In the western wastelands, where the sun rose rarely and always over the jagged horizon like a wound, the ruins of Ra slumbered beneath ash and silence. Marble pillars, once proud and white, now cracked and scorched, leaned into the wind like tired sentinels. Obelisks, broken by centuries of fire and siege, jutted from the sands, their surfaces etched with glyphs no living hand could read. Ash drifted over everything, settling like a shroud, and even the wind moved cautiously here, as if afraid to wake what had long been forgotten.
Amidst this desolation, ten figures moved as one. Cloaked in robes threaded with bones—spine fragments, finger bones, shards of rib—each stretched their hands toward the center of a circle etched deep into the scorched marble floor. Their voices rose in unison, guttural, vibrating, speaking in tongues that had died with the world. The sound crawled into cracks, into fissures in stone, into the marrow of the bones buried beneath the sands. The desert held its breath.
The ritual had begun again.
Ten voices became one, harmonizing into a chant that was more hunger than sound, shaking dust from ceilings long crumbled, rattling the few standing stones like dry bones. Glyphs, buried beneath centuries of sand and flame, now erupted along the circle in emerald fire. They crept across the cracked marble floor, pulse by pulse, toward the center, twisting and knotting like green serpents.
And there, inside the heart of the circle, the tear opened.
A hole in the fabric of the world, circular, quivering, faintly alive, flickering with green light unstable and angry. It hummed with the kind of potential that made the bones in the desert ache. And within that wound, waiting, a vessel hung suspended like mist given form.
Tall. Lean. Barely clothed. Hairless, featureless, but shaped enough to fool a distant mind into calling it human. It stood motionless, soulless. A husk. Forged for one purpose. To contain what no one had been able to summon before. To hold what had never wanted to be held.
The ten chanted louder. Sweat dripped down their brows. Fingers bled ink. One of them hissed, "Bring fire. The Archon of Flame must awaken."
Power surged into the glyphs. The circle thickened with green flame. Runes screamed against the bonds of reality, twisting toward the husk, feeding, attempting, begging the universe to obey. The vessel shuddered. Its joints jerked with unnatural tremors. A bark, coarse and inhuman, tore from it. No words. No light. No sign of spirit.
The sixth of the ten spat onto the floor, shaking his head in fury. "Another failure," he muttered. "Throw it east. Let the desert swallow it."
And so they did. Bound it, bruised, hurling it onto a rusted cart. Sent it east, toward Blackstone Keep, where even the wind seemed unwilling to return. Where nothing came back from alive. Where Malrec would wait, always waiting, always hungry for the failures of the world.
But the ritual had not ended.
Because this time, the green circle did not fade. It blackened. The glyphs bled darkness. Stone cracked beneath their feet as though the world itself sought to escape.
Above, upon a balcony carved from obsidian and shadow, eight figures watched. Silent. Hooded. Immortal, it seemed, as they leaned like judges presiding over the fall of a thousand kingdoms.
One of the ten in the circle screamed, blood streaking his eyes and nose in twisted lines. Another collapsed to his knees, shaking. The hum beneath the world grew. A resonance that dug into bone.
"This… this is different," said the fourth above.
"We've tried a hundred times," replied the fifth. "No Archon ever answers."
"This is no Archon," whispered the second, voice like a dying echo.
"Stop it," said the seventh. Not alarm, but dread, the kind that poisons the throat.
The eighth, hooded, silent, had never spoken. Now they stepped forward, robes dragging over centuries of dust. Head bowed, face unseen, their presence pressed the world. The circle pulsed beneath them, like a dying star. They whispered into the wind.
"He is here."
No one heard it. But the wind did. It wrapped the bones of the desert, lifting ash in frenzied spirals. It bent the ruined marble pillars, rattled the broken obelisks, carrying the whisper forward like a secret that the dead remembered and the living could not comprehend.
When the vessel arrived at Blackstone Keep, it was still. Broken. Bruised. Bound. Forgotten. The winds of the western wastelands had carried it across miles of ash, across dunes that had never known life. But it was not empty.
The mark bloomed. Across its chest, four stars twisted into a violet sigil, faintly burning against pale, nearly translucent skin. The light was quiet but insistent. The husk shivered. Eyes opened. And bled violet.
Far above, in the sanctum spire of Blackstone, Overseer Malrec peered into his scrying crystal. The distant quake shimmered through the image, lines of interference writhing across the lens. His face, already pale as ash, turned slower than thought, voice brittle, glass-cold.
"Inform the Order of Sanctum," he said, each word deliberate, each one a blade.
A pause. Breath like ice. Heartbeat stretched to eternity.
"The Second Coming is near."
Another pause. Another heartbeat.
"The Riftborn awakens."
And beneath the sand, deep in the cracked bones of the wastelands, the Rift stirred. A tremor at first. A whisper. Then a hunger, stretching, expanding, stirring. Something ancient. Something that had been patient. Waiting. Watching.
The sands shivered as though they, too, recognized what was coming. And in that recognition, in that trembling of earth and spirit, the future began to tilt, unbalanced, toward ruin and fire.
The husk moved slightly, a twitch, the faintest hint of life stirring where none should be. Four stars burned across pale flesh. Violet light pulsed from eyes. The Circle had failed to summon an Archon. But something answered. Something else.
And Blackstone Keep, perched atop its black-veined hill, felt the tremor, felt the stir, and waited.
Because the world was about to bleed again.
Because the Riftborn had opened his eyes.
And the shadows whispered with hunger.