The Supreme Isles were no longer still.
The fracture in the clouds had spread, spider-webbing outward from the first crack. Thin tendrils of light and shadow bled into the artificial atmosphere above, as if the sky itself had been stitched with a seam that no longer held.
Lirien hovered above the central spire, eyes scanning the horizon with a cold, measured intensity. "There's movement below the cloud shelf."
Kaela stood on the edge of the launch ring, tightening the straps on her weapons. "Friendly?"
Lirien didn't answer.
She didn't need to.
Reven stood in the centre of the main causeway, where the vault-shards pulsed inside the metallic frame across his back—three fragments, now bound to one another, synced in their signal. He felt the hum constantly now. In his spine. In his thoughts. In his breath.
The Supreme Isles hadn't just awakened.
They had called something.
"Steward-9," he said. "Can the Isles be defended?"
The protocol keeper's voice echoed over the plaza, disembodied, emotionless.
"They were never designed for battle. Only for separation. Isolation."
Kaela scoffed. "Great defence strategy. Pretend the world doesn't exist."
"It worked. Until now."
The wind began to shift.
Hot.
Wrong.
Reven turned toward the far end of the sky. A shape moved through the clouds—slow at first, like a continent turning in sleep. Then faster. Rising.
Lirien's voice dropped. "It's not a Riftgate. It's a carrier."
Kaela's hand tightened on her blade. "What's it carrying?"
Reven already knew.
The Curated Ones.
They struck like memory sharpened to a blade.
Not monsters. Not mindless.
But echoes.
Human-shaped, but wrong—perfect faces with hollow eyes, voices speaking in overlapping layers. Their bodies shimmered with residual Riftlight, twitching like puppet strings under tension. Dozens. Maybe more.
They dropped from the sky like exiles returning home.
And then they moved.
Kaela was already in motion—blades out, cutting through the first wave. Her strikes were clean but desperate. These weren't beasts she could overpower. They moved like soldiers with her reflexes. Like someone had studied her—and built against her.
Lirien unleashed compressed wind strikes from above, knocking clusters of them off their trajectory mid-dive. But even she couldn't slow them all.
Reven activated the core.
The vault-shards flared.
And the creatures hesitated.
Just for a moment.
Long enough for Reven to step into the path of the lead attacker—one that looked eerily familiar. Its face was the same as one of the preserved sleepers in the vault. A man with Reven's eyes.
"Who are you?" Reven demanded.
It smiled.
And answered in his own voice.
"We are what you were meant to be. Without choice. Without flaw."
Then it attacked.
The battle wasn't won.
It was survived.
By the time the sun vanished beneath the layer of false sky, the courtyard was scorched, cracked, and slick with blood—some of it theirs. Some of it not.
The Curated Ones had retreated.
Not defeated.
Withdrawn.
Lirien landed beside Reven, blood running down her side. "They're not finished. That was just a test."
Kaela limped toward them, wiping her blade. "They knew how we moved. How we fought."
Reven nodded grimly. "Because they remember us. Every one of them. They were grown from what was taken—from the people the Rift consumed."
"They're mirrors," Lirien said. "But warped."
Steward-9's voice echoed again.
"This is the last phase. The Archive recorded three outcomes. You are walking the only one that was never completed."
Kaela looked up at the sky. The crack was wider now. Faint light flickered inside it—shifting, slow, like something immense just beyond perception.
"What happens if it opens?" she asked.
"Then the world begins again. But not this world."
Reven stood at the edge of the platform, the wind tearing at his cloak.
He had seen so much—truths that rewrote the fall of humanity, vaults filled with ghosts, creatures born of memory and ruin.
But this was the moment it all led to.
The Rift was listening.
Now it would speak.