Chapter 502: The Great Rift
Why was it scary?
Cecilia stood harnessed inside the military helicopter, one hand gripping the safety strap, the other pressed against the curve of her belly as another contraction rippled through her. The rotors thundered overhead, drowning out everything but the roar of the vortex ahead.
She had faced so many rifts now. A portal inside a dam concrete, hidden beneath the water, then the adjacent possibility of them opening deep in the ocean’s underwater, where the pressure alone could crush a man before the corruption ever touched him.
Then the zombie portal, corpses reanimated, humans twisted into mindless vessels of infection, the dead rising from their graves to drag the living down with them.
And now this. One giant portal in the sky. A wound in the heavens so vast it seemed to swallow the horizon.
Was their world truly going to face the same kind of disaster one day?
She couldn’t stop the question from circling her mind.
Would the fabric of reality tear open everywhere, creating unlimited holes that had to be manually sealed over and over and over again?
Was this the future that awaited them, an endless war against an enemy that could strike anywhere, at any time, through any medium? Water, earth, air, flesh, where corruption didn’t discriminate, just consumed and consumed and consumed.
And the worlds it had already consumed were numberless.
She looked closer at the swirling clouds.
When corruption got a hold of a rift seed, it used it to infect other worlds. The seed, which should have been a tool of creation, a concept planted in fertile reality, allowed to grow into something new, was twisted into a weapon.
It became a rift core.
And the only way to close the rift was to destroy the core and killing the host, because the core embedded itself into the host’s very existence. The two became inseparable. To kill one was to kill the other.
What about the Key?
Was it the same thing? The Key, Oathran, had it been made the same way?
Its creation preceded the Alicei bloodline, a spell so ancient and so complex that even Oathran himself couldn’t dissect it. He carried it in his blood, in his bones, in the very fabric of his being, but he didn’t know what it was beyond its function. He had never known.
But what was it?
What was its true origin?
Was Oathran carrying the equivalent of a rift core inside his own soul?
She forced the thought down. She couldn’t afford it. Not now.
From the helicopter’s vantage point, the vortex was almost incomprehensibly vast.
It looked like a massive rotating wall cloud, the kind of formation that spawned tornadoes in the flatlands of the continent. But it was inverted. Wrong.
The tornado didn’t point down toward the ground, funneling destruction onto the city below. It pointed upward. A column of spiraling black clouds, studded with veins of pulsing black lightning, rotating around a central void that seemed to pull at the edges of reality itself.
The eye of the storm was not calm. A hole punched through the sky and into whatever lay beyond. The clouds churned around it in slow spirals, layer upon layer of bruised grey and lightning-strobed black, and at the very center there was only darkness.
"I didn’t fucking know you can fly a military helicopter," Arkai said, strapped into the co-pilot seat beside Eastiel, his wolf ears pressed flat against the roar of the rotors.
"I also didn’t know you passed NATOPS Qualification," Eastiel shot back, his hands steady on the controls, his lion eyes fixed on the vortex ahead.
"It’s your family, isn’t it?" Arkai narrowed his eyes.
"Yeah, my dad bought me one for my fourteenth birthday." Eastiel awkwardly looked away. "Spent a whole summer learning how to... Anyway, let’s focus."
"Trust fund bastard..."
"AREN’T YOU ONE AS WELL?"
They managed the approach carefully. The helicopter shuddered as they neared the outer bands of the vortex, but the wind was curiously calmer than it should have been.
The wall cloud rotated with violent intent, lightning flickering in its depths, but the air around them was almost still.
It was strange. It shouldn’t be like this at all.
Everything... felt dense.
"Do you think it’s chaos above the clouds, then?" Eastiel asked, his voice tight.
Arkai didn’t look away from the window. "Then we can only fall to get away."
Cecilia’s gasp cut through the comms. "That’s—"
They saw it.
Beyond the churning veil of the cloud wall, something moved.
A silhouette, massive and sinuous, sliding through the storm. It was clearly a terrible grace of a predator surveying its domain.
The black lightning that flickered through the vortex illuminated it in fragments. A curve of scale here, a ridge of spine there, the suggestion of a body so vast that it seemed to stretch for miles.
It was flying, but it looked like it was swimming. It moved, coiling through the clouds as though the sky itself were a sea and this creature its undisputed leviathan.
The scales were black. An iridescent, gleaming black. Each scale was the size of a truck, overlapping in patterns that shifted and rippled with every undulation of the body. Where the lightning caught the edges, they glinted like obsidian blades, razor-sharp and ancient.
The creature had no visible head, no visible tail, just the endless, serpentine motion of a body that circled the eye of the vortex like a dragon coiled around a hoard of dying stars.
Cecilia couldn’t see its eyes, but she felt them. A pressure against her mind, a weight against her soul, the unmistakable sensation of being observed by something that had existed long before her world was born and would exist long after it was ash—
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was more than she could chew.
But why did her heart tell her that Oathran was somewhere close...?
The faint roars began like distant thunder. It was guttural, barely distinguishable from the rumble of the vortex itself. But they grew. Slowly at first, then with accelerating urgency.
The scales began to move quicker.
What had been a slow, sinuous patrol through the cloud wall became something else entirely. The massive body twisted and coiled with sudden, erratic violence, its obsidian scales catching the black lightning in frantic, strobing flashes.
A ridge of spine rose from the clouds like a mountain range breaking through a storm, then plunged back into the churning darkness.
A tail, or what might have been a tail, lashed across the visible edge of the vortex, its passage leaving a trail of shattered cloud and crackling black energy that lingered in the air like a scar.
The creature was thrashing. Not attacking? No, it wasn’t defending either. It was thrashing, as though something had provoked it from within the storm itself.
"It’s moving erratically—oh my God, I couldn’t even react when I first saw it." Damon’s voice crackled through the comms. "But now it’s fucking thrashing?"
"It feels like the air is trembling." Arkai said tightly, his wolf instincts bristling against something his conscious mind couldn’t name. "I don’t know how to explain it."
"If you feel it trembling, then it’s trembling." Eastiel’s hands were white-knuckled on the controls. "Wind magic expert Arkai Dawnoro, make sure our rotor is safe, alright?"
The trembling intensified.
It started as a vibration in the helicopter’s frame, subtle, almost ignorable, and built into something that rattled their bones and teeth.
The air itself seemed to shudder, as though the atmosphere had become a drum and something was beating against it from the other side.
Boom—
Boom—
Booom—
BOOM!
The distant lightning strikes grew louder, closer, each boom hitting the helicopter, each one louder than the last, each one building toward some terrible crescendo—
ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!!!
A single cataclysmic blast tore through the sky and slammed into the helicopter like the fist of a god. The aircraft lurched violently, its frame groaning, its rotors screaming as they fought against the sudden pressure wave.
Eastiel wrestled with the controls, his instincts the only thing keeping them from spinning into the void—
"CECILIA! HOLD TIGHT!"
But Cecilia didn’t close her eyes. Through the shuddering frame of the helicopter, through the blur of the rotor blades, through the chaos of the thrashing leviathan and the strobing lightning and the trembling sky, she saw something.
Something she recognized.
She had seen it before.
The black flame.
Was it the same thing that had destroyed that kraken’s rift core? The black flame that consumed... disgustingly?
It looked—
Flash—!
Cecilia blinked for the first time since the thrashing had begun.
A brilliant glare of light cut through the chaos, completely out of place in the bruised darkness of the vortex. It had come from below, not from the swirling clouds or the black lightning. It came from the city itself.
She looked down. Past the helicopter’s trembling frame and the edge of the evacuation zone, where on the rooftop of one of the tallest buildings still standing, she saw two figures, with one of them holding a... big mirror.
That blonde hair... whipped wildly in the wind—
And beside her, the man, holding the mirror, its surface polished to a blinding silver sheen, angled precisely toward the sky.
And... those shovels?
The gods?