Chapter 15:The Surface Shatter

The city of Narrah-3 buzzed with light and movement, a tiered sprawl of white-metal towers and flickering skylanes. Neon banners scrolled across highrises in endless rotations of news, product tags, and government slogans. Everything looked clean. Ordered. Safe.

No one here believed in Veil fractures. Not really.

Sure, people whispered about "cold spots" and data ghosts—those strange moments where messages glitched in rhythm or people felt something watching. But the average citizen didn't care. Resonance was theory, tucked away in academy halls and Council-controlled symposiums. The Veil was a concept. A myth of a myth.

Which made the event in Sector Blue-Nine all the more terrifying.

It began with a blinking light. Not red, not green—something in between. Then came a sound: not audible, not digital, but felt. Like thought moving backward.

And then the air bent.

People screamed. Cars blinked out of lanes. A government drone froze mid-hover and dropped into a crowd. For exactly eight seconds, no sensors registered time.

And in the center of it all, a child stood perfectly still. Not glowing. Not floating. Just watching.

He whispered a name:

"Elias."

Then collapsed.

Council Sector Dispatch scrambled containment. Suppression agents deployed across Blue-Nine within the hour, dressed in matte black, their insignias pulsing with red lock-runes. The scene was cleared. Witnesses were tagged and pulled. Those who remembered too clearly would soon forget.

But rumors—they moved faster than drones.

Someone uploaded a silent, shaky video to a backchannel. The tag read:

"The Veil just blinked."

And beneath that:

"Who is Elias?"

In a quiet surveillance facility beneath Narrah-3, a lone analyst stared at the waveform of the incident.

She didn't move. She didn't speak. Her name was Analyst Mirae Sun, Tier 4 Comms, originally stationed at Thar'mek before the fracture closed it off.

She had seen something like this before.

She flagged the file with a single phrase: Possible Resonant Event. Veil Adjacency Confirmed.

And beneath her breath, before she hit send, she whispered:

"It's spreading."

Back in the Sanctuary, Cass reviewed the intercepted footage Wren had pulled before it was wiped. She watched the moment time bent. She watched the boy. She saw the glyph flicker in the reflection behind his eyes.

"It's starting," she said.

Kirin crossed his arms. "I thought people didn't believe in this stuff out there."

"They don't," Wren said, voice sharp. "But they will."

Mira stepped forward, quiet. "And when they do, they'll either run… or try to worship it."

Elias, standing at the edge of the room, watched the video repeat. The sound of the boy's voice calling his name echoed longer in his ears than it should have.

"Why me?"

No one answered.

Outside the screen, the boy's eyes opened again.

But this time, it wasn't just him watching.