Prologue — The Break Between Worlds

  The sky above Velratha burned in violet flame.

  From the highest balcony of the blackstone keep, she watched the final battle unfold like a tapestry unraveling. Lightning coiled between storm-split clouds. The ground below — once green, once sacred — was a cracked wasteland littered with ash, bones, and long-forgotten flags.

  They were fighting again. Still. Always.

  Her cloak fluttered in the bitter wind, frayed at the edges, its once-regal silver thread dulled by time. Her skin bore ancient scars. Her eyes — one a piercing violet, the other a deeper red than blood — glowed faintly in the dark.

  She did not flinch as a blast split the air behind her. She did not look back.

  “They will never stop,” she murmured, voice low and hoarse from too many years, too many screams. “Even when there’s nothing left of us.”

  She turned from the edge.

  Through shattered hallways and dust-choked stairwells, she walked the empty halls of the fortress. Echoes followed her. Not voices, but impressions — laughter, songs, oaths once sworn under candlelight. Every corner of this place remembered her. It remembered everything.

  And she had had enough.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Deep beneath the keep, in a vault sealed from time and death, she entered a hidden chamber. The stone pulsed with the warmth of ancient power. In the centre, the ritual circle waited, humming faintly, half-alive. Glyphs etched in a language older than stars flickered to life as she stepped into the ring.

  The spell was forbidden. It had no name. It was not meant to be cast by any one being.

  But she was no longer willing to play by anyone’s rules.

  Kneeling in the centre, she spread her arms. The magic gathered around her — jagged, hungry, alive. Pieces of her old self peeled away like smoke. Her form twisted, blurred — a woman, a girl, a shadow, a god.

  Her voice did not tremble.

  "Take me far from this place," she whispered. "Take me somewhere no one knows me. Somewhere I can be… nothing."

  Light swallowed her.

  The runes screamed.

  And then, Velratha was gone.

  Somewhere else — a different sky. A different world.

  The night was quiet, the only sounds the chirping of summer insects and the soft rush of a passing breeze.

  A ripple tore the air above a dark field. It began as a thread of light, then tore wide — like the world itself had blinked.

  And from the tear, a girl fell.

  She hit the ground with a hard thud, body limp, eyes closed. The air around her shimmered faintly with purple light — then stilled.

  She looked no older than sixteen. Her tunic was strange, stitched with symbols no one would recognize. Her skin was flawless but unnaturally pale. A thin line of blood trailed from her temple into the grass.

  Her chest rose. Shallow. Faint.

  Headlights rounded a distant corner. A truck slowed. Someone shouted.

  Footsteps thudded across the dirt, stopping beside her. A voice — male, startled, afraid — spoke into a phone.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think she’s alive. But she just—she wasn’t there a second ago, I swear.”

  He leaned down, blinking at the girl’s closed eyes.

  Her lips moved.

  A single word escaped in a language no living soul had heard in thousands of years.

  And then, silence.

  She remembered nothing. Not her name.

  Not what she was.

  Only that she had left something behind.

  And that the stars looked… different.

  End of Prologue.