single vertical line appeared in midair, glowing faintly. Then twisted.
Then unfolded.
Reality peeled open like torn paper soaked in moonlight, revealing something beyond — something deeper. A space of impossible angles, colors that didn't belong in nature, and the scent of ink and cold metal. The temperature dropped five degrees in seconds and to add to the mysterious occurrence, kael heard a cold errie voice then a screen with symbols like runes that kael could not read yet understand appeared.
[Narrative Thread Weave chooses you]
[First Arc trial Rift Formed – Initiating rift sequence]
[Prepare for your Arc trial, Arcborne]
Kael stumbled back, eyes wide, lips parted in a breath he didn't remember taking.
He didn't move. Couldn't.
Because from the rift something was calling him
The Arc Rift trembled.
The air around it pulsed like a heartbeat, and Kael still frozen in place felt something inside his chest.
No warning. No time to scream. Just reality folding inward, like the world around Kael was a tent being yanked up by invisible strings. The walls of his room twisted, stretching into impossible curves. The light turned into threads. The sounds became fabric.
Kael's body was yanked forward no, not forward, through the rift.
Through something not physical, but still real.
His skin crawled. Not with pain, but with the knowledge that he no longer existed in the space he was born to belong to. Time around him fell away. Names, memories, pain, hunger, they stretched and thinned.
And then
Silence.