The Night the Sky Glitched

The first sign is light—wrong light—spilling over the far hills like someone has cracked open a lantern the size of the horizon.

It does not bloom warm. It snaps into being in clean angles: lines that cross and lock, triangles nested inside squares, a lattice of pale geometry that exists for a heartbeat and then vanishes as if the sky regrets showing it.

Emberford sleeps through most of it.

Most.

A dog bays once, then whines. Chickens slam against their coop. An owl cuts off mid-cry. And beneath it all, under the river’s steady hush, something deeper shudders—stone on stone, the bones of the earth shifting in a way that feels less like an accident and more like a decision.

A tremor runs through the forge-town.

Shutters rattle. Tools clink. Chimneys shed a little soot. For a breath, Emberford holds its breath too, waiting for the next blow.

In the center of town, an old rune-stone answers.

It has stood on its low plinth longer than any living man can remember. No one knows who carved the runes around its base. No one remembers why it was planted there at all.

People in Emberford simply grow up with it—like they grow up with the river’s moods and the soot that never quite leaves your nails. Children dare each other to touch it during festivals. New apprentices are made to circle it once on the morning they’re accepted, as if walking around the stone might keep their hands steady and their hearts from cracking under the work.

Tonight, the rune-stone cracks first.

Not a weathered break. Not a careless chip.

A clean, bright fracture splits it from crown to base. For an instant, the seam glows from within like molten metal.

Then it goes dark.

The runes remain—same shapes, same grooves—yet they look subtly off, like a pattern shifted half a step when no one was watching.

And in the forge at Emberford’s edge, above the bed where an apprentice sleeps, the air trembles like a struck bell.

Aron Vale dreams of a forge that is not a forge.

A hall without walls, lit by fire that burns white and cold at the same time. Anvils float in empty space. Hammers hang mid-swing, waiting.

Beneath his bare feet stretches a perfect grid—straight lines running forever, like a smith’s measurements taken too far.

Aron tries to breathe. The air tastes like iron filings.

He looks down at his hands. They are his—broad, callused, marked by old burns. But faint symbols drift under his skin, moving when he doesn’t. They remind him of chalk marks on hot steel before the first strike, except these marks refuse to stay put.

He raises his head, and a rhythm answers him.

Hammer. Hammer. Hammer.

Three measured strikes, not from a place but from everywhere.

A word drops into his mind like a tool set on a bench.

Initialize.

The hall ripples. Shapes flash in the air—runes too precise, too sharp—until they align into something like a doorframe hanging in nothing.

Beyond it, the grid doesn’t continue.

Beyond it, the lines break.

Aron steps closer. The white fire flares. The floating hammers stop completely, frozen as if time itself has been clamped in a vice.

Behind the frame is darkness—real darkness, the kind that swallows light.

Aron should turn away.

Instead, he leans in, stubborn as ever, trying to see what’s hidden.

Something looks back.

Not eyes. Not a face.

A patient hunger, old as rust.

The darkness shifts, and for a fraction of a heartbeat Aron sees a shape like a mouth made of angles—then another shape behind it, deeper, like a machine’s teeth waiting to turn.

The hall suddenly feels too quiet.

Then the hammer strikes once more.

Hammer.

The world shatters into lines.

Aron jerks awake with a gasp.

His chest heaves as if he has been running. Sweat cools on his neck. For a heartbeat his eyes don’t know what to do with the loft’s darkness. The world feels too small after endless space.

Below him, the forge is quiet. The hearth is banked for the night, its last embers smoldering behind ash. Tools hang where they belong. The half-finished apprentice blade is clamped in the vice, waiting for morning like a promise.

Aron stares at that blade in his mind—thin steel, still ugly at the edge, not yet true. He had spent the day grinding it until his arms shook, because Master Keel had said, “If you can’t learn patience at the wheel, you’ll never learn it at the anvil.”

Patience is easier when the world makes sense.

Tonight, nothing feels steady.

The floorboards tremble.

A jar of nails rattles on the shelf. A chisel rolls half an inch across the bench and stops.

Aron sits up fast enough to bump his head on the low beam. He bites back a curse, boots already in his hands.

Outside, Emberford is awake in the way it only is when something goes wrong—hurried footsteps, sharp whispers, lanterns flaring behind shutters. A pair of lampstones along the street glow faintly, their runes pulsing in a confused pattern, as if they aren’t sure whether it’s still night.

Aron takes the ladder down and slips into the street.

The air smells of damp cobbles and woodsmoke. The river slides dark under the moon. Smoke from chimneys drifts low, caught in the cool night.

People gather in the square around the rune-stone, lantern light spilling over the black surface.Aron’s stomach tightens as he sees the crack—straight, bright, wrong.

He pushes through shoulders and sleeves, recognizing faces: the miller, two guards, the baker’s wife gripping a rolling pin like it’s a club. Someone mutters a prayer to the Crown. Someone else swears and spits.

Aron crouches near the base, studying the carved symbols. He has always liked runes the way he likes puzzles: he can’t solve them, but he can’t stop looking. He can’t help tracing patterns, comparing angles, noticing what doesn’t fit.

Tonight, what doesn’t fit is everything.

His fingers hover a breath away from the grooves.

A hand clamps down on his shoulder.

“Don’t,” a voice says.

Aron looks up.

Master Keel stands behind him, cloak thrown over a night shirt, hair a mess of dark silver. Even half-awake, the smith’s eyes are sharp—too sharp for a man who should be tired.

Keel steps forward. The crowd makes room without being asked.

He does not touch the stone. He studies the crack the way he studies a failed weld, reading the story inside the break.

Old Brask, leaning on his cane, grumbles, “That stone’s warded. It doesn’t crack.”

Keel’s jaw tightens. “Wards fail.”

“Not like this,” Brask mutters. “Not clean. Clean means purpose.”

A voice cuts in from Aron’s left.

“I saw the sky,” Lysa Maren says.

Aron turns. Lysa stands at the edge of the lantern light, hair braided quick and messy like she ran out the door without thinking. She’s wrapped in a cloak too big for her shoulders, and she smells faintly of crushed herbs—peppermint and something bitter. Her eyes are wide, but her voice is steady.

“You saw it?” Aron asks before he can stop himself.

She nods once. “Over the hills. Like a net. Like somebody laid a grid over the stars and yanked.”

Aron’s throat tightens. So he didn’t imagine it. “I thought—”

“Don’t say what you thought,” Keel snaps, and then softens his tone a fraction. “Not here.”

Lysa’s gaze flicks between Aron and Keel. She doesn’t look away first. “Master Keel,” she says carefully, “the goats at my aunt’s place nearly tore their pen apart. And the river—did you hear it? Like it changed pitch.”

Keel’s face goes still. “Go home,” he tells her.

Lysa’s jaw sets. “Is this dangerous?”

Keel meets her eyes. For a heartbeat Aron sees something raw there—an old memory Keel keeps behind iron walls. “It might be,” Keel admits.

Lysa exhales through her nose. “Then I’m not going to sleep through it.”

Keel opens his mouth, then closes it again, as if he knows better than to waste breath on stubbornness when stubbornness is what keeps people alive in small towns.

He lifts his chin, voice carrying to the square. “Everyone home. Check your hearths. You—” he nods to the guards— “walk the bridge and the north road. If there’s been a slide, I want to know before dawn.”

“And the stone?” someone asks.

“At dawn,” Keel repeats, and the argument dies in people’s throats.

The crowd disperses, reluctant. Lanterns sway away into side streets. Emberford tries to tuck its fear back under blankets.

Aron stays crouched, staring at the seam.

For a heartbeat, he thinks it flashes brighter—like something inside it is waking.

He blinks.

It’s gone.

Keel’s hand remains on Aron’s shoulder, heavier now. “You will not speak of this tonight,” he says quietly. “And you will not go near it again.”

Aron swallows. “What is it?”

Keel’s gaze flicks to the dark line of forest beyond the last houses, then back to the stone. “A marker,” he says.

“A marker for what?”

Keel’s voice drops to a warning. “For a boundary we were never meant to cross.”

Aron looks at the crack again and thinks of the dream doorframe—how the grid ended there, how the lines broke.

He forces himself to stand.

As Keel guides him away, Lysa falls into step on Aron’s other side, quiet now, eyes scanning the streets as if the shadows might change shape.

“At dawn,” she murmurs to Aron, low enough that only he can hear. “You’re going to tell me what you’re not saying.”

Aron doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know what to say that won’t be a lie.

Back at the forge, Keel bars the door—an odd sound in a town where doors are rarely barred. He checks the banked coals, the bellows, the racks, as if expecting something to be missing. He lays a hand on the forge’s old rune-lock—just a simple ward to keep wandering children out—and the rune doesn’t flare the way it should. It simply… sits there, dull.

Keel’s fingers tighten.

“Back to bed,” he tells Aron, as if saying it firmly enough can make the night behave.

Aron hesitates. “Master… the sky earlier. I saw—”

“You’re tired,” Keel cuts in. “Whatever you think you saw, leave it for morning.”

“But you said it might be dangerous.”

Keel’s eyes lift, and for a moment Aron sees the smith he rarely sees: not the man who teaches him blade angles and scolds him for sloppy work, but the man who carries Emberford’s safety like a burden on his spine.

“I said it might be,” Keel answers. “Danger doesn’t always announce itself with teeth. Sometimes it starts as a crack.”

Aron nods, because arguing won’t change anything.

Keel is already settling into the chair by the hearth, sitting like a guard on duty.

Aron climbs back to the loft.

He lies down, staring at the ceiling beam. He tries to picture the half-finished blade downstairs. The familiar steps of tomorrow—heat, hammer, quench, grind. Ordinary work. Ordinary life.He tries to believe in ordinary.

His eyelids grow heavy.

And then, without warning, the world flickers.

Not outside.

Inside Aron’s vision.

A thin line of pale light draws itself across the air in front of him. Another line intersects it. A rectangle forms, perfect and sharp, hovering above his knees like a pane of glass catching moonlight.

Aron freezes, breath locked in his chest.

Symbols bloom across the rectangle—letters that are not letters—then shift and settle into words he somehow understands, as if his mind is being handed a language it never studied and expected to read it anyway.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

SYSTEM NOTICE INITIALIZATION: 

PENDING USER: [UNREGISTERED]

CONFIRM? (Y/N)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Aron’s hands shake. Slowly—so slowly—he lifts one finger toward the floating window.It doesn’t ripple like smoke. It doesn’t reflect like glass.

It just is.

The window flickers once, like lantern flame in a gust.

A second line appears beneath the first, stuttering into place as if the world has to try twice to write it.

ERROR: INPUT REQUIRED

Aron’s mouth opens.

No sound comes out at first—memory of the dream tightening his throat—then his voice scrapes free. “What… what are you?”

The window does not answer.

But somewhere deep behind his thoughts, the hammer strikes again—slow, patient, inevitable.Initialize.

The translucent window waits for his answer.