- Mira Sloane
Rommulas stepped away without announcing it.
No one stopped him. No one asked where he was going. He moved with the quiet certainty of someone who wasn’t fleeing, only recalibrating—slipping along the edge of the broken street until he reached a place where the ground no longer sloped downward, where the pavement had cracked but not given way. A leaning wall rested there, its bricks bowed but intact, like something that had learned how to fail without collapsing.
The Hole in the Earth was quiet here. Not absent. Never absent. Just present without pull, like a held breath that wasn’t asking to be released.
Rommulas placed his hand against the wall and felt the weight of it—real weight, honest weight, the kind that didn’t pretend to be a metaphor. The city pressed downward through him, redistributed carefully, not violently. This wasn’t avoidance. This was measurement.
Behind him, Frankfurt continued to adjust. Rain fell unevenly, muffled in strange pockets, loud in others. Footsteps echoed late, arriving seconds after the citizens or Division-9 soldiers or Fractures or Fracture users who made them. The city was still learning how to exist without lying to itself.
He didn’t notice Mira approach until she was already there.
She stopped beside him without ceremony, her presence registering the same way a pressure change did—not sudden, not alarming, just undeniable. For a moment, neither of them spoke. They watched the street together as it dipped and corrected, watched a small group of people move cautiously through spaces that no longer pretend to be safe.
The rain softened, then resumed, as if deciding whether it belonged.
I wondered what rain felt like when I was just a shard inside Noah, Rommulas thought. I’m not quite sure how to feel about it.
Mira broke the silence without looking at him.
“Is it heavier here,” she asked, voice calm, “or is it just you?”
Rommulas exhaled slowly. The question landed exactly where it was meant to—not as accusation, not as concern, but as invitation. He searched for language and found it slippery, inadequate.
“I don’t know how to name it,” he admitted. “It isn’t pressure. Not the way Hole in the Earth presses. Not in the way my Oblivion anchors. It’s… misplacement. Like weight shifting to places I didn’t put it.”
Mira nodded once, still watching the street. “And that scares you.”
(There was a faint smell of tobacco and smoke, mainly coming from Kate. She had pulled out another mysterious cigarette at some point.)
“Yes.” He paused, then corrected himself. “No. It unsettles me.”
She turned her head slightly, enough to see him from the corner of her eye. “Because of Katie.”
Rommulas frowned—not in denial, but in frustration. “Not exactly. She doesn’t increase the load. She doesn’t make things heavier.”
“What does she do, then?”
He hesitated. Tried again. “She disrupts where I place it.”
Mira’s mouth curved—not a smile, not amusement. Recognition.
“She doesn’t ask the ground to hold,” Rommulas continued, the words finally finding shape. “She tells it she won’t wait.”
Mira breathed out through her nose. “That’ll do it.”
They stood like that for another moment, the city shifting subtly beneath them. Somewhere far away, something failed openly. No cover story followed. No justification. Just consequence.
“You don’t feel pulled toward her,” Mira said gently. “You feel unanchored.”
The truth settled into him with uncomfortable clarity. Not attraction—not the simple gravity of one person to another. It was structural. Philosophical. Rommulas absorbed weight; Katie refused inherited structures entirely. Inside the Hole in the Earth, that difference wouldn’t soften. It would sharpen.
Rommulas didn’t say what he was thinking—that inside the deepest region, instability could misplace judgment. That certainty mattered there. That choosing wrong under pressure didn’t just harm you; it reshaped everything around you.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Mira didn’t need him to say it.
“The Hole in the Earth won’t let you compartmentalize,” she said quietly. “Whatever you don’t name now will surface down there.”
He closed his eyes briefly. The city pressed down through him, patient and unkind. “I’m not avoiding it,” he said.
“I know,” Mira replied. “I’m not asking you to solve it either.”
She finally turned to face him. Rain clung to her hair, her jacket darkened with damp. Hey eyes were steady, not searching. “The Hole in… the hole doesn’t punish hesitation,” she said. “It magnifies it.”
Rommulas opened his eyes.
Across the broken street, Katie leaned against a bent signpost, the cigarette glowing faintly in the rain. She wasn’t watching them–until she was. Their eyes met for half a second. No smile. No acknowledgment. Just awareness.
The weight shifted—not heavier, not lighter. Repositioned.
Rommulas understood then that descent without awareness wasn’t bravery. It was negligence. And negligence, inside the Hole in the Earth, would be catastrophic.
He stepped away from the wall.
Mira moved with him as they returned to the others, the city adjusting underfoot as if noting the change. Katie flicked her cigarette aside, grinding it into wet asphalt without ceremony. Julius looked up, expression measured, Lullaby humming low and restrained.
No one asked what had been decided.
They didn’t need to.
Somewhere beneath them, the Hole in the Earth waited—not calling, not demanding. Not hostile. Expectant.
And Rommulas knew, with quiet certainty, that whatever he had not named on the surface would not stay unspoken below.
Some time had passed. They simply gathered again, as if pulled by the same unspoken conclusion. No one said now. No one said ready. The city itself seemed to exhale them toward the sink zone, the uneven ground guiding their steps with quiet insistence. Division-9 was absent here—not gone, not entirely defeated, but reorganizing elsewhere in Frankfurt, licking its authority into new shapes that hadn’t yet decided how to confront honesty.
The edge of the Hole in the Earth did not look like an edge.
There was no clean drop, no yawning chasm. The street sloped gently, then stopped agreeing with itself. Lines bent where they shouldn’t. Angles refused to meet. The space ahead felt conditional, as though the city were waiting to see if their steps would finish thinking. Rain fell unevenly. Light pooled where there should have been shadow and vanished where lamps still stood. Sound dampened and stretched, footsteps resolving a heartbeat late, voices arriving thinner than they left.
“This isn’t a boundary,” Julius said quietly. “It’s a refusal.”
Katie snorted once, planting her boots near the distortion. “Figures. Even the apocalypse can’t commit.”
Mira didn’t smile. She scanned the space ahead, hands loose at her sides, eyes alert. “This isn't a rescue,” she said. “And it isn’t an execution.”
Rommulas nodded. The weight beneath the city pressed down through him, heavy but not aggressive. “Once we cross this,” he said, voice steady, “the city can’t lie for us anymore.”
No one argued.
They stepped forward together.
There was no fall.
The ground simply failed to finish their movement. Each step landed late, as if reality needed extra time to accept it. Breath sounded wrong—too close, too loud. The city above receded immediately, not in distance but in relevance. Direction lost meaning.
Rommulas felt the weight inside him redistribute violently, layers of pressure shifting without warning. It wasn’t pain—not yet—but it demanded attention. The Hole in the Earth did not push. It waited for him to settle into it.
Katie inhaled sharply—and laughed under her breath. Not fear. Relief. As if something that had been pressing against her for years had finally stopped pretending.
Mira’s chest tightened. Empathy compressed inward instead of expanding, sensation folding dense and heavy, threatening to overwhelm if she let it spread unchecked.
Julius stiffened, jaw tightening as Lullaby strained to exist without smoothing, its usual instinct rebuffed by a space that rejected quiet as a solution.
The Hole in the Earth acknowledged them, not with welcome nor hostility, but with recognition. The environment didn’t respond to their presence—it responded to their decision.
Behind them, the sound of rain cut off abruptly, like a door closing. The last sense of above-ground direction vanished, the city’s orientation dissolving into something deeper, less forgiving.
They stood still for a moment, adjusting. No one reached for their Fracture. No one tried to assert control. The space did not reward impatience.
“This is the point of no surface,” Julius said, more to himself than the others.
Katie cracked her knuckles. “Good. I was tired pretending we’d get anywhere at the top.”
That damn feeling
(Butterflies)
in my gut again, Rommulas thought. He grounded deliberately, not to dominate, not to anchor the space—just to refuse collapse. The weight pressed back, expectant, waiting to see how much he would accept and how much he would deny.
Mira glanced at him, understanding passing silently between them. Whatever happened next would not be clean. It would not be contained. The Hole in the Earth had no interest in tidy outcomes.
Ahead, the space deepened—not darker, not colder. Just more there. Geometry surrendered slowly, edges softening into intention rather than shape. This was where Isaac Roan had gone—not to hide, not to escape, but to decide what kind of harm he was willing to become.
Rommulas felt it then, clearly and without metaphor. The Hole in the Earth did not want a ruler. It wanted a limit.
They moved forward again, deeper this time. The city above was gone now—not destroyed (though the giant pit in it had slightly gotten bigger), not erased. Simply irrelevant. The last echo of surface sound dissolved into a quiet that did not soothe.
A thought failed to finish. And with it, the certainty of anything left above could still reach them.