The Spire of Convergence loomed over the Rifted Zone like a scar across the sky impossibly tall, strangely quiet now that the tremors had passed. And yet, the silence felt heavier than the quake. As if time itself was holding its breath.
Kael stood on the outer platform, eyes scanning the swirling fog below. His breathing hadn't returned to normal. Not from fatigue, he was used to running, jumping, dodging danger—but from what he'd felt during the quake. The pressure. The echo that hadn't just rattled his bones, but something deeper.
Aya emerged from the interior chamber behind him, her expression carved in ice. Elrik followed close, wiping blood from a shallow cut above his eye.
"All accounted for?" Kael asked.
Aya gave a terse nod. "Kura and Jessa are tending to the loopfield monitors. We stabilized most of the breaches."
Kael didn't look relieved. "Except Dex."
The name hung in the air like a weight.
Elrik grimaced. "He was last seen at the Echo Market. Said he had a lead on an anomaly. Then nothing."
Kael's fists clenched. "We shouldn't have left him."
Aya crossed her arms, turning to gaze outward where the Rift shimmered like a wound. "He knew the risks. Dex has protocols for this. He's probably tracking us now."
"Or he's stranded," Kael muttered. "Or worse."
Behind them, the Rift pulsed again, a deep, low thrum that wasn't sound but sensation. Aya stiffened. She whispered more to herself than anyone else, "Something is moving… not just through time, but beneath it."
Kael turned to her. "What does that mean?"
But Aya didn't answer. Her eyes remained fixed on the swirling distortion, as if listening to something only she could hear.
From the Spire's heart, a tremor returned—not physical, but emotional. Something was coming.
The silence shattered with a sharp ping.
Aya's scanner, clipped to her forearm, flashed erratic pulses red, blue, and violet. Jessa darted in from the left corridor, hair tangled, eyes wide. "It's Dex," she said breathlessly. "Something broke through the interference."
Aya crouched by a data terminal embedded in the spire wall and jacked in the scanner. Static crackled, then stabilized into fragmented imagery. The screen flickered—distorted angles, a warped corridor, shadows crawling like they had lives of their own. Dex stood in the frame, flickering like he was fighting the very moment he existed in.
Jessa whispered, "He's broadcasting from a shard. A memory shard. Probably his backup relay."
Dex's voice came through, choppy but clear enough to chill them.
"...this place doesn't follow rules. It... folds... no axis stays straight. The cloaked figure, he called me... 'Woven Echo.'"
The image warped again. Then a second voice overlapped Dex's feed, deep, smooth, ancient.
"The Woven One awakens."
Kael stepped closer, lips parted. Then the voice whispered again softer, like a thread brushing skin:
"Kael."
Aya paled. Her fingers froze above the terminal. "It knows him."
Elrik leaned in, typing rapidly as he scanned the signal for coordinates. "I can isolate part of it. The flux signature matches one of the lower Null Core pathways. Beyond the mapped Rifted Zone."
"That far?" Jessa asked.
"No relay should survive there," Aya said quietly.
Kael's jaw tightened. "But Dex did."
The feed collapsed into static, but a timestamp glitched in the corner—some kind of trail. Aya logged it, then stood. "He's not dead. But he's trapped deep. Wherever that thing is... it isn't finished with him."
"And it's not finished with me either," Kael added, eyes darkening.
The war room inside the Spire had never felt colder. It wasn't the air, Kura had stabilized the environmental regulators hours ago. But the tension now? It was thick enough to choke on.
Kael slammed his palm on the circular holotable. "We need to go now. Dex is still alive. You saw that feed!"
Aya, standing across from him, arms crossed, didn't flinch. "And if we rush in, we lose more. The Null Core layers aren't mapped for a reason. You go blind, you don't come back."
"He came for us," Kael snapped. "He stayed behind when you told him not to. And now he's calling for help."
Jessa shifted uncomfortably, glancing between them. "He didn't exactly say help. It sounded more like a warning."
"That's exactly why we can't ignore it," Kael replied. His voice cracked slightly. "He found something. Or it found him."
Aya exhaled slowly. "Do you know what the term 'Woven Echo' means? That's Riftbound language, Kael. That thing speaking through the shard it knew you. By name."
Kael's fists clenched. "I didn't choose to be 'known' by anything."
"No," she agreed softly. "But you were marked the day you stabilized that first time-loop. And now the Rift knows your rhythm."
The words landed with the force of truth. Kael stepped back, breathing hard, gaze falling to the holographic map.
"I didn't ask for any of this," he muttered.
Aya's voice softened, but only slightly. "None of us did. But you're central to it now, whether you like it or not."
Kura entered then, brushing soot from his coat. "Arguments won't rewrite the flux path. Dex's signal is real, and decaying fast. If we're going, it's soon or never."
Aya locked eyes with Kael. "If we do this… we do it my way. We prep a loop anchor. No hero charges. No split decisions."
Kael met her gaze, hesitant but resolute. "Fine. But we're going."
Aya turned to the console. "Then let's find our way to the place time itself doesn't trust."
The descent into the Rifted Zone's lower Null Core was unlike anything Kael had felt before.
Aya piloted the skimmer with practiced precision, its chassis shimmering against invisible eddies of temporal drag. Kura and Jessa worked silently at the rear console, stabilizing the loop anchor—a tether that would give them one chance to snap back if things went wrong.
"Distance?" Aya asked.
"Five minutes to the drop-point," Jessa answered, glancing at the shifting maps. "After that, we lose signal integrity. No tracking. No backup."
Kael peered through the viewing dome. The landscape ahead had lost all sense of spatial logic. Buildings floated sideways. A mountain inverted in midair. Trees stood rooted in nothing, their leaves falling upward.
Time was broken here.
Elrik, seated beside Kael, whispered, "You ever get the feeling we're walking into someone else's memory?"
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching—some presence just beyond comprehension, hiding in the layers of time. Not malevolent. Just ancient. And aware.
Suddenly, the skimmer jolted.
"Hold on!" Aya shouted.
The craft tilted, caught in a swirl of flux distortion. Kura wrestled with the stabilizers. "Localized compression field, some kind of inverted loop!"
Jessa gasped. "It's forming a pattern!"
On the screen, threads of chronolight wove themselves midair, dozens of lines intersecting into a strange, rotating spiral. In its center floated a shard.
Not just any shard.
Dex's face blinked across it, frozen, eyes wide, mouth open in mid-scream.
Kael lunged. "We're close!"
Aya gritted her teeth. "Landing now. Get ready."
The skimmer dropped with a thud onto cracked crystalline terrain. The moment Kael stepped out, he felt it, like stepping into a memory that wasn't his. Thoughts brushed his mind that didn't belong to him. Sorrow. Questions. Echoes.
"Stay sharp," Aya said. "Something's anchoring this zone. Dex was caught in it."
Kael's eyes narrowed as they neared the shard, the spiral of light above it turning slower now.
And then it whispered again. Not aloud, but in his head.
"The Sovereign remembers you."
Aya stopped moving before anyone else noticed the temperature drop. Not the physical kind, but something older, colder, brushing the inside of her bones.
Kael turned to her. "What is it?"
She didn't answer immediately. Her gaze was locked on the spiral shard where Dex's image still flickered. But now it had changed. His eyes were shut. Lips moving. Whispering something no one could hear.
Aya's hand twitched toward her blade. Her voice, when it came, was a whisper. "I've felt this before."
Kael stepped closer. "When?"
She looked at him, and the fear in her eyes wasn't just fear, it was recognition. "Before I left the Time Authorities. They called it an anomaly with no origin. But I know better now."
"What was it?"
Aya's jaw tightened. "It's not a thing. It's a presence. It moves under time like a shadow beneath ice. They named it a Rift Sovereign. But it's older than the Authority's records."
Elrik and Kura joined them, tension high.
"You mean like... another Riftbound?" Elrik asked.
Aya nodded slowly. "The one that commands them. Not just a being, but a memory given will. A consciousness formed from collapsed timelines."
Jessa's voice quivered. "So... it's watching us?"
Aya looked again at the shard. "It already has."
Suddenly, the shard cracked.
A burst of light exploded outward, knocking them back. Time twisted, Kael saw versions of himself blink across his vision: older, younger, broken, triumphant. And at the center of it all, a shadow. Tall. Shifting. Cloaked in shimmering remnants of lost hours.
A voice not heard, but felt, filled the Rift.
"The Weaver walks in flesh again. And the Echo bleeds."
Kael staggered to his feet, eyes wide. "Did it just call me,"
Aya pulled him behind cover. "It sees your potential, Kael. The same way it saw mine. And it's reaching out."
"For what?" Kael demanded. "To kill me?"
Aya met his gaze, her own trembling slightly. "No. Worse. To make you... remember."
The shard lay cracked but still pulsing.
Kael approached slowly, breath unsteady. The voices had stopped. The shadow had faded. But the silence left behind felt louder than any scream.
Aya, kneeling beside the broken fragment, activated a flux stabilizer. Light shimmered over the shard's surface and then Dex's face emerged again. Not flickering this time. Solid. Eyes open.
He was... conscious.
"Dex?" Kael whispered, voice cracking.
The projection didn't respond right away. Then:
"Kael..." Dex's voice was hoarse. Slowed. "If this fragment reached you, it means I've found it. The Source Loop. It's buried beyond the Null Core's edge... wrapped in layers of temporal decay... but alive."
Kael dropped to his knees. "Dex, where are you?"
"I don't know anymore," Dex admitted. "The Sovereign pulled me through something that isn't time. It's... memory built into the Rift. It's watching me. Studying me. It called me... 'the unfinished Echo.'"
He glanced to the side, at something they couldn't see. "If it touches Kael, the resonance completes. I don't know what that means, but it fears him. And that's something."
Aya's hands trembled. She looked to Kael, then to the shard again. Dex's eyes now locked onto her.
"Aya... don't let the past choose him. Help him choose himself."
The feed ended.
The shard darkened.
Silence.
Kura stepped forward. "That wasn't just a message. That was a map."
Jessa, fingers already at her interface, nodded. "I can trace the resonance. It leads straight through the Null Core Divide."
Aya stood. "Then that's where we go."
Kael hesitated, staring at the last flicker of Dex's image. He wasn't sure what scared him more: that Dex might be alive... or that he was being kept alive for a reason.
He turned to the team. "Whatever's waiting at the end of that trail, it's tied to me. So I'm going."
Aya nodded, expression unreadable. "Then we all are."
And with that, they prepared to descend deeper—toward the unknown memory at the edge of time's collapse.