The storm arrived two days ahead of schedule.
It wasn't rain that came first, but whispers—threads of voices threading through the wind like broken song. They rolled across the black grass of the southern scarlands, stirring the dust in slow spirals. Reven felt it in his teeth before he saw it in the sky.
They had crossed into the Rift-shadow.
And something knew they were there.
Kaela crouched at the edge of a collapsed pipeline, her eyes scanning the jagged horizon. "Movement. Two miles north. Big."
Lirien touched down beside her, wings pulled tight against the buffeting wind. "Not Supreme. No banners. Looks tribal."
Reven stepped up, squinting toward the distant figures. There were a dozen of them, maybe more. Shapes draped in bone, cloth, and chain. Tall. Moving in disciplined formation across terrain no one sane would travel.
He knew that walk.
"Bone-bound," he muttered.
Kaela stood. "Veyna's war-priests?"
Reven nodded. "Or what's left of them. She doesn't send scouts. She sends witnesses."
The wind keened louder.
They moved quickly after that, slipping down a ravine cut by Rift erosion and pressing east. The landscape was nothing like the highlands—everything here was grey, scorched, and oddly smooth, as if fire had polished the land itself. No birds. No beasts. Just that constant, whispering wind.
By nightfall, they reached the remains of an old relay tower, half-consumed by fused stone. Lirien checked the altitude and snapped out a short-range scan with her tracker.
"Two hours ahead," she said. "The Core—if that's what we're chasing—is buried in the next basin. But…"
Reven waited.
She hesitated, then added, "There's something else. A presence. The terrain's warped. Temporal interference."
Kaela grimaced. "Temporal? As in…"
"As in the Rift's bleeding again."
They made camp behind the shell of the tower, fireless and quiet. Kaela stood watch, sharpening her blade by feel. Reven sat with his back to a twisted support beam, the shard and Flamecore resting in his lap. The shard pulsed faintly, but something about the rhythm had changed.
It wasn't calling.
It was responding.
Reven reached for it, then stopped. He could feel her.
Veyna.
Not in the way he felt Kaela's steadiness or Lirien's sharp intuition. This was colder. Hungrier. A presence layered in memory, echo, and grief so deep it had calcified into cruelty.
She was near.
She knew.
At dawn, the sky fractured.
Not broken—shattered. Great bands of color stretched across the heavens like torn fabric, flickering between amber and violet. Time bled into itself. The air slowed.
They moved anyway.
By midday, they reached the basin.
It was worse than the map suggested.
An ancient Dominion observatory lay half-swallowed by a sinkhole, surrounded by jagged stone and dust that refused to settle. At its centre, glowing faintly through the haze, was a pillar.
And upon it, a third shard.
Kaela reached for her bow, already sensing the trap.
Lirien's wings rose. "We're not alone."
"No," Reven said. "We were never alone."
From the far ridge, figures appeared.
Tall. Rigid. Wrapped in tattered white robes reinforced with bone plates. Their faces were masked in ivory, no eye holes, only carved symbols and spirals.
And behind them—
She arrived.
Veyna, the Bone Witch, rode atop a great Riftborn beast—part serpent, part fossil, part shadow. Her robes trailed like smoke behind her, her arms layered in relics and bone-crafted rings. Her face was not masked.
It was bare.
Pale.
Unsmiling.
And somehow… familiar.
"You've come far, Reven," she called, her voice sharper than steel on glass. "But not far enough to understand what you carry."
Reven stepped forward, jaw tight. "Then say it. What do I carry?"
She smiled softly.
"Burden."
Kaela stepped beside him, blades drawn.
Veyna raised a hand. "There is no need for violence, not here. Not yet. I came to see. To feel. To confirm."
Lirien landed silently behind them. "You'll do more than see."
"No," Veyna said, almost gently. "You will. The third Core doesn't belong to me. It belongs to what's waiting beneath it."
Reven's heart sank.
Beneath?
He looked again—and saw it.
The shard wasn't sitting on the pillar.
It was part of it.
A keystone.
A seal.
"Don't touch it," Veyna said, lowering her hand. "Unless you wish to wake what the first world tried to bury."
Then she turned, slowly, and left.
Her masked followers followed without a word.
Within moments, they were gone.
But the damage lingered.
The shard was glowing now. Bright. Urgent. The Flamecore at Reven's side pulsed so hard it ached.
"She could've taken it," Kaela said quietly. "Why didn't she?"
"Because she's afraid," Reven whispered. "Or because she wants me to do it."
Lirien stepped closer to the pillar. "What do you want to do?"
Reven looked at the shard. At the pillar. At the light within the fractures of the sky.
And then he reached forward.
His fingers brushed the surface.
The earth cracked.
The pillar split.
And the world remembered something it was never meant to.