The two of them committed to the strategy of when in a rift, do what the riftborn do, and followed the city’s steady pace, buying snacks that tasted nothing like they looked, poking in and out of shops, picnicking under the willow’s shade, watching birds and people sing alike, and loitering. So much loitering.
Tellur, or Tulen, kept presenting back-to-back rifts unlike any Nico had encountered in his ten years of licensure. It wasn’t new for riftborn to mimic people. What was new was how accurately they could do it, and how seamlessly they existed outside the rifts that birthed them. He’d even gone through the rift database looking for similar data—reports, variables, patterns, or even themes. The database, formed shortly after standardization sixty years ago, was too young to hold any Soul rift data. Not that records on Soul rifts hadn’t been kept before, only that they were scattered.
“Had you heard of Tulen before?” Nico asked as they walked along a line of shops.
“Hm? Why do you think I’d know more than you about it?”
“…Because you’re, like, a century old.”
For once, the sage seemed bothered. He laced his hands behind his back with a huff and stepped in front of Nico, looking up at him with mild displeasure. “Do I look fifty?”
“No, it’s just funnier to round up,” Nico said, sidestepping him.
It was common knowledge that Zhou had stopped aging when he became a Sage roughly fifty years ago.
Zhou stepped right back in front of him. “You’re making me sound like I’m robbing your cradle.”
Nico blinked down at him, unsure what answer the sage expected as he kept blocking his path.
“…”
Is this guy trying to make out with me?
Nico closed his eyes and held them long enough each time before opening again, making it hard to call it blinking. He turned on his heel, tail brushing Zhou in the motion. He walked off in a hurry, desperate to go die somewhere over the fact that his tail had just done that. He weaved through the crowd, which was significantly shorter than him, making his position painfully visible. But the one pursuing him didn’t have the best vision, so…
He made a few turns, took shortcuts through the roots, entered a building through one door and exited through another, crossed a bridge, and cut through narrow alleys. It was all definitely just to give himself a good tour of the rift the System had seemed kind enough to preserve for them.
…The System?
“Does the System make Soul rifts?” Nico asked himself, because he hadn’t avoided anyone.
“…”
It was probably time to find him again. He didn’t like being in this rift without Zhou. He stepped out of the shadow of the alley, flicking a few thoughts out of his ears—
“You’ve figured out how to talk to them?”
—and they shot right back up. Zhou waited on the porch of the building Nico had just cleared, head tilted, smiling with innocence.
The population of this city were riftborn, after all. When they’d tried interacting earlier, the inhabitants could perform certain stored functions— a child braiding hair, a woman waving, a waitress bringing out food that was pointed at. Any attempt to speak to them outside those actions was met with a polite gesture meaning ‘sorry, I have to go’. Nico reached for his tail, not to brush down fur that totally hadn’t puffed up because the sage startled him.
“…”
He squinted at Zhou, who leaned against a post with his hair stirring in the breeze, perfectly composed and not at all sweaty for someone who should’ve had to be chasing him to corner him like this.
“I got to know the city while you were asleep those two days,” Zhou said.
“It wasn’t humanly possible for me to be asleep for two days.”
“I mean, a pile of leaves probably only looks like a good napping spot to a fox.”
“Yeah, because it was a nap, not a coma.”
Zhou laughed, falling into step beside him again.
“Do you think the System has more GPU than nature? Natural rifts procedurally try to re-render reality, but does that mean System-made rifts contain intent?”
“I’m not really a philosophy guy.”
“And I’m not 100 years old.”
“86,” Nico guessed.
“This is the most refined rift I’ve experienced as well,” Zhou said, apparently continuing a different conversation. “I knew about as much as you did about Tellur, and aside from some glyphs, the same for Tulen.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
He must’ve been more content with that number. Nico ran his hand along the railing inscriptions, fingertips brushing the carved curves and grooves. If he pulsed mana into them, they’d respond, but not glow the way they had for Zhou.
“So you just showed up in Tellur by coincidence, then?”
“I said I knew about as much as you did,” Zhou replied, tilting his head. The amethyst of his irises brightened as his eyes curved in a smile.
Nico sighed, turning back to the railing. So Zhou had come to Tellur with intel on the involvement of their guild, Nireya and Aster.
“So all of this was because you hate Aster?”
Zhou let out a hearty laugh. “You know, I thought my hate for that guy maxed out decades ago.”
He rested his arms against the rail, voice lowering. “I’ve grown to hate him exponentially more since coming here, somehow.”
Nico’s gaze drifted across the plaza. The Serifs—the riftborn—still bustled through their routines. They were constructs of mana given form, nothing more. But what if the mana was theirs? If the rift unraveled, would their essence rejoin the world’s flow, or had they already chosen to remain here?
He really wasn’t a philosophy guy.
* * *
As evening deepened, they climbed to a bridge that joined two rooftops. The city glowed beneath them, gold light spilling into the stone canals. Zhou’s sight had recovered to its prior stage, and he followed the horizon with unguarded calm. Nico was quietly glad they could watch together.
Nico sat on the edge of the bridge, dangling his feet off the side, and Zhou sat beside him, close enough for warmth to pass easily between them. The wind lifted through Zhou’s hair, silver strands bright against his skin. With a turn, he caught Nico watching and gave him a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, the amethyst within them faint in the evening light, before looking forward again. Nico returned his gaze to the sunset, hands in his lap as he idly swung his legs above the people walking under the bridge.
Zhou leaned into him, threading his arm around Nico’s as he had before, resting his head lightly on the fox’s shoulder. The soft scent of jasmine lingered on his collar. He shifted a little to adjust for height. Nico’s ears flushed as he listened to Zhou’s steady breathing. Between the silences, he could hear their heartbeats. His quick, Zhou’s slow and heavy, pulsing with the city.
The drifting willow leaves before them slowed. The rush of water faded to a trickle, and the chatter below settled to a hum. Time inside the rift eased until even the breeze could no longer lift Zhou’s hair. The people below were frozen in place again, riftborn with no sense of routine left. The sunset hung suspended above the city, gold and rose drawing long across the rooftops. They watched the still world a moment longer.
|| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ||
[Mission: Unravel the core.
Time for goodbyes. ??? ? ? ?? ??]
Zhou lifted his head, eyes turned toward the horizon. The thin veil across them caught the reflection of the unmoving sun. Nico watched, uncertain whether Zhou was looking at the system text or the sky softening into blush and honey.
It made Nico think of what Zhou had said, half in jest, in the Lunar Fall rift: ‘It might keep you here if you eat it’.
And how the Sage hadn’t hesitated to eat within this rift.
The sun stayed balanced on the horizon, the light unmoving. It felt like the end of a recording. Nico looked up at the branches still holding onto a lost city. They’d noticed it before they’d even begun navigating; that every stream of mana running through the city traced back to the tree itself. Its roots fed the city’s glow; its branches touched every current of air; its trunk held the city’s heart.
He looked over to Zhou. His expression matched the one he wore when he stood on the decayed trunk before they entered the rift.
It was a cruel irony: the System making them rewrite the fate of this tree. It transferred the history of Aster’s destruction of this civilization onto them, making it their responsibility to hold. After being gifted the reconstruction of a single day, they were the ones who had to end it.
Nico drew a slow breath and looked at the frozen city one last time. He freed his arm from Zhou and rose, standing on the bridge. The structure anchored into the willow’s trunk near its base. He turned toward the bark where the rooftop joined the wood. Zhou caught the hem of his shirt.
“I’ll do it,” he said, still facing the horizon, taking in the sunset one last time.
Nico stood until Zhou let go. The sage walked to a more scenic spot near the foot of the tree, where the willow branches hung low and heavy with green. Nico stayed among the outer roots, his boots half sunk in soft moss. From there, he watched Zhou step closer and lay a hand against the trunk.
Zhou drew a slow breath and released violet mana into the bark; it thrummed faintly under his palm. The trunk brightened, light threading through the ridges of the wood. It gradually turned violet as it climbed through the branches. Deep green leaves gave way soft white-pink buds. In a single sweep, the buds unfurled their petals all at once, filling the air with lush bloom.
Petals began to fall—at first only a few spinning through the air—then the whole cascade released in a steady rain that filled the city.
Zhou’s fingers stayed on the grooves in the bark as the petals drifted downward. Their glow reflected on his horns before dissolving into shimmers of ambient mana. Where the blossoms touched the frozen figures below, their outlines softened, until they too became faint light carried on the petals.
It rained like that for a long time, the way ash had once fallen.
When the branches finally emptied, the city was ready to return to the flow of mana. The glow spread through the bark, across the roots and limbs, releasing a metallic scent mixed with the faint hum of mana returning to earth.
|| Skill Activated ||
[ Lycanthropy ? ]
Zhou’s hand stayed on the trunk as the last petals caught in his hair and vanished. The light dimmed beneath his palm, briefly surging to shine the brightest the moment before it all disappeared. The swamp returned, heavy with the scent of peat. Rain fell into the grand sinkhole the land had collapsed into, carrying no petals. Where the tree had stood, a hollow trunk remained, its bark turned ashen grey.
The fox leapt up beside Zhou, climbing the same stone slabs the sage had raised when they’d entered. Zhou pulled his hand from the rotting wood and turned toward the fox sitting nearby. His expression was distant, the veil less visible now in the dim light that deepened the violet of his eyes. A faint tremor lingered in his hand as his shoulders rose and fell in even breaths. The fox sat quietly beside him, waiting for whenever he was ready to leave the moment.
Though it seemed meant to be short lived, Nico’s ears shifted, attuned to the sound of footsteps approaching from a far corridor. He recognized them by their rhythm—it was Kai.
On cue, Zhou started walking away without a goodbye, as he’d done before.
|| Active Skill: Lycanthropy ? ||
[ Deactivate? Y/N ]
But this time, Nico reached out and caught the hem of his sleeve.
Zhou smirked. “What, you want to set up our next date?”
“Yeah.”
Zhou’s eyes widened before curving into crescents, tickled by the fox’s bluntness. “It’ll be a bit, but I’ll find you,” he said, laughing softly.
“Don’t take too long.”
“Mn.”
Zhou left with a small wave, on a route that notably didn’t backtrack toward the entrance.