The wind bit harder here.
It carried ash — not warm, gentle dust, but heavy, spiteful flakes that clung to Solus Onelight's skin and hair like a living curse. Each breath he took scraped his lungs, laced with the sour taste of things long dead.
He stood slowly, every muscle aching with a deep, new kind of weariness.Not just the exhaustion of running, or falling, or fighting gravity — but the exhaustion of existing in a place that wanted him undone.
The ruins stretched endlessly in every direction. Shattered pillars clawed at the bruised sky. Roads of blackened stone cracked and wept slow streams of colorless water birds. No voices. No mercy.
He tightened the ragged cloak around his shoulders — a fragment of something he didn't remember grabbing — and started forward.
Each step left a faint imprint in the ash before the wind devoured it.No path marked the way. No sign offered guidance.
Only one instinct gripped him now: Move.
Standing still was surrender.
The ground shifted underfoot — not violently, but subtly, like the world was breathing.Long, slow, hollow breaths.
Solus ignored it.
He kept walking.
Minutes, hours — time bled strangely here. He could not measure it by the sun or moon. Only the growing throb of something in the distance gave him a sense of direction.
A sound? A vibration? A... call?
It was neither kind nor cruel. It simply was — insistent, steady, and certain.
He followed it.
Around him, shapes stirred at the edges of the ruins. Too small to be true threats, too large to be tricks of the eye.
Shadows. Things born from the Rift's fallout.
He kept walking.
The road narrowed into a corridor between broken monoliths, ancient carvings gouged deep into their sides. He didn't recognize the language, but some part of him — a memory lodged in the marrow of his bones — shuddered at the sight.
He moved faster.
Something shifted in the ash behind him — a soft, slithering sound.
He didn't look back.
The first rule of surviving a broken world was simple:
If it doesn't touch you, don't acknowledge it.
Attention was invited. Fear was an invitation. Curiosity was a knife you handed to the void.
He passed beneath an archway sagging dangerously to one side.The throb grew louder — or closer. Hard to tell.His hand drifted instinctively to the only thing he had besides the cloak: a jagged shard of black stone tucked into his belt.
He didn't know where he'd gotten it.
He only knew it felt right.
Heavy with meaning. Hungry.
He tightened his grip and pressed onward.
The ash thickened, swirling around his ankles like water.
The world narrowed into a tunnel of dust and stone and forgotten hunger.
And somewhere ahead, something waited.
Something that had noticed his arrival.
The ash began to pulse.
Not with the wind — but with something deeper, like the beat of an unseen heart buried beneath the ground. Each pulse stirred faint ripples through the air, pulling at Solus Onelight's cloak, his hair, and the edges of his mind.
He pressed forward, squinting against the thickening haze.
Shapes loomed ahead — not ruins this time, but something newer, or at least more deliberate. Pillars were arranged in a circle, black stone slick with a sheen that seemed to drink the light.
In the center of the circle, half-buried in the ashen earth, a structure jutted out: a door.
No walls house.
Just a massive, ancient door lying prone, its surface cracked and scarred with symbols older than memory.
Solus hesitated at the threshold.
The throbbing pulse was stronger here, enough to buzz against his bones.
He felt no warmth from the door welcome. Only the distinct, razor-sharp sense that this was not a place meant for the living.
But living or not, he had no choice.
Ash whipped around him in vicious spirals, as if trying to force him back, to drive him away. He stepped closer.
The shard at his belt began to hum — a low vibration that synchronized with the pulse in the ground. When his fingers brushed the stone, a flicker of something shot through him:
A memory. Not his own. A memory of standing at the edge of a broken sky, of holding open the mouth of a world and forcing it to swallow its death.
He staggered, clutching the shard tighter.
The symbols on the door shifted subtly as he approached — the lines and curves warping, breathing, rearranging into something he almost recognized.
Almost.
At the center of the door, a single glyph burned into clarity: A circle split by a jagged line — a Rift.
Solus knelt and touched the door.
The world shuddered in response.
A groan rolled through the ruins, deep and slow, as if the land itself were waking from some long and terrible dream.
The door pulsed once — a shockwave that flattened the ash around him, clearing the air.
Then — silence.
No absence of sound.
Absolute silence.
The kind of silence that swallowed thoughts, crushed voices, smothered existence.
Solus gritted his teeth.
The shard grew hot in his grip.
Without thinking, he pressed it against the center glyph.
The instant they met, the world inverted.
Colors bled away. Gravity reversed. Light folded inward. He was weightless, voiceless, thoughtless again — but not adrift.
Pulled.
Pulled down, through the door, into something that had been waiting far longer than he had been alive.
Through the Rift.
Through himself.
Through the first gate.
And into the Ashfall Roads beyond.
There was no landing.
No impact. No ground.
Solus Onelight simply became elsewhere.
The world he emerged into was wrong — vast plains of cracked glass stretching in every direction, their surface reflecting a sky that shifted colors with each breath he took.
The sky wept rivers of silent starlight.
The ground pulsed with veins of darkness that seemed alive.
The Ashfall Roads.
He knew it instinctively, without learning, without memory — like an ache written into his bones.
This place was not death.
It was the corridor between life and what came after.
A place of unmaking.
The shard at his side flickered weakly.
Solus staggered forward.
Every step on the cracked glass felt heavier than the last, like the weight of unseen memories trying to pin him down.
Above, distant shapes moved — serpentine trails of black smoke coiling through the shifting stars, whispering in languages his mind refused to hold.
He ignored them.
Ahead, far ahead, something burned against the impossible horizon: a single point of gold.
Small.
Fragile.
Utterly alone against the endless ruin.
Hope.
Or bait.
He had no way of knowing which.
But standing still meant death.
Movement — even toward an unknown — meant something else.
Solus pressed on.
The ash clung to him here too, though thinner, sharper — cutting tiny rents into the edges of his cloak, his skin, his thoughts.
The Roads test you.
A voice — not his own — brushed the edges of his awareness.
The Roads strip you.
The Roads remember what you forgot.
Solus stumbled as the ground beneath him shifted.
A memory not his own slammed into him:
A battlefield of moons.
A sword without weight.
A name — not Solus — screaming itself into oblivion.
He wrenched himself free of it.
No.
Not yet.
He hadn't come this far to drown in ghosts.
The point of gold flared brighter now, throbbing like a heartbeat.
The cracks in the ground widened the closer he came, whispering promises — threats — histories long erased.
He reached the edge of a massive fissure.
Below, the glass-shard world shattered into a spiraling abyss of color and soundlessness.
Hovering just above the chasm, suspended by nothing, was a figure.
Small.
Hunched.
Wrapped in a cloak stitched from flickering starlight.
The figure raised its head.
Eyes — or what might have been eyes — glowed with molten light.
It spoke, but not with words.
It impressed itself into Solus' mind:
"You are early."
Solus clenched his fists. The shard at his side pulsed harder.
The figure tilted its head.
"No matter. You walk the Ashfall Roads now. There is no turning back."
It pointed a single withered finger at him — not in accusation, but in acknowledgment.
"You are broken. You are less. You are nothing."
The words should have crushed him.
Instead, they set something inside him burning.
A fierce, quiet fury.
Not rage.
Not grief.
Something else.
Solus stepped forward, onto the air itself.
The Ashfall Roads would break him?
Good.
He would see what was left after.
And he would forge that ruin into something the Rift could never swallow.
Not this time.