Project: Descent – Prologue
Before the world broke, before the lines between reality and the unseen bled into one another, there was a silence — fragile, vast, waiting to be shattered. This is how the descent began.
The void was absolute.
Amid the scattered remains of forgotten routes and the slow-burning fractures of dying stars, Stella drifted at the edge of the great unseen wall. Below her, Earth floated, wrapped in a faint luminous shroud that still resisted the hungry pull of the abyss.
Her body did not shiver. There was no cold where she was. No hunger. No pain. Only a severed bond, pulsing like an old wound where belonging once lived.
Behind her stretched the Broken Stair, a skeletal path of crumbling echoes tethering the empty vastness to the psychic walls around the planet. The others—those who had brought her this far—waited. Some with the patience of dead things, others with the restless hunger of the living.
She pressed her palm against the unseen surface. A subtle vibration answered. But the barrier held. Fragile, they knew. Like glass straining under unseen winds. Yet whole. Yet alive.
“What are you seeking here?” a voice rasped, hoarse and frayed, as if worn thin by ages of suffering, neither fully outside nor within.
Stella did not answer. Her gaze remained fixed on that small world adrift in the vastness. A place she once loved. Or perhaps had merely forgotten to love.
Behind her, fractures spread like hairline cracks racing across frozen glass. Ahead, something stirred against the veil. Someone still fought.
Stella closed her eyes. And for the first time in ages, she allowed herself to doubt.
The Earth had forgotten how to scream. But it was beginning to remember.
Beneath a sky bloated with unseen pressure, Aedan moved across the barren plateau, boots sinking into the ash of long-dead fields. Every step vibrated with a tension he couldn’t name, a silent tremor gnawing at the marrow of the ground—and at his own bones.
The air thickened. The horizon shimmered, not with heat, but with something denser, heavier.
He paused, breath shallow. The ground underfoot shifted, subtly—a pulse, a ripple. The world seemed to breathe against him, not welcoming, but pulling.
Aedan staggered, reaching instinctively for the steady resonance he kept within—the silent Echo that had always answered him before. Dead silence.
And then, brushing the edges of his mind, a fracture wider than sound or sight: a thin place in the world, a membrane bruised and breaking.
For a heartbeat, he glimpsed it—The Veil.
A place where shadows curled backward, where light fractured and folded into itself. Where the world bent, heavy and slow, as if drowning in its own weight.
The landscape around him warped—the sky sagged lower, the ground stretched and quivered, as if reality itself strained against invisible hands. His vision rippled, bending shapes into jagged reflections of themselves.
A whisper clawed through the static: “…seek… the light… abyss…”
Maybe it came from the earth. Maybe it came from within.
Aedan clutched at the silent Echo within him, grounding himself. He thought of a voice—not his own—steady, stubborn, refusing to let him fall. The memory flickered, faint but stubborn.
He set his jaw and moved forward, unaware that the first fracture had already opened beneath his feet.
Inside, the shadows stretched longer than they should have. And somewhere deeper in the ruin, a faint echo of movement answered his arrival.
Aedan moved carefully, each step muffled by ash and fractured stone. At first, the distance seemed manageable—a few strides, no more. But as he advanced, the ruin unfolded around him, corridors bending where none should exist.
The silent Echo within him trembled, caught between two pulses—one real, one slipping. Light thickened into molasses. Shadows clung to his skin like breath.
Then—a ripple. Subtle. In the Echo.
A thread tugged at him, faint and deliberate. Aedan focused, letting the silent Echo stretch outward. A pulse, rhythmic and steady, somewhere ahead and slightly to his left.
Direction. Fragile as a heartbeat, but real.
He moved toward it, through walls that narrowed and ground that flattened, following a pulse stitched into the unseen.
After a time he could not measure, he came upon a threshold—a simple archway, untouched by decay, its surface smooth and dark like obsidian. Crossing it would be more than movement. It would be commitment.
He breathed deep. Stepped forward.
And as he crossed the archway, the world around him sighed—and changed.
The pressure lifted. The ruin behind him faded into a haze, and before him stretched a vast plain under a violet sky.
The stars overhead pulsed slowly, breathing in rhythms he could feel in his chest. The earth was soft, translucent, and where he stepped, ripples echoed outward, as if the ground itself remembered the touch.
Far ahead, at the edge of sight, a dark spire towered against the horizon, cutting into the violet sky like a wound. The Echo within him pulsed sharply—recognition without understanding.
Then the sky shivered. The world blurred. And Aedan fell forward into darkness.
When he opened his eyes, the sun was bleeding over a ruined landscape.
Above, a tattered sky still clung to a few stubborn stars, flickering like dying embers swallowed by the growing light. The ground beneath him was cracked and broken, fragments of shattered streets and skeletal buildings reaching upward like forgotten prayers.
And someone was calling his name.
“Aedan…”
The voice was familiar—achingly so—but blurred, like hearing an echo underwater.
Ahead, through the haze and ruin, a figure stood. Not distant. Not near. Caught between.
A silhouette against the broken horizon, shimmering at the edges, as if struggling to hold itself together.
“Calen?” Aedan called, voice cracking.
The figure raised a hand—or something like it—beckoning once, a slow, deliberate motion. Aedan staggered to his feet, the broken earth groaning beneath him.
He took a step forward—and the figure stepped back, deeper into the ruins.
The Echo within him pulsed again, weak but insistent.
Guiding.
Warning.
He wasn’t sure which.
He breathed once, steadying himself, and moved after the fading shape—into the waiting bones of the city. And into whatever the new world had become.