Kael woke up to a silence that felt unnatural, the kind of quiet that pressed against his eardrums and made the world feel thinner than it should. He blinked against the pale morning light leaking through the cracked curtain, expecting the usual ache in his chest, the memory-laced heaviness that had defined his mornings for as long as he could remember. But it didn't come. The air felt lighter, almost playful, and for the first time in years, Kael realized he could breathe without the weight of yesterday crushing him. That's… new, he muttered, swinging his legs off the bed and planting his feet on the cold floor. He had a sudden, uncomfortable awareness that something inside him was… off. Different. Awake in a way it had never been before.
His phone buzzed on the bedside table, and instinctively, his body jumped as if it had been shot. One notification. A group chat. [Rift Idiots 🗿]. Kael stared at the name, half annoyed and half intrigued. He knew he should feel dread, but instead, there was a faint tug of… amusement. Why am I still part of this disaster? he thought.
Ryn: IF YOU DON'T SHOW UP, I WILL PERSONALLY HAUNT YOUR CORPSE.Ishaan: He's breathing. Barely, but still.Mira: Kael. Now. Or I'm coming to drag you myself.
Kael smirked faintly. "Friends," he muttered under his breath, the word tasting strange on his tongue. He typed back slowly. > Kael: If I die today, I'm blaming all of you.
The replies came instantly, chaotic as always. > Ryn: HE LIVES. > Ishaan: Statistically improbable. > Mira: Don't push it. We leave in 20.
He sighed and shoved the phone back onto the bed. Friends. He didn't like admitting it, but he couldn't deny that having them made the world slightly less unbearable.
The city was already alive with the usual chaos, but Kael noticed small differences today. The colors felt sharper, the noises sharper, almost as if reality itself had been tuned slightly off-key. He walked beside the group, hands in his pockets, watching people move with their trivial, meaningless purpose, and felt the first stirrings of something inside him. It wasn't fear or anger. It was… potential. Power. Aura, the word whispered in his head before he could stop it. Something he had never been able to name until now, a subtle resonance that hummed beneath his skin.
Ryn practically bounced with his usual energy, oblivious to Kael's distracted thoughts. "You feel it too, right? That weird thing?" he said, voice crackling with excitement. Ishaan adjusted his glasses, scanning their surroundings with that same meticulous intensity. "It's subtle, but measurable," he murmured. Mira stayed quiet, walking beside Kael with the calm confidence of someone who could predict exactly when the next disaster would strike.
Kael frowned. Measurable? By what standard? By whose rules? Before he could ask, the air shifted. It wasn't a breeze or a sound. It was pressure, a pull that brushed across his senses like invisible fingers. Time itself seemed to stretch for a fraction of a second, enough to make the hair on his arms stand on end.
Then the ground trembled.
Not violently, not yet. Just enough that Kael's chest tightened, and the faint resonance inside him pulsed, almost calling out, almost demanding action. His friends froze beside him. Even Mira's usual calm tightened just slightly. Ryn's grin faltered. Ishaan's fingers twitched near the edge of his pocket, ready to calculate trajectories if anything fell.
Kael's aura flickered nervously, casting pale blue light that danced across the cracked pavement and his friends' wary faces. Great, he thought, this is exactly how people explode in horror stories. Ryn, as usual, couldn't resist commenting. "Bro, if you blow up, at least make it stylish," he said, flexing his hands as if he were auditioning for some kind of anime action scene. Ishaan muttered something about "energy instability readings" and immediately ducked behind a nearby car, while Mira's calm gaze didn't waver for a second. "Focus," she said simply. "You feel it, you control it, or we all die. Probably in that order." Kael gritted his teeth. Control it? That's news to me.
The rift pulsed again, darker and more aggressive this time, and Kael instinctively lifted a hand. The air hummed, the pavement cracked beneath him, and a shard of debris lifted as if gravity had forgotten its job. Okay… okay… not dying yet. That's good. He glanced at his friends; their expressions ranged from panic to anticipation. Ryn grinned maniacally. "This is gonna be fun," he said, clearly misunderstanding the word "fun."
Kael swallowed and exhaled slowly. The shadows emerging from the rift were grotesque, twisting, and hungry. He felt a shiver, but beneath it, a thrill he hadn't felt in years—the power of being alive, dangerous, and entirely unpredictable. With a flash of blue light and a pulse that made the ground tremble, Kael realized one terrifying truth: he wasn't just awake. He was awake, and the world was finally noticing.
Kael didn't move at first. He wasn't sure what to do. But the pull intensified, and a strange warmth spread from his core, swirling outward like invisible fire licking at his skin. No, he thought. Not now. I don't even know how to control it.
And then it struck.
A jagged crack appeared in the middle of the street ahead of them. Reality bent like glass under pressure, fragments of pavement twisting upward in impossible angles. A low, guttural growl echoed from within the rift, something that smelled wrong, sounded wrong, and felt wrong to his bones. Kael's friends instinctively stepped back, but Kael didn't. His hands twitched at his sides, and the faint blue aura began to glow around him, humming like a trapped storm.
This is it, he thought, heart thundering. My life is about to get very, very complicated.
Before anyone could react, the shadows from the rift curled outward, forming grotesque shapes that slithered across the cracked asphalt, seeking, testing, smelling the world. Kael felt a surge of exhilaration and fear, his pulse syncing with the rhythm of the pulsing aura. He didn't know if he could control it. He didn't know if it would protect him or destroy everything around him.
All he knew was that he was awake.
And from the depths of that unnatural rift, something whispered. "AT LAST… YOU ARE READY."
Kael's eyes widened as his aura flared uncontrollably, illuminating the street in violent blue light, painting his friends' shocked faces in stark, surreal contrast. The rift pulsed in response, as if alive, and the ground beneath them quaked again. The world felt smaller, tighter, like it was holding its breath—and Kael realized with a mix of terror and exhilaration that everything had changed in an instant.
He barely had time to think before something massive, black, and wrong began to emerge, something that moved with purpose and malice beyond anything he had ever seen. And Kael, for the first time in his life, felt alive and terrified all at once.
This… is only the beginning.