Chapter 23 The Sky That Trembled
The sky split open.
Not metaphorically actually. A seam of red lightning tore across the clouds like a claw raking the heavens, and the sound was so loud it hammered through my ribs. Eryndor flinched beside me, his breath ragged, one knee sinking into the shattered stone. The obsidian shard pulsed once in my palm, a slow, sick heartbeat.
Behind us, the Witch-Tech Hunters shouted orders, their armor plates clinking as they took formation.
“Kaia,” Eryndor rasped. “The shard they can’t”
“I know,” I snapped, because my own panic was a living creature clawing inside my ribs.
The floating ruin beneath us tilted again, groaning like a dying beast. We scrambled, shoes skidding on stone dust, as another section of the platform crumbled into the void below a long, endless drop swallowed by fog.
A Hunter lifted a rifle. “Stand down! Release the relic!”
I raised my other hand, the one not holding the shard. Energy crackled at my fingertips fierce, alive, wild. The Hunter froze.
“Try me,” I said.
Eryndor managed a grim smile. “Always dramatic.”
“Comes naturally.”
Another fracture tore across the sky. This time it wasn’t lightning it was something behind the clouds. Something straining to force its way through.
A hollow boom followed, like a fist knocking on the world.
The Hunters hesitated, glancing up.
Bad sign.
If the monsters hunting us were scared, the universe was having a truly terrible day.
Eryndor swayed. I grabbed his arm. “Don’t you dare collapse on me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he murmured. “Though if I do, try to make it look heroic.”
The platform lurched, throwing us toward the edge. A Hunter slid past us, screaming as he dropped off the side, swallowed by the fog without even a fading echo.
Great. Death by gravity, or death by Witch-Tech. Truly an inspiring menu.
“Kaia,” Eryndor whispered.
I followed his gaze.
The storm clouds weren’t clouds anymore.
They were moving pulling apart like curtains.
And beyond them was an eye.
A colossal, vertical, slit-pupil eye staring directly at us.
The breath left my lungs.
“That’s… not possible,” I whispered.
“Apparently it is,” Eryndor said, too calm for comfort.
The Hunters panicked immediately.
“Project ARK is manifesting” “It’s awake” “Get the relic from her!”
One fired. A bolt of ion energy streaked toward me fast enough that I barely reacted.
Eryndor did.
He shoved me aside, took the hit in the shoulder, and hit the stone with a strangled gasp. Smoke curled from the scorched impact on his armor.
“Eryndor!”
Something in me snapped wide open.
The energy that surged out of me wasn’t like before. It didn’t feel borrowed, or wild, or unstable.
It felt inevitable.
The air thickened. Cracked. Shimmered.
The Hunters froze mid-step, mid-breath, mid-fear trapped in a shimmering distortion of suspended time. Their limbs wavered like reflections in boiling water.
I stared at my hands.
“What did I just do?”
Eryndor pushed himself upright, wincing. “You forced a temporal halt.”
“Okay, but HOW?”
He laughed under his breath, pained and impressed. “Because you’re becoming what the shard remembers you to be.”
His wording sliced straight through me.
“Eryndor… what exactly is the shard?”
The clouds above the eye tore a little wider. The creature behind them let out a low, resonant growl that vibrated through the metal bones of the floating ruin.
“That,” Eryndor said, “is your answer.”
Not helpful. Not at all.
The frozen Hunters began flickering, cracks forming in the time shell around them. My magic wouldn’t hold them long.
“We have to move,” I said.
“We have to jump,” Eryndor corrected.
I stared at him. “Off the platform? Into the endless death fog?”
“Into the rift beneath it.”
“What rift?”
He pointed.
And sure enough, the ruin was drifting apart at the center, forming a pulsing black tear in the air like a wound leaking gravity.
“Tell me that’s not the void again.”
“It’s… void-adjacent.”
“That is not a comforting phrase!”
Lightning stabbed the platform. The Hunters snapped back into time with screams, firing wildly as they regained motion.
No more choices.
“Jump with me,” Eryndor said softly.
The world shook under us. Stone cracked. The eye above widened, the pupil stretching into a vertical maw of red light.
And the Hunters charged.
I didn’t think.
I grabbed Eryndor’s hand, dragged in a breath that felt like inhaling broken glass, and sprinted.
The Hunters shouted. The sky cracked. The platform tilted hard.
We ran anyway.
The void-rift yawned beneath us, wide and impossible and promising nothing except change. The shard vibrated so violently I thought it might explode.
The air heated.
Someone shouted my name.
A Hunter lunged.
I jumped.
The world fell away.
Eryndor’s fingers closed around mine, tight, as the rift swallowed us whole. The storm, the Hunters, the watching eye all vanished in a single sound like tearing paper.
Darkness wasn’t what waited.
Not this time.
Instead light. Golden, blinding, ancient.
And the sensation of falling upward.
Eryndor gasped beside me. “Kaia… we’re inside ”
And then the world re-formed around us.
A chamber. Circular. Walls carved with runes glowing faint gold. Air humming with magic so dense it pressed against my skin.
Floating above a stone pedestal was a mirror.
No. Not a mirror.
A reflection of me that breathed.
Her eyes were molten gold. Her hair crackled faintly with fire. And she spoke before I could.
“You’re late,” she said.
My blood turned to ice.
Eryndor whispered, “Kaia… that’s not a reflection.”
No.
It wasn’t.
It was the woman from the storm vision.
The one I’d seen in the shard.
The one the Hunters feared.
The one the sky-creature answered to.
She stepped closer, each movement smooth, deliberate.
“I am the first Emberborne,” she said. “And you are the last.”
The chamber shook.
Above us, I heard the storm-creature roar a muffled, monstrous sound pressing through reality.
She smiled.
“And it is coming to claim you.”
The pedestal cracked.
Light flared.
And the chapter ends with her lifting her hand toward me fire swirling around her fingers while something enormous slams against the chamber walls from the outside, as if trying to break through.