The Black Fracture

The desert night was wrong.No stars gleamed overhead—only a jagged wound across the sky, a splitting seam of shadow where light was swallowed whole. The survivors from the caravan stood in silence, staring upward, their faces pale. Even the wind seemed hesitant to move, as though the air itself feared what had arrived.
Zyra stepped forward, the alien chitin on her arm twitching as though alive.“That,” she whispered, “is no natural rift. It’s the Black Fracture. The place where dark matter bleeds into our world.”
The words sent a chill through Kael’s bones. For days he had carried fragments of the truth, visions stitched into his sleep. But now he could feel it—something enormous pressing at the edge of existence, trying to seep through.
From the distance came a sound that didn’t belong in any desert: a deep, low thrum, like the vibration of an unseen engine, rattling the marrow of their bones. Sand lifted into the air as though pulled upward by invisible tides. The fracture widened. Shadows dripped from it, spilling into the dunes like ink.
“We can’t fight that,” one of the caravan guards muttered. “That isn’t an army, it’s—”“A wound,” Zyra cut in. Her insectoid eyes gleamed with fear. “A wound in the world itself.”
Kael clenched his fists. “If we run, it will swallow everything behind us. Cities, forests, seas. There has to be a way to close it.”
The others looked at him as if he were mad. But Zyra’s gaze lingered. “Perhaps there is. But it will cost more than you’re ready to give.”
Before he could ask, the fracture rippled—and something crawled through.
It was neither beast nor machine, but a shape of pure contradiction. Its body was woven from strands of shadow and crystalline chitin, constantly folding in on itself, like a Möbius strip that defied logic. Where eyes should have been, there were pits of collapsing light, tiny black holes that devoured even the glow of torches.
The survivors screamed. One man fired a pulse rifle; the shot bent mid-air and was sucked into the creature’s body as though never fired at all.
“Dark Matter Entity…” Zyra hissed. “The children of the fracture.”
Kael’s instincts screamed to flee—but something in his chest ignited instead. That familiar ache, the one tied to the strange fragments buried in his blood, answered the monstrosity. He raised his hand, and the shard of alien crystal he carried lit up with a harsh, impossible glow.
The entity froze. Its head tilted, as though it recognized him.
In that moment, Kael heard a voice—not with his ears, but inside the marrow of his bones.
> You are fractured too. Half of our world, half of theirs. You belong to the dark.


He staggered, gripping his head, fighting the pull. But behind him, Zyra grabbed his shoulder. Her claws dug into his flesh.“No, Kael. You are not theirs. Remember what you are fighting for.”
The entity lunged, moving with impossible speed. Its shadow-tendrils lashed out, and the sand itself dissolved where they struck. Kael pushed Zyra aside and braced himself. For a heartbeat, he felt the fracture inside his chest widen, as though he were about to break apart entirely.
Then he roared and unleashed the shard’s light.
The desert exploded with brilliance.
The entity shrieked, a sound that cracked stone and bent steel. Its body split apart, collapsing into fragments of shadow-glass. The rift above them pulsed once, then recoiled, shrinking slightly as though wounded.
But Kael fell to his knees, blood pouring from his nose. His vision swam with black veins crawling across the sky. He realized the truth in that moment: every time he used the shard’s power, it didn’t just fight the dark matter—it fed it through him.
He was becoming part of the fracture.
Zyra knelt beside him, her alien face unreadable. “You can hold it back. But if you keep this path, Kael… you’ll stop being human.”
Kael raised his gaze to the shrinking rift, then to the broken desert filled with terrified survivors. His chest burned like a furnace, and deep down, the voice of the fracture whispered again:
> Every wound needs a vessel.


He didn’t answer it. Not yet.
But the choice was closing in.

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