The city of Caldris was dying.

Riven stood at the edge of the steel overpass, staring out across a once-living metropolis now swallowed by smoke and broken neon. Drones buzzed like dying fireflies in the distance. Towers once scraping stars now lay gutted and hollow, their insides spilling sparks and steel bones into the streets below.

He adjusted the strap of his photon rifle and tried not to breathe too deeply. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and ozone. The last air filtration tower had fallen two days ago.

“Command, this is Echo-7. Still no sign of civilian movement. Just ash and ghosts.”

His comm crackled. Then silence.

Typical.

He lowered the mic and exhaled. Always alone. He was good at that. Good at quiet steps, at vanishing when needed. Ghost ops, they called it.

But even ghosts got tired.

He looked up at the sky—or what was left of it. A sickly red veil hung overhead, bleeding with strange auroras that didn’t belong in this dimension. Time fractures had grown more frequent. Birds flew backward. Some mornings lasted minutes; others, years.

The Rift was growing.

He could feel it—like a migraine in the marrow of his bones. The more it expanded, the more it twisted things: space, memory, even reality.

He used to think it was random. Until he found the pattern.

And until he saw her.

That first time, three months ago. In a place where time had folded into itself like a dying star. A battlefield caught in a loop. She’d appeared just as the air shattered like glass.

Not from his world.

She wore armor made of silverleaf and obsidian bone, her hair braided with sky-threads, her sword humming with light that pulsed to the rhythm of her heartbeat.

She looked like a myth. Moved like a storm.

He should’ve reported it. Instead, he returned. Again and again.

Every time the Rift opened, he searched. And sometimes—only sometimes—he saw her again.

---

Meanwhile, in another world...

Auren unsheathed her blade and sliced through the shadowbeast’s neck with a clean, practiced arc.

The creature crumpled to the ground, vanishing in a puff of black smoke and silver dust.

“Three more,” she muttered, twirling the blade back into its sheath.

The forest around her hissed, leaves whispering like tongues of ancient spirits. She touched the jewel embedded in her gauntlet. It was dim now. Too dim.

The Rift was near.

She could feel it—like a cold wind licking her spine, carrying voices she’d never heard but somehow knew.

Auren was a Blade-Sister of the Moon Court, trained to defend the Realms from unnatural breaches. But nothing in her training had prepared her for this: the visions, the stutters in time, the man with storm-colored eyes who appeared in her dreams.

She didn’t know his name. Only the feel of him.

Pain. Fire. Stars.

She'd told no one. Not even her closest general. The Moon Court believed her strong. Unshakable. But lately, she’d begun to crack beneath the weight of a prophecy whispered at her birth:

"When sky splits and stars fall, your heart will fracture time."

She never believed in prophecy.

But lately… the stars had been acting strange.

---

Back in Caldris, hours later

Riven woke with a start.

He’d dozed off in an old subway car, engine long dead. A sound had pulled him from sleep—not loud, but deep. Like a drumbeat from beneath the earth.

The Rift.

It was opening again.

He grabbed his pack and sprinted out into the night. As he reached the crest of the ruined plaza, the sky split open—like glass punched from the inside.

A glowing crack.

And from it, a figure fell.

No—not fell. Descended.

Silverleaf armor. Sky-threaded braid.

Riven’s heart stopped.

Auren.

And then—

The Rift pulsed.

Reality screamed.

And time forgot to hold them apart.