It wasn't a city.
It breathed like one—low, layered, constant—but o81it didn't live like one. No gates. No borders. Just glass spires, rising crooked from scorched earth. They were like teeth or antennas, catching light that wasn't there. The air around them shimmered—not with heat, but with pressure, as if the ground remembered something awful.
Cyril and Miren stood at the ridge's edge.
"Throatglass," she said, voice dry.
"Welcome to what's left of forgetting."
Cyril squinted at the mess of structures below.
"What is this place? Looks like a bad dream."
"A ruin built on top of older ruins."
The wind blew sour.
They walked down a path carved by boot heels and wheel ruts. Cyril counted eight different wrecks of wagons buried in the sand along the way.
The deeper they went, the less sense the city made. A tower stood upside-down, its foundation open to the sky. A tavern had no walls, only curtains made of vertebrae and wire. Voices whispered from alleyways that had no mouths.
Miren didn't flinch.
Cyril kept close.
They stopped at a wide depression in the center of the ruin, where tiers of carved stone led down into a pit veiled in fog. It looked like a wound in the land that never healed.
At the center: a figure.
Not seated. Not armed. Just present—silent, wrapped in loose cloth the color of soot and salt. A smooth, mirrored mask hid their face. Something in their posture felt… ancient. But not old. Like a memory, held too long.
Miren stepped forward.
The figure did not speak.
She stopped ten paces away, then gave the smallest nod.
"We need understanding," she said.
"We heard this place might offer it."
The figure tilted its head. The mirrored mask caught the sky and fractured it—Cyril saw himself reflected, but wrong. The wrong smirk. The wrong eyes.
"You carry questions," the figure said, voice layered, strange.
Not gendered. Not human.
Cyril stepped beside Miren, unsure why his hands were sweating.
"I've been feeling things I shouldn't," he said.
"Moving the Flow when I don't try. Reacting to things I don't know. I don't follow a pattern. I've trained. A little. Enough to know it shouldn't work like this."
The figure was silent.
Then: "It doesn't."
The sound in the pit deepened. Not thunder. Not vibration. Something internal. Cyril felt it in his teeth.
"What does that mean?" he asked.
The figure turned toward him fully now.
"You do not walk the road of the Anchors. Nor the Weavers. Nor the Fractals. Your energy doesn't spiral. It splits. Cuts. Crosses lines... ."
Miren narrowed her eyes.
"Is there something wrong with him?"
"No," the figure said.
"Just misaligned."
The figure's presence weighed on him. Cyril blinked. Once. Twice. On the third, the world changed.
A white corridor stretched before him. Clean. Too clean. Dozens of doors, all marked with glyphs he couldn't read.
He opened one.
A flood of color. Screams. A child's hand holding fire.
He opened another.
Nothing. Just void. And a single heartbeat—his.
"Some are shaped to contain," said the voice from nowhere.
"Others are shaped to leak."
He slammed the door shut.
Cyril gasped and dropped to one knee.
His ears rang. He tasted copper.
The masked figure stood exactly as before.
"You are a first, never seen anything like you before." it said.
"I am saddened to say this is all I can do for you, Throatglass doesn't teach, it only shows."
The figure turned away.
Leaving Cyril awe-struck before he slowly stood, wiping his nose.
Miren touched his shoulder.
"We're done here."
They climbed the tiers in silence. Cyril glanced back once, but the fog had already swallowed the figure . As if it had never been there.
Later, as dusk bled into the cracked horizon, they camped beneath the shell of a shattered statue.
Cyril leaned against the stone and finally spoke.
"Was that… helpful?"
Miren stared into the dark.
"No. But it wasn't useless."
He exhaled, bitter.
"I don't even know what to call what I'm doing."
"You don't need a name for it yet."
He looked at her.
"You think I'm dangerous."
She didn't deny it.
"I think you're unstable."
"Same thing."
"No," she said.
"Dangerous is what people become when they know what they are and stop caring. You're not there. Not yet."
Cyril looked away.
"What happens if I never figure it out?"
Miren shrugged.
"Then you either go mad, or become something else. Maybe both."
She said it like she'd seen it happen before.
***
The night deepened. Cold threaded throughq broken stone, and the ever-present shimmer of Flow in the air felt subdued, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
Cyril couldn't sleep. He found himself reminiscing about the comfort of his apartment…even Mrs. Chen's constant nagging.
Miren, settled against the wall, cloak drawn tight, eyes half-shut but alert. Always alert. He envied her for that—her stillness, her focus. The quiet fire of someone who knew their shape, even if they hated it.
Cyril didn't.
He sat apart, arms on his knees, watching the stars.
They looked wrong tonight. Too sharp. Too close.
One of them moved.
At first, he thought it was his eyes playing tricks—a flicker across the sky, barely a ripple. But then it grew. Brighter. Bluer. A vertical trail like a wound in the firmament.
Miren sat up fast.
"You see that?"
Cyril nodded, slow.
"It's… falling."
"No." Her voice suddenly lost all its sense of tiredness.
"It's being sent."
The light tore downward, clean and terrible, like a thread of truth slicing through the heavens. Flow around them began to ripple, instinctive and terrified. Even the warped land of Throatglass reacted—spires ringing like tuning forks, stone cracking from the pressure of something greater.
Then came the sound.
Not thunder.
A note. Pure. Distant. Deep enough to reach marrow.
Cyril's vision tunneled for a moment. Not from fear—but from recognition.
He couldn't explain why, but something in him responded. A call and answer.
A beacon.
The streak of light vanished beyond the horizon in a flash—far to the northeast—but the mark it left behind shimmered above them like a scar.
Flow convulsed again. A soft echo rolled through the land, carried not on air, but on energy itself.
Cyril turned to Miren, throat dry.
"What the hell was that?"
She didn't answer at first. Just stood, brushing dust from her cloak, eyes fixed on the fading light.
"Something broke through," she said quietly.
"A fragment. An inheritance. Could be an object. Could be knowledge. Could be… something very worse."
The sky broke like it remembered a higher order.
"From that place you spoke of before?"
She looked at him now.
"From above—where only the highest dare to reach."
The name wasn't said. It didn't have to be.
The Upper Realm.
Legends spoke of it in fragments—myth layered in metaphor. A place of perfected Flow, where cultivators passed beyond the mortal coil and reshaped themselves in the echo of divine will.
Nothing came back from there.
Until now.
Cyril felt the world tilt slightly. Not physically. Narratively. Like the rules shifted underfoot.
Miren stared northeast, the way the light had gone.
"Every sect, tribe, freehold, and madman felt that. The world just got smaller. And hungrier."
Her hand rested on the hilt of her blade.
"And now they'll all be heading the same way."
Cyril exhaled.
"So that's where we're going?"
Miren gave a crooked smile—one without joy.
"No. We're trying not to be crushed under the ones who are."
The air around them felt charged now. Watching. Listening.
Cyril looked back up at the night sky. The scar remained faintly etched in the stars, making a beautiful scene of blue and purple as it stretched toward northeast.
Something had come down.
And it didn't belong here.
Neither did he.
But he was done running.
***
Far behind, unseen by either of them, a figure watched from within the fog. A dry chuckle stirred the dust.
"So many interesting things in one day. This old man hasn't been so entertained in decades…"