"Not every version of you was a survivor. Some were gods. Some… were mistakes."
Location: Riftborn Memory Echo – Trial Layer OneStatus: Reality Stable (for now)
Ren's Sanity: Being flirted with aggressively by anxiety
Ren landed hard — knees smacked a stone floor, breath knocked out of him, and gravity felt just a bit too smug.
Everything looked… almost real.
Familiar streets. Cracked towers.
It was Ka'rath'Mar — but not the one he knew.
No psychic goats. No scammer stalls.
Just a city unburned.
Alive.
REN (to himself):
"This... is before the Fall."
A child ran past him — laughing, glowing faintly with glyph-light.
Men and women in silver robes walked beside Riftborn constructs, their hands glowing with clean, stable magic.
No war. No corruption.
No Outer Drift Rupture.
This was the Ka'rath'Mar that could've been.
Then he saw it.
A tall figure walking toward the center of the city — people bowed as he passed.
Black coat.
Silver eyes.
And a glyph on his left hand that should not exist — one Ren had only ever seen once.
On himself.
⚔️ Trial Objective: Witness What You Were Meant to Become
"You are not the original, Riftborn. You are the consequence."
"This is what you could've been… before everything was shattered."
Ren followed his counterpart — the "True Riftborn" — through alleys and open council chambers.
This version of him wasn't cracking jokes.
He wasn't pissed.
He was in control.
He moved like he belonged to the world.
Then the scene shifted.
The city screamed.
Light fractured. The skies tore.
A figure appeared — wreathed in golden flame, holding a blade made of collapsing timelines.
KAELRETH AURALITH.
Ren had never seen him before. But he knew who it was.
Now he realised it wasn't him from start it was all Kael's past.
This was the day it all died.
The Trial Becomes Combat
Ren wasn't just watching now.
He was in it.
Kaelreth's sword came down — not at the True Riftborn…
…but at him.
"This isn't your trial to survive," Kaelreth said, voice layered with echoes.
"This is the trial where you fail. Again."
FIGHT: Ren vs. Auralith Projection
Snarksteel materialized (screaming "Finally!")The memory city began collapsing mid-battleEvery hit Ren took showed him a new life he didn't liveEvery wound whispered a name he had forgottenThe sky bled glyphs
And then — he lost.
Ren was knocked flat.
Sword out of reach. Glyphs dim.
But before Kaelreth could finish him —
The Old Man appeared.
Not smiling.
Not joking.
Floating above the burning memory city like a god who forgot to wear pants to war.
He raised one hand.
Time stopped.
Kaelreth froze.
Ren coughed blood and blinked up at him.
OLD MAN (calmly):
"You did better than most. This version of you usually dies at 'hello.'"
REN (wheezing):
"You could've warned me Kaelreth was hot and insane."
OLD MAN:
"Trial One was never about winning. It was about seeing."
Trial Reward: First Fragment of Riftborn Truth
(Unlocked after surviving Trial One: The Scar of Possibility)
The Riftborn weren't chosen — they were left behind.
Shards. Ghosts of the "Original Thread" that snapped during the Collapse. Every Riftborn is a fractured echo of something whole —
a failed splinter born from Kaelreth Auralith's incomplete containment. Kaelreth wasn't just the first Riftborn.
He was the vessel, the origin container, designed to survive the full shattering of dimensional logic. The Old Man wasn't a mentor by chance —
He was Kaelreth's failsafe, a stabilizing tether hard-coded into existence.
A being Kael couldn't erase, even as timelines fell apart and were rewritten again and again.
"I existed because he couldn't destroy all of himself." – The Old Man
But here's the twist:
Ren doesn't fit.
He was never part of Kaelreth's original split cycle.
He didn't come from this timeline.
He wasn't supposed to exist in the echo.
"The rules that governed the others never applied to you."
"You didn't fracture like they did. You fell through."
– Old Man, after observing Trial One
And because of that?
Ren isn't just a Riftborn.
He's the last one.
A drift-borne paradox with no echo trail and no loop behind him.
The final wildcard — the piece the universe never got to categorize.