Zareth Mal’Kor: When the Sky Remembered

Before the sky learned to remain still, Zareth Mal’Kor heard it fracture.

He stood upon the upper balcony of Skyreach Vhal, where storm columns rose like living pillars beneath the city, and watched the horizon ripple as if struck by an unseen hammer. The stormfront did not roll or crack in thunder. It bent. It folded inward, like cloth pulled through a ring.

The wind tasted wrong.

Zareth closed his eyes and inhaled.

He had been born during a Sky Pact ceremony, so the elders never let him forget. The gust that caught him as a child had not lowered him gently but lifted him higher than any Zephyrborn initiate had ever risen without training. They said the First Wind had marked him. They said storms curved when he willed them.

They were wrong.

Storms did not obey him.

They listened.

And tonight, they were whispering something he did not want to hear.

The Breathlords had sealed the Aether Gate Hub three nights ago after the disappearance of a Wind-Scribe. The official claim was sabotage. A broken pact. A traitor. But Zareth had walked the high spires at dusk and felt something else: not betrayal, but hunger.

Far below, in the Drifthollows between shards, something was pulling at the Lattice.

He extended his hands and let the gale move through his fingers.

Emotion shaped weather in Korravel Ascendant. Fear sharpened lightning. Joy thinned clouds. Grief thickened rain into cold sheets. But what bled into the wind now was not any emotion born of flesh.

It was older.

A tension.

A thread being drawn taut across the sky.

Zareth leapt.

The air caught him instantly, spiraling beneath his boots as levistone inlays flared along his greaves. He angled his body, cutting between storm veils, passing beneath suspended skybridges where citizens paused mid-conversation to watch him descend toward the outer storm-ring.

They believed him fearless.

He was not.

He feared silence.

And the storm ahead was silent.

At the edge of the storm column, the wind faltered. Lightning forked outward and froze mid-arc, a bright white fracture against dark cloud. Zareth hovered before it, heart pounding.

He had seen time-lock phenomena only once before, during training at the Aether Gate. But that had been contained. Controlled.

This was spreading.

The air before him shimmered.

And then the sky cracked.

Not with sound.

With reflection.

A second Skyreach Vhal flickered into existence above the first, its towers inverted, storm chains dangling upward into nothing. Buildings hung where there should have been sky. People walked along surfaces that were not there.

Zareth saw himself standing on an inverted balcony, staring downward.

Their eyes met.

The other Zareth’s expression was not fear.

It was warning.

The vision fractured.

Wind returned all at once, nearly hurling him into the storm’s maw. He twisted, riding the sudden surge, and landed upon a spiraling wind-ramp that coiled around the city’s outer edge.

Breath ragged.

Pulse racing.

He felt it clearly now.

The Lattice beneath Korravel was destabilizing.

And the sky was not splitting randomly.

It was aligning.

Someone was pulling threads from another shard.

Or something was pushing through.

He dove toward the Aether Gate Hub.

The gates stood dormant, vast archways etched in Mechanarch sigils older than Zephyrborn memory. Storm-djinn bound within cloudforges circled restlessly above them.

And at the center platform, kneeling before the largest gate, was a figure.

Wind-Scribe Taleren.

The one who had vanished.

Zareth landed behind him, boots ringing softly on levistone.

"Taleren."

The scribe did not turn.

The gate shimmered faintly, its surface no longer opaque but rippling like disturbed water.

"You felt it too," Taleren whispered.

"The fracture."

"It is not a fracture," Taleren said. "It is a convergence."

The air thickened.

Zareth stepped closer.

The gate surface reflected neither of them.

Instead, it showed a red-iron sea frozen mid-eruption, colossal chains stretching into a dead sky.

A forbidden shard.

Vaul’Zheran.

Zareth’s breath faltered.

"That place is sealed."

"Not sealed," Taleren corrected softly. "Suppressed."

The gate pulsed.

Zareth felt it in his bones, the tug he had sensed from the horizon.

A titan resonance.

Taleren rose slowly.

His eyes glowed faintly, not stormlight, but something deeper.

"The Breathlords believe the Lattice is failing because of sabotage," Taleren said. "They are wrong. The Lattice is being called."

"By what?"

Taleren turned.

"By blood."

The wind dropped.

Zareth felt a chill that did not belong to altitude.

"There is titan residue in you," Taleren said. "You know it. You have always known it."

Zareth stepped back.

He had heard the whispers, childhood rumors. The way storms bent. The way lightning traced sigils around him during Sky Pacts.

"That is myth," he said sharply.

"Myth is memory," Taleren replied. "And memory is a tether."

The gate surface surged.

The red-iron sea shifted.

And from the frozen eruption, a single colossal eye opened.

It looked upward.

Toward them.

The storm outside Skyreach Vhal roared back to life, wild, violent, spiraling.

The second inverted city flickered again overhead.

Zareth felt something answer within his chest.

Not allegiance.

Recognition.

Taleren reached toward the gate.

"We can anchor it," he said. "We can pull its power into Korravel before it tears through uncontrolled. You are the only one the resonance answers."

Lightning exploded across the dome.

Zareth saw the consequences unfolding in fractured glimpses:

Storm pillars collapsing.

Storm-djinn breaking free.

Skybridges unraveling.

Or worse.

A new sky forming.

One not bound by Mechanarch restraint.

One ruled by raw force.

The titan eye widened.

The chains in Vaul’Zheran trembled.

Zareth stepped forward.

The wind did not resist him.

It held its breath.

He placed his hand against the gate.

Heat flooded his veins, not burning, but awakening.

The red sea churned.

The colossal eye blinked once.

And for a heartbeat, Zareth saw through it.

He saw the Architect Prime’s lattice threads straining.

He saw shards drifting closer.

He saw Skyreach Vhal inverted completely, storm columns twisting into spears.

And he saw himself standing at the center of a new sky.

Alone.

The vision shattered.

Zareth ripped his hand away.

The gate dimmed.

The inverted city faded.

The lightning unfroze.

Taleren staggered.

"You refused," the scribe whispered.

"I chose," Zareth corrected.

The wind returned in controlled spirals.

The storm steadied.

But the silence beneath it remained.

Zareth turned toward the horizon.

The thread had not broken.

It had only tightened.

Somewhere in the Drifthollows, chains were pulling.

And something beneath a red-iron sea had recognized him.

The sky above Korravel did not split that night.

But it remembered how.