Chapter 3 of Volume 2 — The Guardian of the Fracture

The shadow didn’t so much fly as it shifted across the air, folding and unfolding its shape like it was rethinking its own anatomy.
One moment it looked vaguely avian, wings stretched impossibly wide, talons flashing with steel-colored light. The next, its outline tore and reformed into something serpentine, scales sliding into place with a noise like rattling glass. Its skin wasn’t solid—more like the texture of a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a slightly wrong version of reality.
And it was fast.
“Coming around again!” Akarui’s voice cut through the thrum of the Lightrover’s engines. He shoved the throttle forward, sending the ship diving beneath an arch of floating rock. The shadow followed without hesitation, shrinking into a spear-like form to pierce the gap.
Yûna’s fingers danced over the weapons panel, charging the forward cannons. “I can tag it now—”
“Don’t,” Mira said suddenly, her voice sharp but calm. She was standing between them, her stance balanced, as if bracing for something unseen.
“You want to not shoot the thing trying to slice our ship in half?” Yûna snapped, her hand hovering over the trigger.
“It’s not here to kill us,” Mira said. “Not yet.”
Akarui barked a short laugh. “Could’ve fooled me.”


The creature spiraled upward, circling above them now, its jagged form refracting the crimson light of the Envers’s fractured sky. Each pass made the Lightrover’s sensors scream with anomalies—shifts in gravitational pull, electromagnetic spikes, readings that were impossible in the normal world.
“It’s anchoring itself to the breach,” Mira murmured, eyes half-lidded as if seeing something none of them could. “Guarding it.”
“The breach we came through?” Akarui asked.
She shook her head slowly. “No. Another one. Ahead.”
Yûna turned in her seat, glaring. “We came here for the Arkheion’s light and maybe a rescue, not to get tangled with whatever nightmare is patrolling this place. We skirt around it, keep moving—”
Her sentence broke off when the creature screamed.
It wasn’t sound—at least, not in the way humans understood it. It was a pulse of force, a vibration that rattled their bones and twisted the colors of the air. The rain that wasn’t rain around them began to fall upward in long, shimmering threads.
Then the ground—if you could call it that—shifted.
The forest of inverted trees ahead bent in unison, their root systems curling like skeletal fingers. From the shadows beneath them, smaller shapes emerged—splinters of the guardian, shards of its mirrored skin breaking away and taking flight.
“Okay, now it looks like it wants to kill us,” Akarui said, tightening his grip on the controls.



The Lightrover pitched hard left as a cluster of the shards zipped past, each moving like a blade thrown by an invisible hand. One clipped the hull, and alarms flared instantly—hull integrity warning, pressure drop in cargo bay three.
“I’ll seal it!” Yûna shouted, unstrapping and vaulting toward the aft hatch.
Mira didn’t move. She was still watching the sky, her breathing steady despite the chaos. “It’s testing us,” she said softly.
“Testing us?” Akarui’s voice rose. “Mira, this isn’t a sparring match, it’s—”
He stopped when he saw her eyes. They weren’t looking at him—they were glowing faintly, reflecting the guardian’s light.
“Mira,” he said more carefully, “what do you see?”
Her lips curved in something not quite a smile. “It’s not a beast. It’s a sentinel. Bound here. And it’s deciding whether we pass.”



The guardian’s shards swept around again, this time forming a perfect spiral above the ship. The spiral contracted, pulling them upward toward the creature’s core, toward that shifting, mirror-shard body that hummed with wrongness.
Akarui’s hands tightened on the controls. “Mira, if you have a plan, now would be great.”
She stepped forward, placing her hand against the forward glass of the cockpit. The moment her fingers touched it, the spiral of shards froze midair, as though someone had paused the world.
The guardian shifted again, folding down into a humanoid silhouette, towering, faceless, its head tilting as it regarded her.
A low voice—neither male nor female—spoke in their minds.
“You carry the fracture.”
Mira closed her eyes. “I carry the choice.”
For a moment, there was silence. Then the guardian’s mirrored surface rippled, and an image appeared: a vast white wall, cracked in the center, bleeding golden light into the darkness. The same vision she had seen in meditation.
Akarui exhaled slowly. “That’s where you want us to go, isn’t it?”
The guardian didn’t nod, didn’t speak again—but the spiral of shards unraveled, scattering into the air like silver leaves in a storm.
The path ahead was open.
But Mira could still feel the weight of its gaze as they flew past, and she knew the test wasn’t over.