Prologue
Location: Port Haven
[System Announcement: Elara POV]
The mana core detonated with a sound like shattering crystal — a sharp, resonant crack that rippled through the city’s bones. The great Clockwork Tower, a magnificent gilded needle of brass and arcane gears that had served as Port Haven's primary power source for centuries, didn't explode or fall. It simply dissolved. One moment, it was there, a testament to a forgotten age, and the next, it was gone, leaving behind a gaping, black wound that bled a fine, swirling arcane ash. A cold, sterile silence fell in the wake of the detonation, a dead space in the city’s constant noise that made every hair on the back of Elara’s neck stand on end. The city, usually a symphony of sea birds and merchant shouts and the low, constant hum of ambient magic, was now mute. The sudden void of sound felt wrong, a violation of the laws of nature and of her own sanity.
A wall of heat rolled through the marketplace, thick with the tang of scorched metal and the acrid bite of burning oil. Shards of fire-glass hissed into the dirt, slicing through faded banners and sending the crows screaming into a smoke-choked sky. The arcane ash, a physical memory of the core's final scream, drifted down and coated everything in a fine, grey powder. It settled on the crates of fresh fish, the bright fabrics of the traders' clothes, and the chipped cobblestones of the plaza, making the world seem aged and hollow.
“Third core this week,” Elara muttered, brushing glass dust off a cracked lantern. A customer approached - a scowling man with inked knuckles and the scent of rusted chainmail. He glared at her table, unimpressed. Elara gave her most tired smile. “Hail, friend. Careful, the market’s a bit lively today, mana core season, you know. These lanterns are rare now. The crafters aren’t what they used to be, and the last one who promised stability exploded. Literally.” The man grunted. She tapped a lantern. It pulsed a soft, reassuring blue. “Still purrs like a tamed familiar. Discount if you don’t ask questions.” He handed over the coin without a word. She passed him the lantern. The blue flickered. She sighed. “Ignore that. It’s just… moody.”
Elara ducked behind her stall, the rough wood digging into her palms. A merchant on her left, a rotund man with a perpetually sweaty brow, cried out as his wares—a collection of perfectly-cut and polished glass crystals—crumbled to dust. The light in his eyes died, the spark of magic that powered his business snuffed out in a single, horrible moment. He was just the first. She heard a collective gasp as the air itself seemed to shudder, and the scent of grilled spices and sea salt was replaced by a sharp, electric tang of raw, unstable mana.
Elara felt the shift. It was a subtle, internal whisper—the System, which had been a reliable, ever-present hum in the back of her mind her entire life, was now stuttering. Her mind, trained since childhood to rely on the System’s infallible logic, was left to fend for itself. Her directives were breaking up, her mission parameters dissolving into meaningless static. A familiar phrase, maintain order, flashed in her thoughts, then fragmented into incoherent noise. Voices rose all around—panic, not war-cries. The air shimmered with heat, blurring the painted signs and bright fabrics she’d seen every day for years.
She risked a glance over the counter. Port Haven’s plaza, usually a muddle of barter and laughter, was now a swirl of running feet and twisting smoke. This wasn't a glitch. This was the beginning of the end. The system was getting more erratic. If command would just— She caught herself. She was no longer a hunter. She looked up at the empty sky where the tower had stood. Gone — and with it, the wards. Panic surged. Then a familiar pop, a shimmer, ozone — the wards flickered back. Relief, brittle as glass. But how long could they last?
A figure moved through the haze: Kael. He walked through the chaos like a memory, his long robe dusty but his steps deliberate, shoulders square. Even now, he looked as if he had already weighed every outcome before taking his first step. His left arm, a marvel of silver-glyphed tech, was bare, and a handful of impossibly ancient tomes orbited him like moons, their pages riffling with a silent, invisible wind. Elara’s grip on the dagger hidden beneath her counter tightened. It was a reflex, a flicker of muscle memory from another life. She was a merchant now, a humble peddler of ash-scarves and baubles, but beneath the facade, she was still an agent of the Order of System Executors. The System had made her, shaped her, and now it was breaking, taking her with it.
“Loremaster,” she said, her voice clipped and cold, the word a stone on her tongue. It was a title she had sworn never to speak again. Not since—
—Kael froze. The air between them grew heavy, charged with more than just rogue mana. She glanced at his mechanical arm, then back to his eyes. Her grip on the dagger trembled, not from fear but from something far more dangerous: recognition. For an instant, long arguments, a rare laugh, a firelit look that almost became something else. Almost. Anger roiled. The audacity to stand here now. It all tightened behind her ribs. She gritted her teeth. Of course. He’d stroll through the apocalypse like it was a lecture hall. A faint smile touched her lips.
Then it was gone. Buried. The way the Order training had taught her. Focus.
She exhaled sharply. “When the Core finds its Key, the System shall tremble,” he whispered. So it was true; he hadn’t given up. He wasn’t just surviving the Shattered Realms—he was part of something else. He wasn't a relic; he was a living, breathing part of the System she had been trained to hunt down and neutralize. The past had come back.
A faint chime rang in her mind, a notification she hadn't requested.
[System notification suppressed.]
The words shimmered in her vision for a heartbeat, then vanished. Her throat tightened. That wasn't supposed to happen. It was a core function, a fundamental rule of her existence, and it had been broken. It was a ghost in the machine, a directive she had been taught was impossible.
“You were right,” she bit out. He nodded, his expression weary. “I knew you’d see it. How long have you been off-grid—” Elara reached up to reveal a ruby studded earring hidden behind fiery red locks of hair. “I didn’t”.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
She saw his gaze sweep past her to the smoking ruins above and beyond her stall. His eyes, the startling, vivid blue of a clear day, filled with a knowledge she could only guess at. Elara could see that he had come to a decision. “We need to move,” he said, the voice not in her ears but in her mind, a glyph-less, impossible communication. Without waiting he swept past.
"And you just happened to be here?" she sent back, her thoughts sharp and accusatory. She saw Kael pause mid stride, his back still towards her. Finally he turned around and his voice entered her head. “I’m here because of this,” he replied, his gaze fixed on the swirling wound in the sky. “The System is dying. But there may be a chance to stop it. A chance to fix it. Elara, go to Everton. The anomaly will appear there. All your questions will be answered.” They both gazed up at the sky towards the west. The eye of the approaching storm swirled above the spires of Everton. Elara shifted her gave back to Kael.
"And you?" she asked. Their eyes met and he spoke once again in her head. "I’ll make a detour. If the failsafe's still exist, they’re buried beneath the Bastions.”
She blinked. “You helped build them?”
A bitter smile. “I drew the first glyphs.”
They shared a moment. No longer merchant and mage. Now: asset and archivist. Lightning and memory.
“I’ll meet you at the convergence point,” he said. “If I’m not there…”
Elara nodded. “Then the Archive refused you.”
He turned away, tomes flickering behind him like falling stars, as he strode off.
“Let’s hope,” she whispered, “the Archive never opens again... old friend”
Elara hesitated, every instinct screaming to vanish into the alleys and lose herself in the city’s broken heart. The Order’s protocols were clear: report, contain, neutralize. She was looking at the source of the anomaly, the very thing she was trained to eliminate. But the System had failed her. And in that moment of profound violation, she decided to choose the living ghost over the dying machine. She steeled herself and with a sharp nod, disappeared into the heat and smoke, a cynical merchant trailing a fugitive from the past.
--||--
Chapter 1: The Eye of the Storm
Location: Everton[System Announcement: Arvind's POV]
The world ended with a sound like shattering bone.
A flash of lightning. The bang of thunder. The whisper of dust. A roar of collapsing stone.
Arvind waved his arms as if balancing on a tight rope. Maybe he was. The ground buckled. People surged. Chaos. He stumbled as he felt the tremors and saw deadly doom rain from the sky.
Above him, one of Everton’s last proud spires — a twisted relic of pre-Shattering craft, half brass, half rune-etched steel cracked and groaned. Its ribs flaked to ash, its runes bled out like dying stars, leaving a perfect hole in the skyline that seemed to drink light and sound alike.
The silence that followed was wrong. Not absence, but negation. Arvind’s teeth ached with it, and for a heartbeat the city felt like a corpse. Then the shockwave came — grit in his eyes, metallic ozone on his tongue, stone groaning like wet clay under unseen pressure.
Everton was dying. He was too close. He was always too close.
Arvind didn’t run like the crowds stampeding for the tunnels. He cut through them with the brutal efficiency of a scavenger — a shoulder check here, a trip there, just enough to keep moving. He wasn’t cruel, only alive. Years of ruin-dives and street brawls had taught him this much: hesitation killed, momentum saved.
His focus was a pinprick. The old district. The whispers of a runesmith. The relic he needed to finish the gauntlet clamped on his arm.
The battered thing shivered as a shard of fire-glass screamed past his head. Instinct raised his arm. The gauntlet’s inert runes flickered faintly blue and deflected a splinter with a dull thunk. Cold spread into his wrist, siphoning mana he didn’t have to spare, leaving his gut hollow. Not enough for the dampeners. Not yet.
The street ahead was gone. Cobblestones had buckled into a jagged canyon, mana currents churning below like an aurora turned inside out. A tram car hung from a single warped rail above, screeching as it threatened to fall. Most scavvers would turn back.
Arvind’s eyes caught debris: a length of iron rail. A gear the size of his torso. Leverage. A bridge.
“Perfect,” he muttered, lips curling into a grim smile.
He heaved the rail loose, boots grinding into rubble until the groaning metal tore free. Using the gear as a fulcrum, he levered aside a collapsed beam, carving a narrow gap. Dust and ash poured into his lungs, but he slipped through, his half-built armour scraping stone.
Then the System screamed.
The text flared crimson across his vision. Not the usual gold pings. No noise. This was deep code — the System’s death cry.
The ground rippled like water. Two children stumbled, betrayed by stone that liquefied beneath their feet. Without thinking, Arvind snagged one by the collar, dragging them both upright before shoving them toward an alley. Then he kept moving. Always forward.
And there it was.
Half-buried in the plaza ruin: pale blue etchings, glowing faintly like moonlight on water. He recognized the shape, the impossible angles of the characters, from the faded scraps of lore he’d found in forgotten libraries. Runes. Old ones. The signature of a true runesmith — a lost art thought to be a myth, and here they were, a shimmering reality.
Worth more than everything he’d ever scavenged. Worth dying for.
A low thrum began beneath his boots — not sound, but pressure, vibrating in his ribs. Raw mana slammed into the building ahead, shaking it apart. Dust roared. The runes flared blue.
“Magnificent” he breathed. Finally. Could this be it? He reached out —
A faint thrill coursed through him—the System rewarding his instincts. Another system message popped up, quickly followed by another as his hand brushed against the blue runes —
This was new. A blue notification? He filed that away before starting to check the previous.. Then just as suddenly the runes guttered. and popped out of existence.
The ground ripped open.
Arvind fell.
Not a stumble. Not a collapse. The earth simply revoked its promise to hold him. Stone. Sand. Gravity gone.
He plummeted through black dust and broken stone, his body slamming against jagged edges, breath torn from his chest.
Then, in the silent falling dark, a single impossible line bloomed across his vision:
The Shattered Realms.
Elara, Kael, and Arvind begin to tighten.
LitRPG progression, psychological mystery, and cosmic-scale worldbuilding, but everything starts small — with one storm, one choice, and one broken System.
Everton, but it’s only one ripple in a much greater storm to come.
What do you think the System really is — a machine, a god, or something else entirely?
