Somewhere between the Echo Market and the Rifted Zone
Dex always preferred terminals to tunnels. Give him a glowing console, a firewall to tear down, or a stream of temporal data to decode, and he was in his element. But this? Dim, erratic corridors, stitched from collapsing timelines, bleeding echoes of places that no longer existed—or hadn't yet—this wasn't his scene.
The Echo Market buzzed behind him, a fading hum in the distance. His boots clacked against uneven tiles, some cracked, some pristine, all unstable. Every few steps, the walls blinked—one moment neon-lit with 1980s signage, the next an obsidian sheen with shifting glyphs, or flickering images of Earth cities lost to time.
He should've regrouped with Elrik and the rest.
But he couldn't ignore it—the anomaly he'd sensed near Sector B13. It wasn't on any charted loop or fracture record. A ripple, faint and quiet, like an old thought resurfacing. Familiar, yet wrong. It tugged at him.
The signal had vanished once before, years ago, when he was still deep in the Archive Layers, digging through decaying records of pre-temporal experimentation. That same signature had pinged today—right in the Echo Market's underbelly.
He stopped at a juncture where the corridor twisted unnaturally—left led to a place that smelled like rain on rust; right pulsed with a rhythm, like a heartbeat. He chose the right, trusting instinct over protocol. He always did.
Reaching for his comms, he tapped his earpiece.
"Aya. You copy?"
A burst of static, then her voice: terse, businesslike. "Dex? Where the hell are you?"
"Still in the Market. Picked up an anomaly I couldn't ignore. Elrik went ahead?"
"Yeah. We've already moved toward the fracture. You're late."
"Time's weird here. You don't say." He half-smirked. "Where exactly are you?"
"Heading east into the Rift corridor. But it's unstable. Loopfields are breaking. You'll need to stay in sync—don't stray."
He adjusted the dial on his temporal anchor and exhaled. "Copy that."
"Dex, get here in one piece."
"I'll try."
He cut the comm and began the trek. The corridor ahead vibrated gently underfoot, and his compass glowed a sickly violet. Something wasn't right. Temporal echoes drifted past—half-silhouettes of people walking, pausing, vanishing mid-step. He ducked under one, feeling a strange chill brush against his cheek.
Two minutes in, the corridor tilted.
Not metaphorically literally. The floor rolled sideways, the ceiling bending in, spatial logic warping. He stumbled, bracing himself against the wall but the wall turned to fog. His anchor blinked furiously.
"Son of a glitch…"
Then came the tremor, not shaking the ground, but shaking time itself. A resonance. He felt it in his chest, like a reverse heartbeat. The corridor split open with a silent roar, a crack widening beneath him. Purple light poured through.
"Okay, nope. No thank you."
Too late.
The tear opened fully, and gravity vanished. Dex screamed, not out of fear, but frustration as he was pulled through the rift. Glimpses of time raced past him. A shattered keystone spinning. Aya, older, bleeding. Jessa's face twisted in shock. Kura… gone. Elrik whispering, "It's him…"
The visions vanished as he tumbled into something vast and dark.
When he hit ground, it wasn't ground. It was memory.
The space around him rippled like water over stone. He stood in what looked like a cathedral, half in ruins, half forming itself. Symbols glowed faintly on pillars made of shifting data. This wasn't any place he'd read about, not even in forbidden texts from the Inner Reaches.
He coughed, dust and light escaping his lungs. "Okay. So maybe chasing anomalies alone wasn't my brightest idea."
His gear buzzed. Most of it was offline, his comms scrambled, compass spinning, anchor barely holding. Still, he was alive. He reached for a shard of his scanner that had broken off, pocketing it with care.
Then he saw it.
Hovering in the air, not far, was a figure.
Human-like, but not human. Wrapped in fragments of time, cloaked in the residue of long-forgotten loops. It had no face, only a shadowed mask of memory. Around it, symbols hovered—some ancient, others yet to be written.
Dex took a step back, fingers twitching toward the pulse pistol on his thigh.
The figure didn't move.
Then it spoke, not aloud, but directly into his mind.
"Fragment… returned."
Dex blinked. "What?"
"You carry the broken thread. You walk where you shouldn't."
"Yeah, well, I'm good at that."
The air rippled. The figure turned its head, if it had one, slightly.
"He approaches. The Woven One. The Tearborn."
"You mean Kael?"
The figure paused. Something in the way it drifted now felt almost… reverent. Or afraid.
"He will wake the Sovereign. And the Sovereign will remember."
Dex narrowed his eyes. "That's not good, is it?"
The figure didn't answer. Instead, it extended a hand, and a shard of crystalline time floated toward Dex. Hesitantly, he reached out and caught it. A flash erupted in his mind, a memory that wasn't his.
Kael… kneeling over a broken world.
Aya… screaming.
And Dex himself… saying goodbye.
The vision ended.
When he opened his eyes, the figure was gone.
Dex stood in silence, the shard still warm in his hand.
Whatever this place was, it wasn't part of the mapped Rift. This was deeper, closer to the source. And that thing, whatever it was, it knew about Kael. About the Sovereign. About him.
He had to get back.
He turned, only to find the path had changed again. But this time, it didn't matter.
He knew where he had to go.
Into the dark. Into the core.
And he wasn't coming back empty-handed.