The world was breaking its own reflection.
Kael stood at the center of the Nexus where time no longer moved forward or back, where the earth itself pulsed like a wounded heart. The sky shimmered between colors that didn't belong to any spectrum. Every gust of wind was heavy with fragments of the past memories torn from cities that no longer existed.
Each step he took sounded like glass cracking underfoot. He wasn't sure if he was walking on ground or through a dream still deciding whether to end.
Lyra's voice called from behind him. "Kael! Don't go any closer!"
Her words stretched and broke, repeating themselves in warped echoes Kael… closer… closer… Kael.
He turned just enough to see her form flickering. She and the others were trapped at the edge of a distortion barrier, their outlines bending like heat on metal. The Rift had expanded again, feeding on instability.
Kael felt it inside his chest..,a rhythm that wasn't his heartbeat. It pulsed in waves, matching the tremors under his feet.
Then he heard it.
Her voice.
"Kael…"
The sound was fragile yet infinite, as if carried through light itself. He froze. His body trembled as the voice grew clearer.
"Akiya?" he whispered.
A figure shimmered ahead, suspended in the luminous fog that hid the Rift's core. She stepped forward, barefoot, glowing from within. Her hair drifted in the weightless air like strands of silver smoke. Her eyes,those same eyes he had watched vanish into the Rift now reflected entire galaxies.
"You're…" His voice broke. "You're alive."
"I am what remains," she said. Her tone was calm, but sadness rippled beneath every word. "The Rift remade me. I exist between what was and what will never be."
He reached toward her. His hand passed through light. The moment his skin touched that radiance, pain shot up his arm. His blood turned into liquid energy. Every nerve screamed. Yet he could not pull away.
"Kael." Her hand lifted, almost touching his chest. "You feel it too. The resonance. It was meant to merge, not to destroy."
"What are you saying?"
"The experiment was never about traveling through worlds. It was about rewriting the divide between them."
The Nexus shook violently. Cracks of blinding light crawled across the air like lightning frozen in place. The Rift above them pulsed, responding to her words. Kael felt the pulse inside his ribs now, beating alongside his heart.
"You were chosen by the Rift," she said. "You survived because you carried a fragment of it from the beginning."
He staggered back. "No… I..."
But before he could finish, a shadow fell across them. The air grew heavy, bending sound and light. Shapes formed within the Rift vast, terrible shapes that didn't move but still gave the impression of shifting.
From the heart of that endless storm, two points of light flared like eyes.
Kael couldn't breathe. He knew instinctively this wasn't Akiya's doing. This presence was older, colder.
Akiya's expression darkened. "He sees you."
"Who?"
"The Fragment Emperor," she whispered. "The being that rules the space between realities. He sleeps within the fractures of what was lost. And you are waking him."
As if summoned by his name, the Rift screamed.
A shockwave burst outward. Lyra and the others were thrown back, their forms scattering into afterimages before stabilizing again. Kael dropped to his knees as the ground beneath him disintegrated into shards of light. He looked up and saw them rising, countless fragments spinning around him like an orbit of memory.
Each shard glimmered with reflections moments of Tokyo, the fantasy plains, and faces of people he had loved. They circled him faster and faster until they blurred into a ring of blinding energy.
"Kael!" Lyra's voice broke through the noise. "You have to stop whatever that is!"
"I can't!" He shouted, his voice layered with distortion. "It's moving on its own!"
The ring tightened. The shards drew blood from his shoulders as they began to merge. Pain radiated through him, but with it came knowledge a flood of equations, symbols, and voices whispering in languages no human throat could form.
He screamed. The shards responded.
They slammed together above his head, forming a halo that bled color. The Nexus split open, reality bending like glass under heat. Lyra saw his silhouette vanish into a column of light that pierced both worlds.
"Kael, stop!" she cried. "You're tearing it apart!"
He barely heard her. His mind was drowning in visions,he saw Akiya standing beside him, her form breaking into particles, her voice woven through every shard of light.
"You can still control it," she said.
He reached toward her, his arm shaking violently. "Tell me how!"
"Stop resisting."
He tried to hold onto her words, but the light turned white-hot. He felt himself splitting,his body one moment solid, the next dissolving into light. He saw his reflection in every shard around him, each one showing a different version of himself: one who died in the lab, one who stayed behind, one who never met her.
The crown above his head took shape. It wasn't a symbol of power;it was a wound made manifest, a living memory of everything broken.
Kael collapsed, gasping. The air thickened into liquid light, burning through his lungs.
Akiya knelt beside him, her presence flickering like a candle in the wind. "Listen to me," she said. "You're the only link between what's left of the worlds. The Crown will not obey you unless you understand its pain."
He looked up, his eyes glowing like stars. "Pain?"
"Every shard is a world that died. Every light is a life that was forgotten. You're carrying them now."
"I can't...."
"You can," she said gently, pressing her palm over his heart. "Because you already are."
A pulse of energy surged through him. The shards brightened, spinning faster until they vanished into pure radiance.
Kael screamed as the Crown fused with him completely.
The Rift went silent.
For a brief moment, he floated in absolute stillness. The Nexus no longer roared. Even gravity forgot its duty. He could see both worlds layered upon each other,the neon skyline of Neo-Tokyo overlaid with the ancient towers of the other realm. Mountains and skyscrapers shared the same horizon. Stars bled into circuit lines.
And within the merging skies, the faint outline of something vast stirred. A crown even greater than his own, carved from the bones of collapsing universes.
The Fragment Emperor was turning in his sleep.
....To be continued.....