It began with a pulse.
Not of heart, nor magic.
But direction.
A ripple through the air, like a thread being plucked through layers of space… and I felt it tug me.
Not forward.
Not backward.
But between.
The Rift Compass ignited in my hand.
A relic forged in the secret gears of the Arcane Forge, stolen beneath a collapsing time-loop during the siege of the Third Ascension Spire — and I'd thought it inert.
Dead metal.
A bauble of prophecy chasers.
But now, beneath the aftershock of my naming — Heir of the Rift Architect — it shimmered to life.
No glow.
No heat.
Only a slow, spiraling hum.
And the stars... tilted.
"What is that sound?" Kael asked, one hand still bandaged from the Chainbreaker Rite. "It's like my blood's trying to walk out of my skin."
"It's not sound," I murmured.
"It's direction."
Eirin narrowed her eyes. Even in her partial Voidform, the silver trails on her cheeks twitched. "The Compass isn't meant to be active yet. Not unless you've—"
"I haven't attuned it."
"But it's attuned to you," Lyra whispered from the shadows. Her voice shook in a way it never used to. "It's always been yours."
The Compass expanded in my palm like clockwork blooming into something alive.
Etched rings turned within rings, forming a spindling sphere that wasn't solid — it was stitched from possibility.
And then—
I saw it.
A path.
No, paths.
Not roads. Not corridors. Not even rifts in the way we understood them.
These were veins running through reality — ghost-lines between moments, between choices I hadn't made, between futures still trembling in the dark.
They cut through mountains, spiraled through cities without touching them, reached backward toward things that shouldn't have existed, and forward toward things not yet allowed to exist.
Each line was faint.
But one...
One was burning.
I turned.
The others hadn't moved.
Not out of fear.
But because they couldn't see it.
The path was mine alone.
And it led beneath the Rift itself.
"I have to follow it," I said.
Eirin grabbed my wrist. "You follow that alone and we may never see you again. These aren't normal threads, Aetherion. They lead to unwritten places."
"They're already written," I whispered, eyes on the Compass.
"They're just buried."
The path began to tremble.
Faintly. Like it could sense I was hesitating.
And then it did something I hadn't expected.
It spoke.
"Walk, Architect's Heir. There are doors that fear being found."
My body moved before my mind did.
A step forward—
And the world peeled.
It wasn't a teleportation. Not Riftwalking.
No surge. No spatial wrench.
Just... displacement.
Like one breath layered over another, and I'd stepped into the gap between them.
I was still in the world—
But walking through its idea.
Shapes swirled.
Buildings became memory-husks. Trees bent like ink in water. My companions became paper-thin silhouettes frozen in an invisible wind.
And ahead of me...
A spire of bone and starlight.
It hovered in the void beneath the Rift. Its base wasn't attached to anything — it floated, suspended by something older than gravity, older than time.
The Compass hummed louder.
This was where it had been pointing.
This was the beginning of the Paths Beyond Reality.
I stepped into the spire.
It welcomed me like a cathedral remembering its god.
Chambers bloomed open, each one lined with fractal scripture written in a language I both knew and didn't.
Glyphs twisted as I read them — words that translated only through will.
They told of those who came before me.
The Null-Sighted.
The Cartographers of Else.
The Fractured Choir.
The First Betrayer.
And at the center—
The Architect.
I reached a dais.
On it, a mural. Not carved — woven from echo and myth.
It showed a figure standing between two collapsing realities. One hand held a sword that bled suns.
The other... held a compass.
Mine.
And below it, a line of prophecy:
"Only the Heir shall see the Thread That Does Not Forgive."
I didn't have time to ask what that meant.
Because something began to move.
From behind the mural, the walls slid open like the blink of some cosmic eye.
Inside: a gate.
Carved of nothing.
A gate of pure absence.
Not black.
Not void.
But the lack of anything that could even be perceived.
And I understood, with a clarity that shattered something in me—
This wasn't a place.
It was a remainder.
A scar where a god had once been...
And been removed.
The Compass surged in my hand. It didn't guide anymore.
It begged.
Pulled toward the gate.
Toward the impossible.
And then the air behind me cracked.
Eirin's voice tore through.
"Aetherion—NO!"
She shouldn't have been able to follow me.
None of them should.
But her form—glimmering in half-Voidlight—stepped through anyway, arm blazing with crescent fire.
"I told you, you weren't ready for what's buried down here—"
And before she could say more, the gate responded to her presence.
Not to her power.
To her origin.
The gate knew her.
Lines of negative light spiraled across its surface.
And with an audible snap, the Compass shattered in my hand—
Not destroyed—
But used.
And from the heart of the gate…
A voice.
Ancient.
Layered.
Half-my own.
Half someone I haven't become yet.
"You have opened the Path That Was Erased."
"Your next step will rewrite not just the world…"
"…but yourself."
The gate began to open.
Eirin screamed—
My vision shattered—
And on the other side,
I saw myself.
Older.
Twisted.
Throneless.
Wielding a weapon made of collapsed timelines.
His eyes met mine.
And he whispered:
"Took you long enough."