The clang of metal and the cries of the wounded pressed faintly at the edges of Nora’s awareness, but they no longer held their weight. She was not fully there. Not fully here.
The battlefield shimmered, warping like heat over stone. One moment she saw warriors locked in combat, faces twisted in rage. The next, their bodies became shadows, faceless silhouettes swinging weapons of light and smoke. Blood pooled into rivers, but when she blinked, it was no longer blood—it was black water, sluggish, flowing toward some unseen abyss.
Her own hands trembled. The sword she gripped flickered in and out of form, steel becoming bone, then crystal, then something she could not name—alive, humming, pulsing with the same current that had carried her through the tapestry of worlds.
Whispers rose again. Not one voice, but many—layered, overlapping, rising and falling like a tide:
Nora turned, and the battlefield around her fell away entirely. She now stood at the threshold of a great arch carved from darkness itself, towering and endless, set in the void. Beyond it, nothing but a churning storm of stars collapsing and birthing themselves in an eternal cycle.
A figure stood before the arch. Cloaked, faceless, its form fluid—sometimes man, sometimes woman, sometimes both, sometimes neither. It did not move, yet the space around it bent as though it were the center of gravity itself.
When it spoke, the words were not sound but resonance vibrating through her marrow:
“Nora. Child of fracture. Keeper of threads. Do you know why you were chosen to see?”
Her lips parted, but no answer came. Only silence.
The figure tilted its head, as though amused.
“You carry both root and ruin. You are the knife and the hand that wields it. You cannot flee the current—for you are the current.”
The arch behind it pulsed once, like the beat of a cosmic heart. Light spilled through the cracks in its form, dazzling and terrible, and Nora felt herself pulled forward, drawn closer, as if to step through would be to abandon the world she knew forever.
Yet the battlefield tugged at her ankles—shouts, pain, the pull of the mortal struggle refusing to let go.
She hovered, suspended, one step from revelation, one step from return.
And in that trembling balance, the figure whispered a final truth:
“Choose carefully, fracture-point. What bleeds through will follow you.”
The arch flared. The battlefield screamed. Nora stood between both, her fate a breath away.