The candle sputtered.
Aether watched its flame shiver, wavering in a nonexistent breeze. The room was silent—too silent. Not even the distant hum of the academies, the whisper of drifting dust, the creak of old wood. Everything was… paused.
Not dead.
Not frozen.
Simply waiting.
He felt it instantly.
The same sensation as the moment he first woke on that rain-soaked street.
The air trembled. Reality thinned.
And then—
—text appeared in the air.
Soft gold. Inkless. Weightless.
Like breath forming letters.
[Noticed: The anomaly is stabilizing.]
Aether stepped back, pulse sharp.
Another line materialized:
[Observation: The vessel shows early awakening.]
"Vessel?" Aether whispered. "Awakening to what?"
The letters didn't answer. They dissolved.
The candle flame twisted sideways, as if pulled. Shadows bent unnaturally, curving toward a single point on the wooden table. The surface darkened, stretching inward like a hole being carved through existence.
Aether reached for his dagger on instinct.
The darkness pulsed.
Then a voice murmured from the tear—slow, smooth, and layered like multiple throats speaking at once:
"You were not meant to touch the Astral Schema, Fragment-bearer."
Aether froze.
It wasn't a hallucination.
It wasn't text.
It wasn't the system-like visions.
This was a being.
"Who are you?" he demanded. His hand tightened on the dagger hilt, though some part of him knew it would be useless.
The darkness curled like a smile.
"A witness. A narrator. A watcher behind the curtain."
Another pulse. The candle extinguished.
Aether's heart kicked into his ribs as the world plunged into black.
Not empty black—alive black. A black that crawled.
The darkness whispered again:
"The First Hypostasis has fallen. The Script is collapsing. The threads are fraying."
Hypostasis.
The word sent a spike of cold through Aether's skull. A pain he recognized. A pain he'd felt before the amnesia. A pain stitched into the core of his being.
He gritted his teeth. "What do you want from me?"
A soft chuckle.
Like parchment tearing underwater.
"Want? Oh, no, little Fragment. You misunderstand."
Slowly, impossibly, a hand emerged from the rift—skeletal, ink-black, dripping threads of floating letters. Each fingertip left trails of dissolving symbols in the air.
It reached toward his chest.
Aether stepped back, breath sharp.
"It is you who wants something from me."
Its fingers brushed the edge of his coat—cold enough to numb thought.
"You want the truth you abandoned."
Aether's mind lurched—fractured images flashing:
—falling through a void of shattered mirrors
—golden eyes watching him from behind a broken hourglass
—a pair of hands reaching toward him as he dissolved into white flame
His knees buckled.
"What… did I abandon?" he gasped.
The hand withdrew.
The darkness trembled, folding inward.
"Yourself."
Silence swallowed the room again—but only for a breath.
A final whisper seeped through as the tear began to close:
"Awaken soon, Aether Caelum Noctis."
"Before your Shadow wakes first."
The darkness snapped shut.
Reality lurched—sound returned, time resumed, the candle reignited on its own. Its flame stood perfectly still, perfectly straight, as if nothing had happened.
But Aether felt the lingering cold on his chest.
And he knew three things with terrifying clarity:
1. Someone—or something—is watching him directly.
2. He carries a Fragment of a fallen divine being.
3. A version of him—his Shadow—is waking somewhere in the Nocturne Abyss.
He swallowed hard.
And for the first time…
he wasn't sure he wanted the answers waiting for him.
But he would have to chase them anyway.
Before the Shadow did.