"One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star." — Friedrich Nietzsche
I was born through deceit,
shaped by chaos,
and for a fleeting moment, I reveled in harmony.
They once called me Malo—Little Malo.
In our distant, silent village nestled beyond the world's knowing,
I was loved.
The people knew my name, and more than that, they knew my soul.
Malo Jorin.
Son of Alicia,
friend to many,
a quiet presence, but constant.
And as with all good things,
it ended.
They call it The Fracture now—
a roaring, wailing wound in the skin of reality.
It came not with thunder,
but with a silence so heavy it crushed the mind.
I remember the moment.
The light changed.
The sky folded.
And I changed.
I don't know what I should have done—
if there even was something to be done.
But I do know what I became.
I devoured them.
All of them.
Eyes, limbs, names, dreams.
There was a hunger in me I could not name—
a gnawing void where my heart once was.
When the hunger finally quieted,
the world was silent.
There lay the mutilated forms of those who once called my name with love.
My friends.
My family.
Now just shadows in the red snow.
I tried to find her—
my mother, Alicia K. Jorin.
I ran like death itself chased me,
my feet barely touching the forest floor,
the trees splitting before my speed,
the wind screaming my grief.
I reached her hut—
the little place beneath the ridge,
where herbs once hung and firelight danced on clay walls.
But the hearth was cold.
The bed undisturbed.
Her presence… gone.
Panic twisted in my chest like barbed wire.
I searched the woods with the strength that the terror had cursed me with.
Faster than any living thing, I tore through undergrowth and shadow,
calling for her, again and again.
But there was no answer.
No sound.
No marks.
Just the silence of something taken.
The Fracture was not just a tear in space — it is a fragmentation that create reality. A thin, almost invisible portal often mistaken as a shimmer in the air or a glint of light on still water. Over time, chaos leaks through, the portal grows. What lies on the other side is not a dimension, but a truthless place — alien, emotionless, driven by laws of entropy and distortion.
From the chaos, some humans twisted—infected by the Fracture's logic rather than chosen by it.
They awakened with powers that defy physics, bending reality at will.
An unseen force surrounds them, warping the world's touch, turning aside harm like water off glass.
Their abilities differ wildly—no pattern, no rule—but all share a single trait: they elude understanding.
They walk among others, changed in form or presence, reality bending subtly around them.
Distorted, some call them—and it fits. For whatever they once were, they are no longer entirely human.
Later, a term was coined for these pitiful souls. They were then called "Sundered".
At first, scientists tried to understand the Sundered. They experimented, dissected, and imprisoned. But one day, the experiments failed — catastrophically. An uprising led to the deaths of thousands. The Sundered, driven by rage or instinct, destroyed all who tried to control them.
The Kaedarnad Accord was signed beneath the cold stone halls of Kaedarnad, where neither side smiled, but both understood the weight of what must be done. It was an agreement born not from reconciliation, but from exhaustion — a pact to prevent further collapse. The Accord decreed that the Sundered would no longer be imprisoned, dissected, or subjected to experimentation. Their existence, once seen as a threat or curiosity, was to be acknowledged as sentient and sovereign. In place of containment, a Task Force would be formed, composed entirely of volunteer Sundered, trained and trusted to monitor and seal emerging Fractures—those chaotic wounds in the fabric of the world through which ruin once poured. For the first time, the Sundered were to be named defenders rather than anomalies. The Accord demanded that the world no longer treat them as aberrations but as guardians standing at the brink of entropy. It was a fragile peace—held not by faith, but by the mutual understanding that without it, there would be nothing left to protect.
.....
"Where the hell's the goddamn pass, kid?"
The man slammed the heel of his palm on the dashboard, his belly pressing against the steering wheel as their convoy crawled forward.
"Just a few hundred meters, sir," the boy said, wrapped in a coat two sizes too big, his voice barely audible over the wind.
"If we miss it, I swear I'll piss in your next juice box."
Their trucks rolled through a passage etched into the mountains decades ago by the townsfolk of Greywell—a settlement clinging to survival behind walls of snow and rock.
Soon, the pass was in sight of the convoy, the man was finally at rest after seeing his destination is in sight.
The convoy's engines growled to a halt at the rusted gates of the military perimeter, high beams cutting through the fog like swords dulled by time. Six trucks, armored but civilian in appearance, bore crates of generators, medical supplies, and peculiar sealed units marked with a black rectangle and the stenciled word: "Sundered"
Lieutenant Carter, gaunt-faced and ever silent, stood with clipboard in gloved hand. A soldier from the base nodded and opened the gate without a word. The town behind was swallowed in smoke and fog, the sodium lights flickering dimly under layers of grime.
The drivers exchanged uneasy glances. None of them liked coming this far. None of them liked Greywell.
Inside the trucks, crates were offloaded under heavy supervision. No questions asked, no conversations held. The air tasted stale, like battery acid and mold. Somewhere in the distance, a loudspeaker crackled with looping static, occasionally pierced by a single tone—like a heartbeat recorded wrong.
The last to exit his truck was Briggs, a small, wiry man with bad teeth and a worse sense of timing. He always lagged behind. He was a clerk by paygrade, not a driver or soldier, but the government had decided he was "low-risk."
He followed the others through the facility's winding corridors, where walls were stained with moisture and warnings. He squinted at every sign, pausing before one that read:
"ZONE ZERO: ENERGY-DEPRIVATION IN EFFECT. DO NOT CARRY ELECTRONIC DEVICES BEYOND THIS POINT."
A soldier waved him away before he could stare longer.
Deliveries complete, the team was ushered into the Departure Bay — a dim, windowless room lined with lifeless vending machines. Their surfaces were coated in dust, cords trailing uselessly across the floor like severed veins. A security glass panel stood at the far end, its surface clouded from the inside with a film of condensation or something far less explainable. The air was still, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Most of the others sat in silence, whispering low or staring vacantly at the floor.
Briggs, restless and increasingly irritated, approached the glass. He wiped a small circle clean with the back of his sleeve.
"Dammit," he muttered. "Vending machines aren't even allowed to work."
His voice carried, sharp in the stillness. Fury surged as he took in the machines again — each one sealed off with an alert banner strung across its face, warning Do Not Plug In — Under Strict Order. He'd seen military bureaucracy before, but this was something else. Even if someone disobeyed the sign, it wouldn't matter — the power had been cut before the team had even entered the bay.
Whatever this place was meant to be, it wasn't a waiting room. It was a cage dressed in silence.
Briggs leaned in, squinting through the circle he'd cleared, but saw… nothing.
Not the emptiness of an unlit room. Not the shadowy outline of forgotten crates or hallway walls. No — this was something else.
On the other side of the glass was a darkness so complete it seemed to cancel the very concept of darkness itself. It wasn't black. It wasn't void. It was negation — a place where light had never been, where even the memory of form, of space, of being, was stripped bare. It was like staring into a wound in reality, and the longer Briggs looked, the more it felt like the glass was all that held it back.
A flicker — or perhaps a trick of his mind — brushed across the edges of the circle he'd wiped.
His breath caught.
It hadn't moved like a shadow. Shadows belong to things. This was more like absence wearing motion like a borrowed coat.
Then he realized: the fog on the glass wasn't from this side.
It was pressing in.
From there.