Chapter 60: The Silence Between Breaths
The Cathedral's absence left a hollow in the sky.
Above the shattered skyline of New Cindrel, where spires once scraped heaven's floor and judgment poured like rain, there was now only stillness—an uncanny hush that stretched between dimensions. No bells tolled. No echoes returned. Just a sky scorched gray by memory.
Kael stood at the edge of the ruined plaza, staring upward. Not at the clouds, for there were none. Not at the stars, for they had long since blinked out. He was watching for the riftlight.
But even that, it seemed, had died.
Behind him, the remnants of the Vigilant Order moved silently. Their armor—half ceremonial, half scavenged tech—no longer gleamed. It pulsed with the soft hum of chronal residue, barely keeping them tethered to this slice of reality.
"It's not coming back, is it?" Eris's voice broke the silence.
Kael didn't answer immediately.
He wasn't sure.
She joined him at the plaza's edge, her boots crunching over memory-glass, the remains of crystalline archives that once shimmered with prayers. Now they shimmered with something else.
Fear.
"We should go back underground," she offered.
Kael didn't move. "Not yet. The wind changed."
And it had. Not a real wind, but a shift in presence—a low reversal of tension, as if time had paused, then blinked sideways.
That meant one thing.
A new Rift-Born was emerging.
He closed his eyes. Felt the tremor ripple through the timeline. This one was different. Less like a shadow, more like a scream torn from the bones of history.
Elaris approached, carrying the Sphere of Remembering.
"It activated," she said.
The silver orb trembled in her hands, shedding pulses of light that bent inward. Images flickered—Kael's face, older… and younger. A burning forest. A whisper from a dying child.
"We have to find it," she continued. "Before it finds us."
Lucien arrived then, his coat tattered, his halo gone. He looked tired, but alert—one hand resting on the hilt of the Dichotomy Blade, the other wrapped around a bleeding bandage.
"Too late," he said. "It's already here."
A sound split the square.
Not a voice. Not a weapon. A silence so complete it shattered thought.
The plaza darkened as if blinked out from a memory.
And then it stood before them.
The Rift-Born.
A woman. Or the memory of one. Clothed in layers of time-stained silk, eyes bandaged in golden thread. Her skin was etched with the language of all dead civilizations. Her presence pulled gravity inward.
"She's… me," Eris whispered.
But it was more complicated than that.
This version of Eris had never loved. Never wept. Never forgiven.
She was purity distilled through wrath.
"You carry the Forgetting," she said, her voice dozens layered atop one another.
Kael stepped forward, but the Rift-Born raised a hand.
"You carry Guilt. That is not the same."
Lucien's blade hummed, reacting to the judgment in her tone.
"I don't believe in purity anymore," he said, stepping between Eris and the apparition. "Not since Heaven fell."
The Rift-Born did not move. "Then you believe in compromise."
He nodded. "I believe in choosing the lesser pain."
With that, the plaza shimmered—and fractured.
All of them fell.
Into themselves.
Each of them landed in a version of the same moment: the one day they feared most.
Kael was ten again. Fire devouring the orphanage. Screams buried in ash. He tried to move, to alter what had already come. But memory does not bend easily.
Eris stood beside her mother's pyre. This time, she didn't scream. She watched the flames consume what little she'd called family.
Lucien was back in the Judgment Halls. Rows of nameless faces waited for his decree. Except this time, the final soul to kneel was himself.
Elaris wandered a battlefield littered with her past decisions. Each corpse whispered the cost of her mercy.
They all relived. And remembered.
When they returned to the present, time was bleeding.
The Rift-Born Eris waited, untouched. "Do you understand now?"
Kael didn't speak.
Lucien fell to one knee.
Elaris turned away.
But Eris stepped forward.
"I do."
She removed the Crown of Forgetting from her brow and placed it before her other self.
"But I choose to remember anyway."
The Rift-Born paused. Then vanished.
Silence returned. But it was different.
Now, it was waiting.
They left the plaza quietly, each carrying their wounds.
Far above, where once the Cathedral of Truth had floated, a single thread of silver light blinked back into existence.
It was not the Thread of Judgment.
It was something new.
A choice yet unmade.