Chapter 64: ANCHOR AND MAELSTROM
Lyra pushed herself upright, swaying with exhaustion. Her small hand reached out, not to Seraphina, but to clutch Zara’s pant leg. She looked up at Zara, her eyes filled with tears and a terrifying, unwavering certainty. "My Anchor," she breathed, the words resonating with a power that vibrated in Zara’s static-bone. "My Anchor stays."
The word Anchor echoed in Zara’s fractured memories. Stability. Purpose. Grounding against the void.
Seraphina snarled, a sound of pure, unadulterated fury. "Then you doom us all!"
She raised both hands skyward. The crimson auroras convulsed. The air itself screamed – a high-pitched, soul-rending sound of tearing fabric. Above them, the sky didn’t just flicker; it split.
Not with light, but with absolute void.
A jagged, impossible tear ripped open, wider than the plaza. It wasn’t darkness; it was the absence of everything – light, sound, dimension. It sucked at the world. Rubble lifted off the ground, hovering weightlessly before being silently drawn towards the impossible maw.
The howl that had filled the air vanished, replaced by a terrifying, pressure-cooker silence. The world felt thin, stretched, about to snap.
Seraphina lowered her hands, her violet eyes blazing with desperate fury. An ink-black blade, shimmering with captive starlight and etched with runes of binding, coalesced in her grasp. She pointed it not at Zara, but at the heart of the void rift.
"You force my hand, Fracture," she spat, her voice barely audible over the silent scream of unraveling reality. "Give me the Seam, or I let the void take this world... and her with it."