The rift unfurled like a wound in the air.
Not a flash, nor a blaze—nothing so theatrical. Just a quiet peel of reality's skin, slow and seamless, like silk unraveling from an invisible spindle. Lynchie stood still as light drained from the chamber, the walls bending inward as if gravity itself bent toward the rupture.
The mirror was gone.
In its place hovered a vertical slit of utter blackness, pulsing at the edges with faint threads of violet and gold—like veins exposed beneath translucent skin. The runes etched across the walls dimmed, then began to twist.
"That's… not supposed to happen," Lynchie muttered, backing away, her breath frosting in the air. Her voice sounded far away. Thinner. Hollow.
The voidlings—three left—no longer advanced. They stood at the edges of the circle, unmoving. Watching. No—listening.
She felt it now. A vibration, deep and sonorous. It wasn't sound, not exactly. It was thought, too large for words. Memory. Intention.
It pressed at her chest, urging something inside her to respond.
Then a second whisper curled through the dark. Soft, feminine.
"…You were never meant to wake this early."
Lynchie's blood turned to ice.
She spun, but the voice had no source. It came from within the rift. No body, no shadow—just the soft, broken breath of something too old for form. A presence. A knowing.
Lynchie's heartbeat slammed against her ribs.
"I didn't mean to—" she began, eyes darting toward the growing wound. "This… this was locked. I was just—"
The rift pulsed.
And through it, for the briefest instant, Lynchie saw something looking back.
Not a creature. Not a god.
An eye.
Golden and silver slit. Massive. Blinking.
The moment it focused on her, every glyph in the room erupted in flame. Not fire—but memory. The room flooded with visions.
She saw—
—a crying baby wrapped in woven starlight, placed inside a crystal casket beneath the Eternal Tree.
—a hand marked with seven rings, tearing a page from a glowing codex and sealing it inside a chamber of mirrors.
—a sword buried beneath the Academy's foundation, humming with forbidden names.
—and her mother's face. Younger. Uncrowned. Afraid.
Lynchie staggered back, gasping.
The visions vanished.
But something remained.
A thread.
No—an echo.
A shimmer of starlight now hovered above her palm. As if the Rift had marked her. Not wounded. Not cursed.
Chosen.
The word rose in her mind like a whisper scratched into stone.
Then came the pressure.
The rift shook, and from its depths something began to crawl through.
No, not crawl.
Hatch.
A shape began to form. Wings. Jagged. Talon-tipped. A mouth of backward-folding teeth and skin like fractured metal. It wasn't a voidling.
It was something new.
Lynchie screamed a word she didn't recognize. Her hand moved, sketching a sigil into the air—reflex, not thought. Glyphlight flared.
The summoning failed.
The creature lunged—
—and stopped mid-air.
Frozen.
Held back by a barrier of blue light. Not hers.
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell behind.
"Move aside, child," said a voice.
Deep. Calm. Terrifyingly patient.
A tall figure stepped forward, clad in violet robes with a silver sash that bore the sigil of the Faculty Oversight Council.
Arch-Instructor Elgron.
His eyes—silver-rimmed, as if perpetually reflecting moonlight—did not blink as he stared into the rift.
"I told them we should have sealed this site in the last cycle," he murmured.
With a flick of his hand, the Rift shrank, twisting like a dying scream into a knot of colorless air—then blinked out of existence.
The creature vanished with it, leaving only the scent of charred ozone behind.
Lynchie fell to her knees.
Her head spun.
"What was—" she began.
Elgron turned, and in that instant, his gaze pierced whatever strength she had left.
"That," he said coldly, "was a warning. And you, Lynchie Regino… just became the center of it."
He walked to her, knelt beside her ear.
"Tell no one what you saw tonight. Not your friends. Not your mentors. Not even your dreams."
Then he stood and walked toward the stairs.
Lynchie blinked, trembling.
And realized the mark on her palm hadn't faded.
In its glow, the shape of a mirror shimmered.
But this time, it was cracked.
And something behind the cracks… was smiling.