The sky was wrong. It wasn't the sky Kael knew.
The last thing he remembered before awakening here were the words echoing through his mind—"The Nexus is descending."
Now he stood in a world that felt broken. Earth was no more, In this place.
The sun loomed vast and swollen, hanging too low over a horizon shattered like splintered glass. Its light pulsed in uneven waves, as if the world itself was breathing—alive yet dying with every beat. Above, ragged purple clouds drifted like cursed tapestries, their edges frayed by unseen storms. Even the air pressed heavy against him, sluggish, indecisive, as though gravity itself couldn't decide how much weight to demand from the living.
Kael dragged himself upright from a crater of obsidian glass. Shards glinted around him like frozen fire, still warm to the touch. His body ached with the memory of annihilation, as if he'd been crushed, pieced back together, and discarded on top of a furnace that refused to die.
"What… the hell…" His voice rasped raw against the silence.
But there was no silence here. Not truly. No wind. No birds. No distant hum of civilization. Only a low, imperceptible vibration, thrumming through the earth—through his bones—like the heartbeat of something vast and unseen.
His hand flew instinctively to his chest. No wounds. No armor. Just a soot-stained gray shirt, jeans, sneakers. Earth clothes. Familiar, yet meaningless in this place. Because this was not Earth.
The glass cracked beneath his steps as he stumbled toward the crater's edge. There, piercing the warped horizon, stood a spire of black stone—a colossal monolith of obsidian. Runes burned faintly along its surface, twisting and reshaping as though alive. The very air warped around it, bending light and thought alike.
And when Kael neared, the runes pulsed brighter—synchronized with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
They were waiting for him as he collapsed unconscious.