Chapter Two: The Ones Who Watch the Silence
Part Three – The Rift That Watches Back
Date: Maelis 25, Year 204 PCR
Location: Outer Veilscar Rim – Eastern Cliffside / Hollowed Rift Zone
Time: Late Afternoon
The sky split when they landed.
Not with lightning. Not with sound.
It was the color—a dull, veiled crimson that bled through the atmosphere like a wound reopened. No clouds. No birds. No wind.
Only stillness.
And beneath that stillness, the ground shimmered—pale and wet, even though it hadn't rained. Glyph ash coated the edges of shattered stone. Deep grooves scarred the cliffside, trailing like claw marks across the Veil's exposed bone.
Selka stepped off first, blade drawn but not lit. Her eyes moved in slow arcs.
"Nothing's moving."
Kaelen touched the edge of a broken obelisk.
"Then something already did."
Yolti kneeled beside a resonance fracture—one of the smaller ones. It pulsed faintly beneath her palm, but it didn't respond to glyphsong.
"These tears aren't old. Some of them are still warm."
Zephryn moved last. The moment his boots touched the dirt, his glyph flared—not brightly, but sharply, like it had been asleep too long and woke with its teeth bared.
A hum rang beneath his ribs. Not melody. Not warning.
Recognition.
Kaelen called out.
"Riftborn! Left ridge. Three—maybe four!"
The shadows moved fast—shifting forms low to the ground, pale-limbed, black-veined, eyes glowing like chalk lit from the inside.
They weren't like the ones from training.
They were wrong.
Incomplete.
Yolti whispered, "They're unstable. Memory-dead."
Selka leapt into motion—her glyphblades flaring white as she dashed forward in two clean arcs, cutting one of the Riftborn down in a clean, silent burst of frost.
Kaelen's fire took the second—too wide, too hot, burning half the stone in a wave that nearly singed Zephryn's boots.
"Damn it, Kaelen!" Selka snapped.
"That's not control, that's combustion!"
"It worked, didn't it?" he hissed, panting.
The third Riftborn didn't charge.
It just stood.
Watching Zephryn.
No mouth. No breath. Just two wide, sunken eyes staring straight through his chest.
It took a step forward.
And spoke.
Not in words.
In one name.
"Caelus…"
The air dropped ten degrees.
Yolti gasped. Selka stopped moving. Kaelen turned, jaw tight.
Buta had told them: Riftborn do not speak.
They howl. They echo. They mock.
But this…
This one knew something.
Zephryn stepped forward, hand raised—not with a weapon. Just a question.
"What did you say?"
The Riftborn tilted its head.
Its skin cracked across the mouth as if the word had cost it part of itself.
"He… who was not… sung."
Then it collapsed—not by attack, but by sheer resonance decay.
The glyph in Zephryn's arm burned.
Not bright. Not violent.
Just true.
He dropped to one knee.
The echo in his ears wouldn't stop now. It kept repeating:
"He who was not sung.
He who was not sung.
He who…"
Selka grabbed his shoulder.
He flinched, breathing hard.
"What did it mean?" she asked.
He looked at her.
And for the first time, his voice cracked when he spoke:
"I think… that was my name."
Behind them, a shimmer passed through the trees.
Not a Riftborn.
Not a beast.
Just a silhouette. One shoulder slumped. One hand holding a broken blade.
Watching from the edge of the scar.
Then vanishing.
Amo Sancho had found them.
But he would not speak yet.
Not until the wind called his name first.