CHAPTER ONE
Fractured Reality
Vanta's Edge wasn't a city.
It was a fracture.
A wound stitched together from the corpses of better places—collapsed skylines, melted glass roads, machines that ran on ghosts. The settlement sat on the border between what the world once was and what it had become. It clung to life atop a tectonic scar of scorched obsidian, its skyline made of leaning steel towers and rusted domes, built from the refuse of a golden age.
The skies overhead were always overcast. Not with clouds, but with Dream ash, fine particles from the storms that rip through the veil of reality, where the Dream bleeds into the waking world. Some said it was the breath of dead gods. Others, that it was the dust of the memories they'd left behind.
Brrring—brrring—
The alarm shrieked into the silence.
"Ughhh..."
Kael groaned, dragging a hand across his face as he stirred in the dim half-light of his bunk. The sound cut off with a slap to the metal panel beside his bed, replaced by the low hum of the outpost's failing generators.
He sat up slowly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Another morning. Another call to duty. Though calling it duty felt too noble—voluntation was more accurate. No one ordered him to serve. He simply chose to, day after day. Not because he wanted to be a hero. But because someone had to.
Outside, the world continued its quiet collapse.
Vanta's Edge was dying.
Not all at once, but piece by piece—eroded by Dreamstorms, hollowed out by the weight of despair. Each day, a new rift tore open somewhere along the fractured skyline. Each day, something was lost—people, places, fragments of memory. The storms didn't discriminate. They took whatever breathed.
And every day, more bodies fell. Mundanes. Aspect holders. Even the strongest weren't safe anymore. The population of the Edge shrank with every sunless dawn, bled dry one soul at a time.
More blood spilled than the earth had water left to refill.
Outside his window, the Dream ash drifted through the air like snowfall in mourning.
Fine, gray particles, soft as whispers, bitter as regret.
And like everything else, it stained.
It stained the walls.
The streets.
The sky.
It stained the hearts of those who remained.
Including Kael.
He sat atop Watchpoint North, one of the few functioning outposts on the outer rim of the Edge, fingers absently sliding a carved knight across a battered wooden chessboard. The board was chipped and scorched, but carefully maintained. Each piece was smoothed from years of use—he only had half the original set, the rest whittled from bone and wire.
He played alone. Always alone.
Because here, in Vanta's Edge, survival left no room for checkmates.
The shimmer lied once.
Now, Kael never trusted it.
Back when he still thought the flicker in the air was just sunlight playing tricks.
Back before the shimmer swallowed the outpost at West Ridge—before screams bled through static and half the squad vanished into nothing but ash and echoes. He remembered the way the air had looked that day. Just like this. Since then, Kael had never ignored a shimmer again.
Dreamstorms didn't roar in with sound and fury. They seeped in quietly—like regret.
Aether pylons around the city hummed with faint blue light, their arrays flickering as if uncertain. These ancient machines, salvaged from the wreckage of the First Sleepers' Citadel, were the only thing keeping the Dream back—barely. They'd been built in the golden years after the Dreamfall, when humanity thought it could still fight back.
But now, like everything else, they were failing.
Kael moved another piece. The queen this time. Sacrificed for tempo.
"I still don't get how that move makes sense."
He didn't need to look up to know it was Sera. She dropped into view like she always did—quiet but electric. Curly hair tied into a rough ponytail, tattered red scarf around her neck, and eyes that didn't blink when they should. She was Vanta-born, like him, but she carried herself like she remembered sunlight.
"It doesn't," Kael muttered. "Unless you see twelve turns ahead."
She leaned against the rail beside him. "That's your problem. Always trying to see too far ahead. Sometimes you just need to move."
"I did move."
"Too late."
He paused. Then looked at her.
Sera gave him a sideways grin, but there was something underneath it. Something distant. As if she was already in another version of this moment—one where the board was overturned, and blood soaked the dust between its squares.
They stayed there for a while.
Watching.
Waiting.
That's all life was in Vanta's Edge—a waiting game. People waited for breaches. For anomalies. For sleep that didn't kill them.
But most of all, they waited for Sleepers.
The lucky few—or cursed, depending on who you asked—who survived a Dreamstorm and returned with an Aspect. Powers stolen or gifted from the realm of gods and monsters.
No one knew why it chose some and not others.
Sleepers were humanity's last line. They kept the Nightmares at bay. Fought back against the Dream. Kept the world from tipping into full collapse.
But they were rare.
And Kael? Kael wasn't one of them.
He was just a mundane.
That night, Kael sat alone beneath a flickering watchlight, fingers gliding across his worn chessboard. He moved each piece with purpose, not just to attack, but to anticipate, to defend. Chess wasn't just about offense—it was rhythm, reaction, layers of strategy hidden beneath each move. For every five attacks, five defenses waited in the wings.
White: Queen to h5.
Black: Pawn to f6.
White: Queen to h7.
He was setting up a Smothered Mate—a maneuver where the king was trapped by its own defenders, leaving only one deathblow from a knight. A checkmate born not from brute strength, but from inevitability.
Kael leaned closer, eyes narrowing. The knight gleamed faintly under the pale lights.
Black: King to f8.
White: Knight to g6.
"Checkma—"
The words caught in his throat.
Something cold brushed the back of his neck.
No sound. No whisper. Just presence—a chill that slithered into his spine like a thread of ice. He jerked upright, heart thundering, the chessboard tumbling to the floor. His reflexes fired like a soldier under inspection.
But the figure standing before him wasn't his commander.
It was a shimmer.
At the edge of the horizon, the air twisted—not heat, but cold distortion, like reality itself was bending. The telltale sign of a Rift. The kind that shouldn't be this close.
Kael stiffened. His breath hitched. The air thickened, heavy with the weight of something unseen. Wrong.
Sera stood nearby, her stance tightening. A bead of sweat traced her jaw.
Even after witnessing the Rift's devastation before, Kael had never stood this close to one. Close enough to taste the static. To feel the silence before the storm.
All his drills, his training, every damn protocol—forgotten. His instincts screamed, ancient and raw:
Danger.
He snatched his rifle and brought the scope to his eye, scanning the Rift's edge. Not all breaches brought monsters. But some did.
There was no harm in being sure.
"There!" Sera's voice rang out.
She pointed sharply. A flicker, barely perceptible—too fast to be human. Too smooth to be weather.
A Nightmare.
It skittered like a goblin carved from shadow, shark-like teeth flashing, claws glinting like razors.
But this wasn't just a beast. Nightmare creatures weren't mindless. They hunted with intelligence. They scouted. When a Rift opened, the first wave always observed. They gauged defenses. Marked population centers. Reported back.
That was the danger.
Kael should've raised the alarm. Fired the flare gun. But he hesitated. What if it was a false sighting? What if it was just a ghost? A flicker of ash in the eye? Flares were costly. Resources were thin. Mistakes had a price.
Sera didn't wait.
Without a word, she vaulted from the outpost, scarf trailing like a comet's tail. Blade drawn, boots striking earth. She was already sprinting toward the scout.
Five seconds. That's all it took.
Five seconds of movement. Of will. Of bravery.
While Kael remained, frozen with uncertainty.
She charged the Nightmare head-on, hoping to delay it just long enough for Kael to sound the alarm and summon reinforcements. Hoping to stop it before it slipped back into the Rift.
Steel met the unnatural.
She moved like a storm-born, swift and merciless. Grace bound in survival. But the creature was faster. Twisting, fluid, like liquid shadow.
Kael's hands closed around the flare.
But by the time he fired it—
It was already too late.
Sera landed one blow.
Then the world went still.
A sound like a string snapping.
Then her body hit the ground.
By the time the guards arrived, it was over.
The Nightmare was gone.
So was she.
Kael sat alone on the wall.
The chessboard lay shattered beside him, pieces scattered across the dust and metal.
In his hand, he held the knight.
The one he had trust on to deliver the final blow, the checkmate.
He stared into the horizon where the shimmer had vanished, and for the first time in years, he didn't think at all.
He just felt empty
Far beyond the Rift, something stirred.
And Kael's time in the Dream was about to begin.