CHAPTER 134: ASHES OF RECOGNITION

The silence after the retreat was unbearable.

Ash still drifted through the air, caught in the folds of Nyra’s cloak, clinging to her lashes. The field around them lay like a graveyard untouched for centuries, but the echo of Kaito’s voice vibrated inside her chest as if he were standing at her side.

It wasn’t only sound—it was weight. A pull. A tether woven through the breach and anchored into her heart.

She hadn’t realized how much she had been waiting for it, how badly she had wanted to hear him again. Even distorted, even fractured, it had been him.

And that was what terrified her most.

Kael was the first to break the stillness. He dragged his sword against the earth as though he couldn’t bear to keep it idle.

"What was that? They had us dead to rights. Then—just gone." He glanced toward Nyra, suspicion sharp in his tone. "What did you do?"

Nyra tightened her grip on her blade, but it felt less like a weapon now and more like a shield against their questions. "I didn’t do anything." Her throat burned from the lie.

"You did something," Mika pressed, brushing strands of damp hair from her forehead. Her hands still glowed faintly from the afterburn of her last spell, but the exhaustion in her movements was impossible to miss. "The breach reacted to you. The Dominion reacted to you."

Yue stood farther back, her expression unreadable. She hadn’t sheathed her knives, though they dangled loose in her hands. Her gaze didn’t leave Nyra. "No. Not to her. To him."

The words landed like cold iron.

Nyra forced herself not to flinch.

Kael muttered under his breath, "Her damned brother..."

Nyra swallowed hard. She had to speak. If she didn’t, their doubt would spread like the corruption threading the Fork.

But how could she explain what even she didn’t fully understand? That the voice had been Kaito’s, and yet not entirely. That the Dominion had obeyed him as if his will were stitched into their code.

She felt Mika’s eyes on her, searching. "Nyra," Mika said softly, "was it him?"

The question cracked her. Her lips parted, but for a long time no sound came out. Finally, in a whisper: "Yes."

Kael cursed under his breath, driving his sword point-first into the ground. "So that’s it, then. The Reaver’s gone full Dominion. He’s pulling their strings now."

"No," Nyra snapped, her voice sharper than she intended. It echoed too loudly in the brittle air. She lowered it, forcing calm back into her tone. "It’s not that simple. He—he’s still in there. I know it."

"You heard him," Kael shot back. "We all did. Whatever he’s become, it’s not your brother anymore."

Mika flinched at his words, but she didn’t interrupt.

Yue finally moved, stepping closer until her presence pressed against Nyra like a shadow. Her voice was quiet, but it carried with unsettling clarity. "What you felt in that breach—it wasn’t only Kaito. Something else spoke through him. Dominion. Core. Both. If you follow that voice too far, you might not come back."

Nyra met Yue’s gaze, struggling not to look away. "If there’s even a chance he’s still himself, I have to try."

Yue’s expression didn’t change, but her silence was answer enough.

The air shifted around them, rippling with faint static. The Fork wasn’t pausing for them. The seams stretched wider, edges of different realities grinding against one another like tectonic plates.

Forest boughs melted into scorched banners, stone corridors folded into broken spires. The instability was worsening with every heartbeat.

Mika exhaled shakily. "We can’t stay here. The fractures will eat this whole field soon."

Nyra nodded. She forced her legs to move, forced herself to keep leading. Because if she stood still, if she let the weight of what had just happened settle too deeply, she wasn’t sure she could rise again.

"Then we head toward the lattice," she said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. "Closer to the Core. If Kaito’s reaching through, that’s where he’ll be strongest. And maybe..." Her throat tightened. "...maybe that’s where we’ll find him."

The march pressed on.

Every step forward felt like pushing against an invisible tide. The Fork twisted more violently the deeper they went. Shadows bent across the ground in impossible directions, stretching longer than their light.

One moment, they walked beneath fractured glass leaves that tinkled like bells when the windless air shifted; the next, they crossed a jagged bridge of stone suspended over nothing.

Kael grumbled with each shift, his nerves fraying. "Feels like we’re walking through someone’s fever dream."

No one argued with him.

For Nyra, though, each shift scraped at her bones. Too often, the places they passed weren’t random—they were familiar. She recognized the angles of ruined spires, the curve of broken stairs. Memories, fractured and bleeding into the Fork. Not hers.

Kaito’s.

It was as though the world itself was unraveling him piece by piece, laying his past bare like an open wound.

And she feared what would happen when there was nothing left to show.

By the time they stopped, exhaustion dragged at all of them. Mika nearly collapsed against a half-toppled obelisk, her breaths shallow and ragged.

Kael dropped onto a slab of stone with a grunt, his knuckles raw from gripping his weapon too tightly. Even Yue, ever silent, lingered longer than usual in the open before disappearing into the shadows at the edges of their camp.

Nyra stood apart, her blade across her knees, staring at the shifting horizon.

She replayed the moment again and again—the sound of his voice, the Dominion retreating like soldiers under command. It should have filled her with hope. Her brother was alive. But instead it gnawed at her insides, because she had seen the truth buried in the distortion.

He wasn’t calling just to her. He was calling to them.

And they obeyed.

The thought made her stomach twist.

She clenched her blade tighter, the metal biting into her palm. I won’t lose him. Not again. Not like this.

Mika’s voice broke the silence. "Do you think... he wanted to protect us?"

Nyra turned, startled. Mika had slid down against the obelisk, her knees pulled up to her chest, her eyes reflecting the faint shimmer of fractured sky. "If he pulled them back—if he called them away—maybe it wasn’t about the Dominion. Maybe it was for us."

Kael scoffed from his seat on the stone. "Or maybe he didn’t want his pets killing his sister before he decided what to do with her."

"Kael," Mika hissed.

But Nyra didn’t flinch at his bitterness. She had thought it herself, in the darker corners of her mind.

"Doesn’t matter," she said quietly. "Whatever reason he had, it means he still remembers us. That’s enough."

Kael muttered something under his breath but didn’t argue further.

Night fell strangely in the Fork, not with darkness but with dimming. The fragments of sky overhead dulled into muted grey, and the edges of the seams bled faint violet, like wounds refusing to close.

Sleep came in restless fits. Nyra dreamed of breaches opening one after another, spilling endless Dominion across the battlefield. In each dream, Kaito stood on the other side, his hand outstretched—not to her, but to them. And every time she tried to reach him, the soldiers closed in and dragged her down.

When she woke, sweat chilled her skin. The dreams clung to her like cobwebs, too close to reality to dismiss.

Yue was already awake, watching her silently from across the camp. Nyra said nothing, and Yue asked nothing. The silence was its own conversation.

They moved again at dawn.

The terrain grew harsher the closer they drew to the lattice. The seams no longer stitched together gently—they tore through one another, jagged and violent.

At one point, they crossed through a corridor that looped back on itself three times before spitting them out onto a cliffside overlooking what looked like an endless sea of broken glass.

The instability pressed on their minds. Mika’s spells faltered. Kael’s temper snapped quicker. Even Yue’s focus wavered, her eyes darting toward shadows that weren’t there.

But Nyra carried something else now. The memory of that voice, calling her name. It pulled her forward like a compass needle fixed to the Core.

By the time the lattice appeared on the horizon, they were frayed to their edges.

It rose like a crown of light and shadow, its structure flickering as though it couldn’t decide which shape to hold. Pillars of code stitched themselves together only to unravel again.

The closer they came, the more the air vibrated with low hums that weren’t sound but resonance, thrumming deep in their bones.

Nyra’s pulse matched its rhythm.

Her brother was here.

She could feel it.

They stopped at the base of the lattice, staring up at the fractured monument.

Kael muttered, voice hoarse, "This place feels wrong."

"It is wrong," Yue said.

Mika’s fingers twitched, light sparking faintly between them. "Do you hear it? Like—like whispers."

Nyra did. But to her, it wasn’t just whispers. It was his voice, threaded into the hum. Not words, not yet, but presence.

She stepped closer. The ground beneath her shimmered with faint patterns of light, like runes half-formed. Her hand trembled as she reached out, brushing the surface of the lattice.

For an instant, everything went silent.

Then—

"Nyra."

It was his voice again, clearer this time, not muffled through a breach but resonating through the lattice itself.

Her breath hitched. "Kaito..."

The others froze.

The lattice pulsed under her touch. The world seemed to tilt, shadows stretching, light bending.

"I am here," he said.

Her throat tightened. "Then let me see you. Please."

Silence. Then a pause heavy enough to crush her chest.

Finally, his voice again, softer, weighted with something she couldn’t name.

"You shouldn’t have come."

The lattice flared.

And reality split open.