History, they say, doesn’t care for dates—dates are too neat, too delicate for memory. It cares only for the things that come bleeding through the cracks in time. The day the sky cracked open is not remembered as a date, but for what it let fall: the dragons.

  The First Rift did not simply open—it shattered. A tear so violent, so profane, that it cracked the air itself. The sky, torn like a canvas left too long in the sun, bled molten light over the Carpathian Mountains, and the Earth itself seemed to tremble beneath the weight of the coming storm. For days, the air smelled of sulfur, the acrid sting of ozone and fire. The first witnesses—those who had the fortune of living long enough to speak—claimed that the fabric of reality itself unraveled in a tear so enormous, it seemed as if the heavens were simply giving up. The winds screamed as the air thickened with something ancient, something wrong, and through this bleeding rift came two forms that eclipsed the sun. Two Dragons.

  The first dragon was red as fire—the color of blood, of ruin. It was a monstrous thing, spined with protrusions that looked like jagged iron, its body wound with a strength no living thing had ever known. It moved like a force of nature, an embodiment of war itself. Cities in Eastern Europe fell in a matter of hours. Prague—one of Europe’s ancient jewels—was nothing but ash before noon. Krakow, with its storied walls, was shattered like glass beneath the dragon’s wake. The German military scrambled to respond, but the dragon’s scales were like molten shields, and nothing could pierce its hide. Missiles detonated in midair, their explosion nothing more than a burst of futile light.

  The other dragon was green, a long-necked serpent that seemed to slip through the sky like a shadow given form. Its scales shimmered with an ancient energy that made the very air tremble. It coiled above East Asia, sending tsunamis of fear through every city it passed. Tokyo, once a city of light, was swallowed by a darkness so complete it was as though the sun had died. Seoul barely survived. And in Nanjing, the dragon rested on the ruins of what had been a temple, its roar like cracking glaciers—harsh, cruel, mocking. The armies that came for it were little more than ants, swarming beneath its weight, their weapons nothing more than the scratching of insects against something far too vast to notice.

  But humanity did not kneel. Humanity did not cower.

  They screamed. They fought.

  And in that fight, something awoke in them. Something terrible, something born not in the sterile halls of science or the temples of old gods, but in the chaos of pure desperation. Weapons of myth forged from the very will to survive. Shields that deflected the dragon's flame. People who could leap onto the backs of monsters and tear them apart with their bare hands. The first Hunters, born not from laboratories or rituals, but from blood and fire, arose. They were the survivors, the few who could hear the rift's call, who could feel the ancient energy rewriting the very core of their being.

  Some said the rift rewrote DNA. Others whispered that the dragons themselves brought with them magic older than the world. It didn’t matter. What mattered was this: Humanity did not bend. Humanity fought back.

  And so they formed alliances, forged not from diplomacy but from necessity. The red dragon was brought low over the ruins of Vienna, its massive form falling with a deafening roar, shaking the ground as it died. The green dragon, sensing the fall of its twin, hissed something ancient and incomprehensible before vanishing back into the rift, leaving nothing but silence and the stench of death in its wake.

  The rift sealed itself. But the world did not heal.

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  Five Years Later

  The world was never the same. Rifts continued to tear through the fabric of reality. Smaller now, more frequent, but always dangerous. Some rifts led to dungeons, sealed pockets of otherworldly space that hid monsters, treasure, relics, resources that defied reason. Others were less predictable, more violent. The rift—their rift—had broken something deep within the Earth, and every rupture, every tear in the world, was a reminder that the old laws no longer applied.

  And so, the Guild System rose. The Hunter Order. The Rift Accord. The politics of this new world were brutal. The United Rift Authority (URA) was born from a fractured coalition—NATO, the UN, and the newly awakened powers banded together to regulate Rift activity. Guilds became the new aristocracy. Those with power to clear dungeons wielded wealth. Those who could survive Red Portals became legends.

  A Red Portal was a sovereign zone of death. Nations only sent teams inside when they had no choice, and only after negotiating the price of their lives. To survive a Red Portal made you mythic. Only ten teams in the world had ever returned.

  John and Rose had been two of them.

  Their guild, Ellis Dawn, was small but mighty. They never sought fame, but in a world where survival was a brutal currency, fame found them all the same. The Warden and the Protector—they were names whispered in every tavern, in every dark alley where Hunters gathered. Theirs was not a story of glory, but of blood, sweat, and rage. They were the ones who fought, who bled, and who survived.

  But every year, on the same day the First Rift opened, they returned to that same field. A place that was once a school. A place that had once been home to their daughter, Evelyn.

  Five years had passed, and every year they stood in that cratered place, under the shadow of a grave marker that stood tall and proud, though no body lay beneath it. The marker had never once been disturbed. No body had ever been found.

  Their younger daughter, Emily, was thirteen now. She had awakened last year, quiet and observant. She was smart beyond her years, dangerously so. She had learned to ask fewer questions, for she already knew the answers. She knew that Evelyn’s body had never been found, and that sometimes her parents still cried when they thought no one was watching. She knew, too, that when her father forged chains in training, they pulsed with rage instead of light.

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  And so they returned, the ritual unchanged. The rift still hummed in the distance, and as they approached the empty field, the air seemed to thicken, the memory of what had happened still fresh in the cracks of the land. The ground itself had never healed. The shattered pavement, the blackened stone, the scorched earth—it was all still there, a reminder of the day the sky cracked, the day everything ended.

  John stood over the grave marker, his fists clenched, his breath ragged.

  "She's not coming back," Rose whispered, her voice cracked and broken. She reached out, brushing her fingers over the cold stone. "She's not coming back."

  But John was silent. His eyes, burning with the heat of a thousand battles fought and lost, scanned the horizon as if expecting, hoping, to see a figure emerge from the smoke, to hear the sound of footsteps on the cracked pavement. But nothing came.

  Only the wind. And the whisper of something far older than either of them, far older than humanity itself.

  The dragons were gone. But the world had not healed.

  And in their absence, there was only the echo of what had been, and the shadow of what was yet to come.