The wind howled through the canyons of the Windglass Expanse, a place where sand turned to crystal and the air sang with fragments of shattered time. For three days, Orin, Kaelen, and Mira had traveled north, guided by the shifting glyphs left by the Skyborn of old.
Their goal: the third anchor—the Skyroot, hidden deep within the floating remnants of the Celestial Orchard.
The terrain shimmered unnaturally, glassy spires rising from dunes like frozen lightning. Every footstep echoed too long, too sharp. And sometimes, the echo repeated words.
"This place…" Mira muttered, eyeing the jagged reflections of themselves in the glass, "feels cursed."
Kaelen frowned. "The Windglass was once part of the sky. When the Hollow Star first struck, it shattered, and the pieces rained down here. The echoes you hear are not illusions. They're memories stuck in the crystal."
Orin stopped beside a formation shaped like a spiral tower, its surface reflecting his face—but not as he was now. The boy in the glass was younger, scared, running from something behind him.
He turned away.
"How close are we?" he asked.
Kaelen raised a small prism compass and watched the needle swing erratically. "The Orchard is nearby. But the currents of time here make the entrance unstable. We need to wait for the bloom."
"Bloom?"
Before Kaelen could answer, a windstorm tore across the expanse—then halted as abruptly as it had come. Above them, a pulse of light swept the sky. High overhead, a mass of floating landmasses—remnants of the Celestial Orchard—lit up with a soft, glowing bloom. Petals of light drifted down like slow-falling stars.
"That's the gate," Kaelen said. "It only opens once every few days."
A glowing petal landed at Orin's feet and shimmered into mist. As it faded, the air around them shifted—warping into a staircase of solid light that led upward, toward the floating islands.
They ascended.
The Orchard above was eerily beautiful—twisted trees with starlight leaves, roots that floated freely in the air, and fruits that shimmered between dimensions. But something had tainted it.
At the heart of the largest island was the Skyroot, wrapped in chains of voidlight. Corruption oozed from a tear in the air beside it, where a beast waited.
It was not a Hollow Star fragment. It was something worse—a Binder, an ancient creature created to guard the anchors from misuse, now twisted by the Hollow Star's influence.
The creature had dozens of eyes, all closed. As they stepped closer, the eyes opened—and Orin's vision blurred.
"You should not bind what must remain broken," the creature growled. "The sky fell for a reason."
Orin raised his hand, fire gathering in his palm. "And we're going to raise it again."