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Julen looked once more toward the gate, where the last of the fleeing figures disappeared into the distance. Then back at her.

“Of course I am.”

Maia didn’t smile. She pulled herself up into the saddle, adjusting quickly, instinct taking over where memory failed. Julen followed a moment later, less gracefully.

Behind them, the city of Eryssan had fractured. Ahead, the path to the cliffs opened. The black banquet clothes snapped around them in the wind, mourning for a city that had not yet died.

Maia looked back once, not at the people streaming through the gates, but at the Archive’s dome, still standing, pale against the darkening sky. Everything she had come here to learn was inside it. Everything she had actually learned was not.

They rode out through the gates with the tear in the earth burning ahead of them as they started their ascent.

Towards the thing that would open in three days and take the rest with it.

Towards the man who had set it in motion, and then refused to finish it.

43

The Path to the Fracture

The gates of Eryssan did not close behind them. There was no grinding of stone, no heaving of wood - only an absence where there should have been weight, and nobody left to mark it. After weeks of increased patrols and Umbralyn oversight, the nothing was worse.

The path beyond the gates sloped upward along the cliffside, narrow and uneven, carved more by time than intention. The last time she had left these gates was on the trip to Meridon. Several weeks ago now, though it felt like a different lifetime - the world had changed entirely since then, and so, she suspected, had she.

The sea stretched far below, a dark, restless expanse that reflected none of the strange light now bleeding across the sky. Julen shifted behind her in the saddle, his grip tightening as the horse adjusted to the incline. They were riding toward the very thing they had avoided their entire lives.

“This is a terrible idea,” Julen muttered.

“Yes,” Maia agreed, but she did not slow. “But it’s the only chance we have.”

The wind grew sharper the higher they climbed, carrying with it something mineral and cold. It caught at the back of her throat. Ahead, the sky had begun to split. The colour was wrong - even more vibrant than it had been - violet threaded through pale streaks of pink, pulsing faintly as though something vast breathed just beyond it.

The Fracture.

Closer now. Much closer.

Julen exhaled slowly. “It’s… bigger than it looked from the city.”

Maia nodded once. “Because it’s opening. They were right.”

They rode in silence for a while after that, the path winding upward in slow, uneven turns. The further they moved from Eryssan, the less the world felt anchored.

The stone beneath the horse’s hooves changed first. Fine lines began to appear: thin fractures etched into the rock, faintly reflective, catching what little light remained and bending it at strange angles. At first, Maia thought it was wet. But it wasn’t.

It was glass, threaded violently through the cliff itself.

She leaned slightly, watching as the horse stepped over a patch where the stone had splintered outward, jagged edges catching against the light.

“It’s spreading,” she said quietly.

Julen followed her gaze. “It’s beautiful.”

And it was. It shimmered beneath the violet light, bright enough to hold their reflections like clear water. The night sky behind them filled with a scatter of glinting stars, with an almost-full moon glowing pink. It could have been a painting. It should not have been beautiful.

Then the path bent around an outcrop, and the wind carried something else beneath the metal-scent of struck stone: cold ash, and beneath that, something sweeter and worse.

The camp had been struck into the cliffside just off the main path. Tents collapsed into their own shapes. The Eryssan banner still lashed to its pole, reduced to blackened threads. Julen’s breath caught behind her.

“Maia—”