A voice cut cleanly through the current.
“Ah, so you’ve gotten caught in this.”
A delicate hand closed around his shoulder and pulled him backward.
COUGH. COUGH. COUGH.
He broke the surface with the pull and stumbled back, landing hard on his ass. His mask shifted with each cough, lungs struggling to understand what just happened. As he pushed his bangs back, heavy with water, the chill of soaked fabric set in. Everything he was wearing was wet now, which sucked.
He reached back for his tail, needing to confirm for some reason that it, too, was soggy. His fingers brushed dry soil instead. He continued feeling around, paying more attention this time.
“This might help,” she hummed.
Fabric drifted into view: the familiar scarf edged with sharp golden teeth. He drew a deeper breath as cool air touched his skin, then hesitated, realizing his face was bare. If he looked up now, she would see him.
A soft giggle followed. “I can’t do anything out in your world, love.”
Her words lingered as he recomposed himself from his hatred of being wet.
||SKILL ACTIVATED|| [ ? Wind thread | "gentle breeze" ]
Air curled around him, drying fabric and fur until he went from drenched to merely damp. It worked quickly, aided by the salt-heavy breeze he pulled in. There was a pervasive dryness to this layer of reality.
The princess stood quietly next to him, patient with his priorities, hands laced behind her back. They took in the scene together.
Cracked earth stretched outward, weeds forcing their way through dust and fractured soil. At the crater’s center sat a receded pool of water, its surface coated in a thin, oily sheen.
Up close it was barely visible, which explained why he hadn’t seen it from the—
Nico looked back. The aqueduct lay in ruins, collapsed and long neglected, blackened rubble scattered down the slope. The damage now matched in both layers, thanks to the fox’s detonation.
“…”
The princess knelt and tugged a weed free from the sparse grass. Its roots came up blighted and black.
“Does the lake in your world really look like this?” she asked quietly.
“This is my first time seeing it,” Nico said, neither confirming nor denying. “The lake on your side was real once, though. Lani said it was how she remembered it… as a kid.”
He was aware he was comforting a Riftborn, an unstable mass of mana formed from memory.
“Will the lake return to that state if I gave you the core?” she asked, still picking at the weeds.
“Most likely not, given how long the rift’s been active,” Nico replied, then added a quieter, “Sorry.”
“Is it my fault?” Her voice held a hollowness.
“Your presence keeps the distortion here, but…” Nico looked again at the aqueduct’s remains, at the rubble and blackened edges. Those didn’t resemble blight, and they didn’t look like anything that had ever been repaired. He thought of Effie’s records, the ones he’d skimmed after meeting Lani. Tellur’s documentation wasn’t reliable, but Effie’s work was.
He didn’t look at the princess when he added, “I think you came after the lake was already damaged, though.”
There had been no records of earthquakes or landslides, no reports explaining how the water distribution system failed, only gaps in the archive from before Effie joined the department. What remained were a handful of rejected aqueduct restoration budgets her department had pitched and were still revising for another submission.
The princess stood and lifted her gaze toward the moon.
“Is that why I can’t leave this lake?”
“Yeah.” Nico followed her line of sight. The water below was too blighted to properly hold the moon’s reflection.
“The reflections can leave if they pull their counterpart through the water,” she said, then paused. “But…” She exhaled softly and stepped closer to the pool. “It’s impossible for me to pull in the moon.”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
An unsettling, familiar feeling flickered within Nico.
“Does it have to be the moon?” he asked, watching the lake’s surface develop ripples from a tremor.
She turned back to him. Her smile was gentle but tired, not quite reaching her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “Because I don’t exist otherwise.”
“…”
The answer gave him pause. Rifts forming replicas of people wasn’t unheard of. He’d spoken to Lani’s reflection earlier that day. But this was different. A Riftborn who understood its own contingency, who could articulate the conditions of its existence, was new to him. Mana always tried to reassemble reality based on how it was remembered. It rarely expressed that it was aware of the gaps in its memory.
The princess resumed walking toward the lake, her linen hem trailing across the dry stone. She stopped where the waterline should have been and stepped forward. The air held her weight. Beneath her feet, the shallow pool reflected neither moon nor princess.
Nico followed her up to the water’s edge, and her gaze to the boulder at the center. With the water receded, it looked taller than he remembered.
He addressed the princess carefully. “What do you think you are, then?”
She lifted a hand to her mouth, giggling softly as she turned to face him. She returned her hands behind her back and studied his expression with open curiosity.
“What your world wishes I was,” she said, smiling.
The rumble beneath them deepened. A small chime sounded.
|| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ||
[? Wish Established (????-)?]
[?? Core Stabilization Initiated (°ロ°)]
The sandglass icon spun slowly, looping like a loading animation.
The familiar flickering of flames returned, but this time it commanded far more of reality.
The princess walking on—flicker—air across the dry crater, weeds scattered through its cracks.
Tremors in the earth carried across—flicker—a full lake as the princess walked its surface, toward the boulder where they had first seen her.
Nico followed her movement without meaning to. Something about the way she walked felt familiar to him. Flicker. The slope of her shoulders, the loose fall of her hair. Flicker. The steadiness in her stance as she crossed the rift.
|| ! SYSTEM WARNING ! (?Д?;) ||
[?? Core Guardian Detected (? ??_??)?]
Moonlight outlined her silhouette clearly as it—flicker—drenched the air with the smell of iron and ozone—
He shook his ears sharply; the taste had grown too metallic. Earth shifted again, grinding somewhere beneath his footing. He refocused on the princess, who now stood solemnly, gazing up at the full moon shining above—flicker—a half-drained lake, heavy evaporation lines marking its perimeter.
Nico blinked, and again, rubbing at his eyes as strain set in.
The lake was—flicker—full again, dazzling blue under the moonlight. Reflected in it were the boulder and the figure atop it, long hair lifting in the breeze. The unraveling locks glowed silver against the night.
The princess turned her head and looked back at Nico. A small, knowing smile touched her face.
“Your partner had the right idea.”
Earth split the air.
Her robe tore open in sharp lines, light spilling through the seams. Black mana poured out like smoke. She stayed upright for a moment longer, eyes fixed on the moon.
Her body finally went slack.
Flicker. A full lake, a half moon, the boulder at its center. The princess suspended above it, her body—flicker—pierced by spires of stone rising from the rock.
Flicker. The same sequence repeated. A full lake. A half moon. The princess again impaled on stone spears—flicker—her form caught between reflections, black—flicker—silver hair streaming in the breeze.
Nico closed his eyes hard, vertigo setting in. He drew in breath as he braced himself.
On the open, he turned instinctively, searching behind him. There was no field of flowers, no flooded land. Only flat ground remained. His ears lowered.
The festival always celebrated the Moon Princess. Only someone like Zhou would act out this kind of wish.
Nico turned back toward the crater.
The mana spilling from the princess drifted across the water's surface, folding into the oily sheen and breaking it apart as it spread. The hum of mana finally quieted.
The lake remained shallow, but it could hold the moonlight again, along with the reflection of the Sage standing at the boulder at its center.
***
His ears perked at the sound of rhythmic beats.
A gust of wind swept through where the meadow of flowers had once stood, lifting dried silt into the air. Lani flapped once more before settling onto a thin patch of grass. She raked at it with her claws, pulling the blade loose from the shallow layer of dirt beneath. The roots came up blighted. She turned slowly in place, taking in what remained, her eyes gathering dew.
“Is this… reality?” she asked, carefully.
“Yeah,” Nico replied.
Only scattered patches of grass still clung to the soil. The lake was no longer what it had been inside the rift; its waterline had sunk deep into the crater, exposing shelves of cracked earth and banks marked with long evaporation lines. Stone slid outward with a slow grind, forming the path Zhou walked along as he emerged, hands in his pockets. He seemed done with wading through lake water as well. His reflection fractured across the uneven surface as he moved.
Lani watched him approach in silence. The mask that had shadowed her face all night vanished with the rift. Under the moonlight, her features looked pale and still, eyes quietly shining. Nico couldn’t shake the sense that she seemed smaller now, the space around her no longer catching light the way it had before.
Zhou stopped a few paces away, hands still in his pockets, coming to stand beside Nico. The air felt heavy, weighted with silence.
In reality, the change had unfolded over decades, slow enough that locals could only grasp at fragments of what had been lost. For them, it had arrived all at once, laid bare over the span of a single night.
Lani stepped forward. Her wings stayed half open as she shuffled down the bank toward the path Zhou had formed. She kept her sleeves close and crouched at the water’s edge.
She reached into her inventory and drew out a lantern. The paper was worn but neatly folded, its edges smudged from handling. She held it for a long moment, the way someone holds a memory.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED ||
[ 火 Foxfire Wisps | 1/7 active ]
A small orb with triangular ears and a wisping tail drifted down toward her. Its gold light reflected softly in her eyes. She held the lantern steady as she lit the wick.
When the flame caught, she gave the wisp a small nod, and it hovered close. Cradling the lantern between her palms, she lowered it to the water and released it with a faint push of wind. With a few flaps, she lifted herself back onto the lake’s edge.
The three of them watched as the small wish floated outward, its reflection stretching into a long line that reached toward the moonlight.