Chapter 19: Origin of the Riftborn
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1. Thirteen Years Ago – The Orphanage at Kyron's Edge
The sky above Kyron's Edge was always gray—choked by storm clouds and industrial smog. It was not a place for childhood dreams. But in a corner of the ruined city, tucked behind rusted water towers and a broken solar array, stood Facility 09—an AegisCorp-run orphanage that doubled as a biometric registry site.
Eris and her younger brother, Lior, were numbers. Not names.
Subject 112. Subject 113.
But when the lights dimmed and the drones flew elsewhere, they whispered names to each other in the dark.
"Do you remember what she looked like?" Lior would ask, curled beside her.
Eris would close her eyes. "She had silver earrings. I think they caught the light when she smiled."
"That's Mom?"
She nodded.
They had no photo. No memento. Just fragments. But it was enough.
Until the day everything changed.
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2. Discovery of the Riftborn Strain
Eris was ten when they came for her.
Two men in white suits. Faces hidden by visors. They called it a "routine scan," but it wasn't. It was a signal test—a calibration to detect the Rift resonance that lay dormant in less than 0.001% of the population.
Eris glowed like a flare in the dark.
The alarms didn't go off. The men didn't gasp. They simply nodded.
"She's viable."
They didn't take Lior. His scan came up blank. Eris screamed as they pulled her from his side. He fought back—bit one of the guards, bloodied his hand.
They hit him.
She never saw him again.
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3. Project Requiem Begins
The first phase of Requiem was built on silence. No names. No records. Just test subjects and corridors of light.
Facility Delta was colder than ice. The walls were sterile. The floors echoed with the screams of those who didn't survive their first exposure to the Rift.
But Eris didn't scream.
She absorbed it.
She adapted.
Dr. Ravel, the chief scientist, wrote in his logs:
> Subject 112 displays unprecedented Riftlight stabilization.
Her neurological map is rewriting itself in real time. We may have found the prototype.
Eris was kept in isolation. Monitored day and night. Injected with wave after wave of Rift-accelerated compounds.
She should have died.
Instead, she saw beyond.
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4. The Awakening
It happened during the seventh trial.
They flooded the chamber with raw Riftlight—unfiltered. Enough to melt bone. The others before her had vaporized in seconds.
Eris stood in the center.
Unmoving.
Her eyes turned silver.
Then she spoke—not in English. Not in any language the scientists could recognize.
It was Riftcode—a cipher hidden in the echoes between dimensions.
The machines answered her.
She wasn't just alive.
She was linked.
To everything.
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5. The Phantom Sessions
After the awakening, Eris began speaking in fragments. Phrases that didn't belong to her. Names of people no longer alive. Memories from places she had never been.
Dr. Ravel hypothesized she was accessing "Residual Rift Conscience"—a form of collective memory embedded in the fabric of reality.
> She's no longer a single mind. She's an echo chamber. A bridge.
Her dreams grew darker.
She saw the Wraith for the first time.
Not as a monster, but a child.
Lior.
His face was distorted, but the eyes—they were his.
They had taken him too. But they hadn't made him a bridge.
They had made him a weapon.
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6. Rebellion in the Dark
Eris began to sabotage the experiments.
At first subtly—disrupting power relays, scrambling internal comms. Then more boldly. One night, the guards outside her cell turned on each other, claiming to hear voices in their heads.
She whispered to the Rift. And it whispered back.
One by one, other test subjects began to recover memories. They said Eris was "lighting fires in the dark."
They called her the Riftborn Queen.
But freedom didn't come.
Instead, the scientists accelerated their plan.
They merged Lior's broken form with a prototype shell—Specter Unit Zero.
And when Eris found out... she snapped.
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7. The Riftstorm
What followed was erased from every AegisCorp file.
But the Seed remembers.
Eris's full synchronization with the Rift triggered an uncontrolled energy cascade—a storm of light and entropy that consumed the lower levels of Facility Delta. The event came to be known as the first Riftstorm.
Over 300 personnel perished.
But Eris didn't die.
She vanished.
The shell that remained—half girl, half Riftlight—was locked in stasis, marked "Failed Prototype."
But in truth, she had simply gone deeper.
Into the Seed. Into the Rift. Into memory.
Waiting.
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8. Present Day – Base Omega
Kaito stood before the Seed, breathing heavily. The memory had flooded into him like a torrent. Not a dream. Not a vision.
A confession.
Mira stepped into the room. "Did you see her?"
He nodded.
"She wasn't just powerful," he said. "She was broken. But she fought anyway."
Mira lowered her head. "She became something more than human."
"No," Kaito replied softly. "She became more human than anyone else."
He looked down at his hands—still glowing faintly from the resonance.
"And I think... she's still fighting."
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9. Elsewhere – The Wraith Rebuilds
Far away, beneath the last skyrail tower of Old Kyron, the Wraith stirred.
Its shell was gone, shattered by Kaito's blast. But the mind—Lior—remained.
And it remembered everything now.
The Rift. The pain. The lies.
Most of all, he remembered Eris.
"Sister…"
His voice was dry, mechanical.
He opened his eyes.
And this time, they glowed not with rage—but purpose.
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[End of Chapter 19]