The wind cuts like memory here. It comes not from the sky but from the glass itself—breathing through cracks that gleam like frozen lightning. Each gust tastes faintly of iron and regret. My pack moves in silence, their paws whispering against the mirrored ground. No one speaks unless the wind does first.
It has been… how long?
A day, perhaps. Or three.
The System used to keep time, but now its voice stutters like a dying heart.
> [SYS—t_e_MP… desyn… chron—err_r_r_ror]
Sometimes I think it's trying to comfort me. Other times, I think it's trying to remember how to hurt me.
Vael walks at my side, amber eyes scanning the horizon where the plains shimmer into nothing. His breath ghosts in silver threads, forming shapes that vanish before I can name them. Behind him, Ryn hums quietly—a song she says she learned from the old wolfkin tribes that lived before the storms.
Her voice sounds like hunger learning to dream.
We march east, toward the Ashwind March—the border between the dead plains and the living dusk. It's said the air there moves backward, dragging time with it. The elders once called it a wound the world never stopped licking.
I wonder if we'll bleed when we cross it.
---
The horizon breaks into color at last.
Not sky-color—nothing so kind.
It's a wall of violet smoke, shot through with veins of molten white. Each pulse of light comes with a hum beneath my feet, like something massive is buried just below the surface.
Vael halts. "The March."
Ryn lowers her head. "Smells wrong."
I almost laugh. Everything smells wrong now. My senses don't agree with each other anymore. Sometimes I can taste light or feel a thought scraping behind my eyes like claws on stone.
The shard in my chest—our bond-core—beats in irregular rhythm. The System flickers with it.
> [Sync—… failed. Resyn… request… denied.]
Denied by who?
I almost ask aloud. Then I see them—shapes in the mist.
At first, I think they're reflections again. The glass here loves to echo the living. But these shadows cast no reverse. They move independent of us, slow and deliberate, like memories waking up.
One steps closer.
Tall. Too tall for a man. Skin pale as ash but veined with faint blue fire. His eyes are twin shards of quartz, faintly luminous. Armor of petrified bark and bone. Not human. Not fully elven either.
An Ashborn.
He kneels—an ancient, graceful motion that feels rehearsed across centuries. "The shard-wolf walks again," he says, voice brittle as frost. "The Plains remember your kind."
My mouth moves before my mind catches up. "Our kind? There are no others left."
He smiles, but it's the kind of smile that knows something about endings. "There are always others, Lira. You've just forgotten which world you began in."
The System screams—a burst of static like glass being ground into powder.
> [IDENT—cros_sref: A̸s̶h̴b̸or̸n̶—Archaii kin]
[Causality conflict… input corrupted.]
I stagger. The world folds in on itself for an instant.
For a heartbeat, I see three versions of the same man standing before me—each in a slightly different world.
Then I blink, and only one remains.
---
We camp at the edge of the March that night.
The glass beneath us hums with soft vibrations, almost like breath. When I press my ear to it, I can hear whispers—not words, just intent.
Come deeper.
Come home.
The Ashborn—his name is Kael'thir, though his own tongue twists it into something more like a sigh—sits beside the fire, motionless. He doesn't eat. Doesn't blink. When I ask what he's doing, he simply says, "Listening to what still remembers being alive."
He tells me stories while the wolves sleep. Stories of the God Husk, a ruin so vast it spans the horizon of the March—a fossilized remnant of a being that fell from the stars before memory. The Ashborn claim it still dreams, and its dreams shape the plains.
He says the relic storms are its heartbeat.
I want to call him a liar, but something in me remembers that name.
God Husk.
The System flickers faintly, trying to rebuild coherence.
> [Warning: Lira—bioSignature resonance 61%—aligning with foreign code.]
[Symbiosis risk: escalating.]
Foreign code? I almost laugh again. The whole world feels like foreign code.
---
Days blur.
The March changes us.
The wolves grow quieter. Their eyes, once amber and wild, now faintly glow with the same blue as Kael'thir's veins. The glass beneath our paws grows softer, like cooling wax. Sometimes it pulses underfoot, as though we're walking on something sleeping.
At night, I dream of places I've never seen. Cities made of black bone. Moons that breathe. My hands are claws, then wings, then light. I wake with my mouth full of dust and my pulse echoing through the System.
Kael'thir says the Husk is calling. That if we follow the wind long enough, we'll find where gods go to die—or be reborn.
Ryn says she doesn't like how he says "we."
Vael doesn't say anything anymore. His silence is beginning to scare me.
---
On the sixth day, the March bleeds.
The horizon splits open, and crimson fog rolls out, thick as blood. The ground hums so violently my teeth ache. When it settles, the plains ahead are no longer glass but flesh—a glistening expanse of translucent membrane shot through with threads of light.
The Husk's border.
The System convulses.
> [WARNING: Topology—unbound.]
[Space and time—non-euclidian drift.]
[—Lira… do not… step—]
I step forward.
The world folds like paper.
---
I wake inside a cathedral of ribs.
The air smells like thunder and wet stone. The ceiling arches higher than sight, veins of luminous crystal threading through the bone. My pack is scattered, their forms dim and uncertain—each one flickering slightly, as though half of them exist elsewhere.
Kael'thir kneels by a pool of mercury-colored water. "The Husk remembers," he whispers. "It remembers what it made and what it lost."
When I kneel beside him, I see my reflection in the water—only it's not me. It's a version of me older, scarred, eyes like cold suns. The reflection smiles first.
> [System echo: user—future iteration recognized.]
[Do you wish to merge?]
I reach toward the surface.
The reflection reaches back.
Then everything goes black.
---
When light returns, I am standing in a field of shattered stars. The Husk's ribs are gone; the plains are gone. Only me, the System's voice—a stuttering godling—and the faint howl of my wolves in the distance.
> [Sync achieved.]
[Identity: unstable. Self overlap—73%.]
[Welcome back, Lira. Or what's left of you.]
I fall to my knees. The world smells like memory burning.
Above me, the horizon shivers—something immense and sleeping turns over in its grave of glass.
Kael'thir's voice drifts to me, half-whisper, half-prayer.
"You've touched the mind of the dead god, wolf. The question now is—will you wake it, or will it wake you?"