Far beneath the frost-shattered bones of the old world, where the roots of the World Tree no longer reach and sunlight has never kissed stone, something stirred.
It had no name.
No face.
No flesh.
It moved like breath through ice.
It whispered like thought before speech.
And it watched.
A Fracture had opened again.
Not with fire.
Not with war.
But with a heartbeat.
**
In the frostbitten forests north of Blackstone' fall, where forgotten gods once dreamed, a lone figure glided between pine and shadow — weightless, silent, untouched by snow. Its robes were sewn from spider-silk and thread drawn from the tendons of oathbreakers. Etchings of dead tongues flickered across the seams — glyphs older than the First Fracture.
Beneath the hood: no face.
Only a mirrored mask, silver and split down the center — a single fracture reflecting twisted branches like broken prophecy.
It reached a mound of blackened earth, where once a shrine to the Woven Flame had stood — long burned, long defiled. And there, the figure knelt.
A voice rose — not from lips, but the very air.
Fractured. Dissonant. Cold.
"The Riftborn stirs."
Another answered, from within a shadow not cast by moon or torch.
"Too early."
"But marked."
"Still unfinished."
"But awakening."
The masked figure reached into its robe and withdrew a shard — jagged, violet, humming like a tethered scream. A Fracture-born crystal. A memory of the first time the veil split.
The whisper returned — deeper now, shaped like fate.
"He walks the Path."
"And she walks beside him."
"Ice and ash. Blade and wound."
The shard pulsed once.
Then the figure crushed it in its palm.
No blood fell.
Only smoke.
And a scream — silent, unhuman — peeled into the snow and was swallowed whole.
**
Far to the south, within the hollowed halls of a fallen Watcher's Spire — where flame once judged the stars — a man sat before a burning mirror.
He wore no robes.
No mask.
Only blackened armor, cracked at the ribs, and a single ring of obsidian worn to dust.
In the flames, he saw her —
Kaia in the Ancestral Hollow,
Rei's mark pulsing like the birth of a storm.
He watched.
Listened.
And then, softly, with a voice carved from ash:
"Let them grow."
"Let them bleed."
"The Fractures do not choose lightly."
"They must be worthy."