The sun never really rose in my district. It only pushed the darkness back a little — just enough to show the broken towers and the ash drifting through the air. People said the world used to be brighter before the Wraithfall, but I was born long after that. All I knew were ruins and survival drills.
My name is Aren Vale, and on the morning everything changed, I was just trying to get water before the pumps shut down again.
The line was long, as usual. Nobody talked. Nobody looked at each other. Silence is safer in a place where sound attracts things you don't want to meet.
I kept my hood up, hands in my pockets, the same routine every day. Then the ground trembled — not a quake, but the sharp pulse that meant a Tear was forming somewhere near the district. People froze. A few backed away. Nobody ran. Running gets you noticed.
I felt it before I saw it — a pressure in the air, like someone pushing a knife against my chest. My breath caught. The crowd started whispering the thing everyone feared:
"Wraith…"
Not here. Not this close.
Then the alarms screamed across the ruins.
A rush of panic hit the street, bodies pressing past me, shoving, sprinting for shelter. I didn't move at first. I was staring at the sky — at the thin spiral of black energy tearing open above the rooftops.
A Tear. A real one. Not a drill. Not a rumor.
And something was coming out of it.
My hands started shaking, but my legs finally listened. I pushed through the crowd, heading for the safer streets. I should've been scared, but all I felt was a strange numbness — the same feeling I always got when the world showed me how small I really was.
Then it happened.
A blast of pressure slammed into the district. Windows shattered. Dust exploded upward. People fell. I hit the ground hard, ears ringing.
When I opened my eyes, the Tear was still there… but something else was too.
A faint ripple in the air.
Like space itself had bent — for just one second — around me.
I didn't know what it was yet.
I didn't know that this moment would pull me out of the ruins and into the Academy.
I didn't know it was the start of everything.
All I knew was this:
Something inside me had awakened.
And the world felt it.