Chapter 5 – A Warning from the Rift
The fracture widened.
Thin, jagged lines splintered outward, cutting through the void like cracks on a frozen lake. Elise barely registered the warning lights blinking on the console. The Rift was changing. But beyond the fracture...
There was nothing.
No space. No stars. No abyss.
Just… something deeper.
Something shifting.
Something watching.
Her breath hitched sharp, involuntary. Pressure. A terrible weight gathered behind her eyes, burrowing into her skull like invisible hands pressing against her mind, crawling through her thoughts. Her fingers clenched around the console, white-knuckled. Not real. Not real.
But the ship’s lights flickered.
And a figure appeared.
Not outside.
Inside.
Elise froze. Her lungs seized.
It was her.
No. Not her.
Something else. Something wearing her shape like a hollowed-out shell.
The thing stood near the viewport, caught between light and shadow...its presence bending the space around it, as if reality itself wasn’t sure it should exist.
Her uniform was shredded, the fabric torn like it had been ripped apart by fire and void. Her skin paper-thin, stretched too tight over bone. And her eyes...
Red.
Burning, smoldering, with an unstable sickly blue glow flickering around the edges, like an ember struggling against the wind.
Noah staggered back. His breath hitched in his throat, a raw sound of disbelief. “What...”
Ren was faster. His weapon was already raised, unwavering.
And yet, Elise couldn’t move.
She couldn’t breathe.
Because the figure… smiled.
Slow. Deliberate.
Not human.
Her blood turned to ice.
The thing shifted..but it didn’t move like a person. It moved like… it was remembering how. Like a marionette testing its strings for the first time. The wrongness of it was worse than its appearance...something about the way it twisted ever so slightly before stepping forward, weightless, unnatural.
Then...it spoke.
“You shouldn’t have answered.”
Elise’s heart slammed against her ribs.
The voice was hers. But it wasn’t.
It echoed wrong...warped, stretched too thin, like sound traveling through something that shouldn’t exist.
A warning.
This was a warning.
But from what?
From her?
Ren’s voice cut through the static roaring in her skull. “Elise. Tell me what the hell is happening.”
She swallowed, throat dry as dust.
“I think…” She could barely force the words out, her mind racing, searching for an answer that didn’t exist.
Her own red-eyed reflection tilted its head.
It didn’t blink.
Didn’t breathe.
And then, with absolute certainty...
“It’s already too late.”
The ship lurched.
Alarms screamed.
The Rift tore open.
And Elise felt herself falling.
Tease Echo:
She had seen herself in the Rift.
But was it a warning…
Or a future?
But was it a warning…
Or a future?
