The night carried a different weight when the first clues surfaced. Whispers moved through the Custodian Order like cracks in glass. A faction among them was breaking the laws they had sworn to protect. They were opening Gates in secret—unregistered, unrecorded—bleeding fragments of Singularity into places where it should never flow.
At first, the rumors felt like smoke with no fire. The Custodian Order had always stood as the spine of balance between worlds. But each report held the same marks: Gates opening at the edge of collapsed realms, traces of memory energy harvested before the structures fell. Someone was building power behind the curtain.
I walked through one of the abandoned sites at dawn. The air still throbbed with the echo of what had happened there. A Gate had been forced open and left to collapse. Its frame hung in the air like the skeleton of a long-dead beast, cracked and trembling, until it finally snapped and vanished.
That was when the sabotage began.
The Custodians sent teams to seal the breaches, but something—or someone—always stayed ahead of them. The traitors knew the Order’s signals, its tactics, its blind spots. Entire squads went silent. Supply lines were cut. It was not simple rebellion. It was strategy. Precision.
And then came the first attack on a Custodian stronghold. Not from outside, as many feared—but from within.
I watched from the hills as the night bloomed with fire. The stronghold’s towers fell one by one, Gates flickering out like dying stars. By the time the Custodians rallied their defenses, the attackers had already vanished, leaving only the wreckage and a message scrawled into the ruins:
“The Balance has failed.”
But the message carried something colder beneath it.
For the first time, shadows moved openly across the war-torn landscape. Figures cloaked in gray walked among the burning gates, collecting shards of memory energy. Their presence felt deliberate, as if they wanted to be seen—but not known.
The Custodians whispered about the Hidden Faction, the ones gathering power for reasons no one could name. But even in the chaos, their leader never appeared. A ghost in the heart of the storm.
And I felt, with growing certainty, that the storm was only beginning.
