The rift still lingered.

It hung like a wound in the air, delicate and wrong. Deep in the forest where mana grew dense and the trees whispered things no one else heard, Kael and Selene stood silently before it. The veil shimmered faintly in the early morning light, a faint ripple in space that pulsed in time with something they couldn’t see—like a heartbeat behind a wall.

Selene squinted at it. “It’s just... like mist. Are you sure this isn’t just wild mana?”

Kael didn’t answer immediately. His gaze didn’t blink, didn’t move. He was watching the fold, not with his eyes, but with his whole being—resonance brushing against it like tuning forks vibrating in tandem.

“No. It’s... It’s not just magic,” he said at last. “It’s a seam. Between here... and something else.”

A breeze shifted through the leaves. A soft rustling. The rift pulsed once.

Kael stepped closer and extended a hand. As his fingers neared, the shimmer curved toward him. Like it recognized his mana. His presence.

“Don’t touch it!” Selene hissed.

“I’m not,” he whispered. “It’s touching me.”

She grabbed his sleeve and yanked him back. “If this is dangerous—”

“It is,” he said. “But I think I can fix it.”

Selene blinked. “Fix it? How?”

---

They sat on a moss-covered stone nearby, the rift still in view but distant enough to breathe again. Kael picked up a twig and began to draw in the dirt—circles, nodes, interlocking lines.

“There’s harmony in everything,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “The universe isn’t random—it dances. Even chaos has rhythm. If this rift is a resonance leak... we don’t destroy it. We cancel it. Like noise.”

Selene furrowed her brow. “Cancel it with what?”

“With a counter-resonance.” He scratched more marks in the earth, eyes sharp, excited now. “If I build a regulator that mirrors the rift’s mana signature and pushes an opposite signal, we can stabilize it. Seal it.”

“Permanently?”

“If I’m right? Yes.”

A pause.

Selene leaned closer. “And if you’re wrong?”

Kael didn’t look up. “Then we’re not ready for what’s coming through.”

---

The village buzzed with tension. Elders muttered about beast sightings. Hunters whispered about stars that looked wrong at night. No one noticed Kael sneaking into the storage shed with bundles of mana-infused bark, shards of old relics, and scavenged crystal-veined stone from the abandoned ruins at the edge of the fields.

He built in secret. Daylight hours were too risky, so he worked by moonlight, hands steady and eyes focused as he etched stabilizing glyphs into wood and aligned raw crystal fragments into a circular core.

The heart of the device was a crystal—a dull, murky thing until Kael pressed his mana into it. It flickered with faint life, catching glints of resonance. It wasn’t perfect. But it would work.

Selene came often. Sometimes to watch, sometimes to help. She didn’t understand most of it—why he carved spiraling glyphs into wood or embedded ancient sigils—but she trusted him.

“You really think this’ll stop the beasts?” she asked one night, when they paused to drink from a shared jug of cool water.

Kael was quiet. Then he said, “I think this might stop the reason they’re coming.”

---

They returned to the rift at dawn, the forest washed in golden light, leaves painted like fire.

Kael placed the device on a smooth patch of stone before the rift. He adjusted the stabilizer fins, aligned the core toward the mana pulse. His hands moved confidently—like a boy possessed by knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have.

Selene stood behind him, quiet but ready.

“I’ll activate the regulator,” Kael said. “It needs a few seconds to align.”

He touched the core. Mana flowed.

The device whirred to life, humming low. Crystals sparked. Glyphs glowed. The rift shimmered, its pulse slowing, narrowing.

“It’s working,” Selene breathed.

Kael’s eyes narrowed. “Not yet.”

The device vibrated—then shook.

“No,” he muttered. “The flow’s changing... it’s pushing back.”

Selene stepped forward. “Kael—?”

The hum became a shriek.

The crystal cracked.

A wave of force exploded outward.

They were flung back.

The rift didn’t close.

It screamed.

And it split.

Dozens of rips tore across the sky—fractures running like veins of fire. Energy bled from them, hissing and howling, and from one—a shadow dropped. Then another. Then hundreds.

Creatures of impossible shape, of twisted limbs and eyes like frozen stars, began to fall from the sky.

Kael lay dazed, blood on his temple, Selene coughing beside him.

“I didn’t seal it,” he whispered, voice cracking. “I opened all of it.”

---

In the days that followed, everything changed.

The sky pulsed with distant light, and travelers from other villages spoke of rifts in their woods, their rivers, even their fields.

Kael walked through the quiet village, eyes sunken. No one knew what had happened. Only Selene. And she hadn’t told anyone.

“Why didn’t it work?” she asked, once.

Kael didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said:

“Because this world was never meant to hold their weight. And I didn’t build something to hold it. I tried to end it.”

That night, Kael sat alone, a flickering stone in hand.

His gaze turned toward the stars — no longer wishing he could go home.

Now he wished he could stop everything from breaking.

And so, beneath that broken sky, Kael began sketching something else.

A system.

Not of magic.

But of hope.