The world ended once before.

  That’s what the old scavenger used to say, his voice rasping through broken teeth and rust-stained lips. “It ended, lad,” he’d mutter as he squatted over a burning oil barrel, warming his hands in the cold twilight of Sector 7. “Sky ripped open. Earth cracked in half. Them that fell stayed down. Them that rose...” He never finished that sentence. Just stared upward, toward the broken heavens.

  They called it the Verra Sundering. A cataclysm that tore the fabric of the world asunder, leaving behind a jagged rift between the Earth and the Hollow Sky above. In the centuries since, no one had fully mapped the breach. Floating islands hovered beyond reach, veiled in stormlight and fractured moonbeams. Ancient machines spiraled aimlessly in the upper atmosphere. And on the lower Earth—reclaimed by neon rust, graffiti-covered ruins, and techno-religious cults—people scraped what life they could from the bones of a forgotten civilization.

  This was the world Rai Kurozane was born into. A place where the stars bled light into cracked clouds, and the air tasted faintly of copper and ozone.

  Rai stirred awake in his steel-framed cot, blinking against the flickering hum of a broken ceiling bulb. The chill of early morning nipped at his skin through the torn sleeves of his shirt. Above him, exposed pipes hissed faintly. His hideout—an abandoned comms node near the Sector 7 perimeter wall—groaned as wind rattled its rusted shell. The scent of old metal and coolant clung to the air.

  Then came the thrum. Low and steady. From within.

  He pulled his shirt down and stared at his chest. Right over his heart, embedded into skin and sinew like a cruel jewel, was the Verra shard. It pulsed with a pale blue light, soft but insistent—like a second heartbeat. The crystalline veins reached outward in symmetrical patterns, some as thin as hair, others almost like circuitry glowing faintly beneath his skin.

  He remembered pain.

  Not when he woke. No, before. Four years ago. He had been thirteen. Scavenging the ruins near the edge of a freshly made crater with his older brother, Kain. A reactor breach, they said. Verra contamination off the charts. But the scrap was valuable. People would pay top credits for a pure shard.

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  He should have listened when Kain said to stay back.

  “Rai! Stay behind me!”

  “Kain, wait! That light—”

  “Don't touch it! Do you hear me?”

  Too late. The air shimmered. There was a sound—like a bell being torn in half—and then white light. A pulsewave flung bodies like rag dolls. Rai remembered shielding a small child with his coat, his body stretched across hers as the light engulfed them.

  Then… nothing.

  He woke up alone.

  Everyone else was gone. His brother. The child. The scavenger crew. All of them.

  Except for the crystal, fused to his chest like a living wound. A gift. A curse.

  And the nightmares began.

  It started with flashes. Dreams that weren’t his. Oceans made of glass. Towers that bent under invisible gravity. A voice, smooth and deep, whispering words in a language his mouth could not replicate, but his bones understood.

  Verra is not dead.

  Rai spent the next two years hiding. He didn’t age the way others did. The crystal halted something in him. His body changed slowly—too slowly. He watched orphans around him grow, leave, get recruited by guilds or taken by militias. He stayed behind, a shadow in the ruin. They called him Ghost Boy. Cursed Kid. The Hollow Host.

  He learned how to survive. How to fight. How to vanish.

  But the crystal grew louder. Hungrier.

  He stared into shattered mirrors at night, talking to his reflection.

  "Why me? What do you want from me?"

  The mirror never answered.

  And then came the Hollowstorm.

  A vortex of fractured sky erupted over Sector 7 one night, swallowing three slums and cutting power for a hundred kilometers. People screamed about winged things, about soldiers of light and shadow battling across floating bridges that weren’t there the day before. Rai didn’t see them. But he felt them. The shard in his chest pulsed like a warning beacon. And he knew, somehow, that they were looking for him.

  He had to move.

  That’s when she found him.

  General Lys Aetheren.

  A woman in a silver coat, wearing a half-mask that shimmered like glass under moonlight. She appeared during the Hollowstorm, parting the fog as if it bent to her presence. Her eyes—one gold, one black—studied Rai with the sharpness of a blade.

  “You’ve been chosen,” she said.

  Rai narrowed his eyes. “Who are you? Another cult? Another freak with dreams of godhood?”

  She chuckled. “No. But I do speak to gods. And they’re very interested in you.”

  “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it.”

  “No one ever does,” she replied, stepping closer. “But what you carry inside you... it’s waking. And when it fully ignites, the world will burn. Or ascend.”

  “Then take it out. Cut it from me.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “And if I could, I wouldn’t. Because you were made for this. You just don’t know it yet.”

  She extended her hand.

  He almost refused. Almost ran. But something ancient inside him stirred at her presence. A forgotten word in a forgotten language.

  Ignition.

  The storm cracked open. And the sky fell.

  Rai grabbed her hand.