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The Fracture Shows

Author: Missy Smith
last update publish date: 2025-07-13 12:03:04

The tension was suffocating. The stolen ship rattled under the strain of its engines, cutting through dead skies, but inside, inside it was worse than any battlefield.

Mae sat, still cuffed, back against the cold wall, watching them argue over her like wolves circling fresh meat. Her heart thudded hard enough to bruise. Her wrists burned from the cuffs. Her skin itched, hot, electric, like the air itself didn’t know whether to suffocate her or ignite.

“Breathe,” she told herself. “Just... breathe.” “This is insane,” Kaine snapped, pacing again. His cybernetic joints hissed with every sharp turn. “We should’ve left her in the rubble. She’s dead weight. Worse, she’s a heat beacon. Every bounty hunter in the sky is sniffing us out because of her.” Sethis spun lazily in his seat, grinning. “And yet,  here we are.” Riven’s plasma wings flared in agitation. “Enough. You’ve said this.”

“I’ll keep saying it!” Kaine roared, his red eyes flashing. His gaze snapped back to Mae. “She’s weak. Look at her. Cuffed, shaking, breakable. What the hell are we risking all this for?”

Mae’s jaw clenched. She wasn’t going to sit here and be picked apart like she wasn’t in the room. “Say that again, scrap heap,” she hissed, fire sparking behind the fear. “Say it. Say it to my face instead of whining to the walls.” The room snapped silent. Sethis’s eyes widened, then gleamed with vicious amusement. “Ooh, wrong move, sweetheart.” Kaine stiffened. Turned. “You little-” Two steps. That’s all it took. His heavy boots hit the floor like thunder. His hand shot out, wrapped around her throat and slammed her back against the wall.

Mae choked, her breath crushed out, feet barely scraping the floor. Her hands flew to his wrist, tugging, useless against the brute strength pinning her. “You’ve got a mouth on you for trash,” Kaine snarled. “Maybe I ought to break it-” Then it hit. A pulse. Not visible. Not sound. A ripple. Like reality itself twisted. Kaine jolted, the grip on her throat faltering, not from mercy but from something else. His cybernetic arm twitched violently, sparks shooting from the joints. His pupils dilated, confusion flashing through fury.

“Wha-what the?” Her cuffs lit. A glow, not mechanical. Not technological. Something deeper. Older. They sparked, hissed, then went dead for a heartbeat. The lights in the room flickered. Lucien hissed, recoiling, chains snapping back as if burned. Riven flinched, one wing flaring protectively. Even Sethis sat bolt upright, grin fading, tension slicing his posture like wire. “The hell was that?” Only one didn’t move. Ashar. Still. Silent. Watching. Golden eyes locked, not on Kaine. Not on the others. On Mae.

Kaine’s grip trembled. He snarled, tightening reflexively, then jerked his hand back as though something bit him. He stumbled a step.

“What the hell.” His voice wasn’t rage now. It was confusion. Fear. “What did you just do?” Mae gasped, stumbling, hands flying to her throat. Her skin burned where his fingers had been, like the memory of his grip was branded deeper than flesh. Her heart raced so fast she thought it would explode. But worse, worse than the bruises, was the void she felt in that split second. A wrongness. A pulse from her. “No... no, no, no, what was that? What was that-”

Tears prickled the edges of her eyes, not from weakness. Not from the choking. But from pure, raw terror. Even she feared herself. Lucien stepped back further, psychic chains curling tight like defensive serpents. “That wasn’t tech,” he murmured. “That wasn’t anything known. She fractured the field.” His voice was barely audible, like thought instead of sound. “No amplification, no catalyst. Raw.” “It came from her.”

Sethis’s grin did not return. He blinked, scanning her with sudden seriousness. His fingers twitched over his data pad, trying to read, but the screen glitched, static, error codes, scrambled glyphs. 

“No way. No way.” Riven’s expression twisted, not angry. Not scared. Calculating. “Is that, what the Council was hiding?”

“What did you do?” Kaine demanded, voice cracking. “What the hell was that?!”

Mae shook her head violently, backing into the wall, breath hitched and ragged. “I don’t know! I don’t know!” Her voice broke. “I didn’t, I didn’t do anything-!” She wanted to sound strong. She wanted to spit in his face, to snarl, to fight. But her own body betrayed her. She was just as scared of herself as they were. The silence after was suffocating. No one moved. No one spoke. Not Kaine, the same one who was ready to hurt her. Not even Ashar. 

No, he didn’t speak either. He sat exactly as before, elbows on his knees, claws laced loosely together, golden eyes burning into hers like a forge. Ashar didn't have much to say, he couldn't. He just sat there. Watching her. Measuring her every breath. Silent.

Waiting. Like he already knew the answers. Like he wasn’t surprised at all.

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  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   Epilogue

    The first morning after the Council fell, Earth did not look healed. It looked awake. Grass pushed through the ruins of command roads, rivers cleared themselves of chemical scars, and towers that had once watched entire cities crumbled into harmless stone. People stood in the streets with bare throats, empty wrists, and shaking hands pressed to faces that were finally their own again. No command voice rose over the skyline, and for the first time in generations, silence belonged to the living.Mae watched the sunrise from the top of what had once been the highest Council tower. It was not a tower anymore, not really, because Ashar’s fire had hollowed the obedience core and Kaine’s gold had turned the remaining metal into a living garden. Vines climbed through old surveillance glass, and small white flowers bloomed where weapons systems had once tracked civilian heat signatures. The world had not gone back to what it had been before pain, because pain did not vanish that neatly. It had

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   The Door She Chose

    The convergence nursery floated beyond the window like a sacred wound in space. It was larger than Mae expected, built from luminous platforms, braided pathways, and walls of translucent light that folded into one another without end. Five child-lights burned inside the outer barrier, each one flickering as Council machinery carved blue-white scars across the surface. Darius’s stolen devices circled the nursery like parasites around a sleeping heart. Every cut made the five heartbeats inside Mae’s chest tremble.Lucien recovered first, chains slamming into the ship walls to stabilize the damaged gravity field. “He attached cutting arrays to the outer resonance layer,” he said, voice tight with controlled fury. Ashar stepped toward the window, fire crawling over his hands in a slow, lethal burn. Riven spread his wings, stormlight flickering along every damaged feather. Kaine stared at the machinery with the stillness of a man deciding exactly how something deserved to die.Sethis did n

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   The Memory He Didn't Ask For

    The nursery coordinate pulsed at the center of the projection. Nobody breathed for several seconds, as if the ship itself understood that one wrong sound might make the truth worse. Mae stared at the glowing point and felt the five heartbeats beyond reality answer in frightened rhythm. Darius had found the one place none of them could afford to let him touch. The map flickered once, then sharpened into a path that should not have existed.Lucien moved first. His chains struck the navigation core and seized control of every possible route, rewriting the ship’s jump sequence before the systems could reject the impossible destination. “He cannot reach the nursery directly,” Lucien said, but the strain in his voice betrayed the limits of that comfort. “He has a coordinate, not an entry key.” Sethis’s shadows recoiled from the map as if the light had teeth. “Darius does not need the door if he can make the walls scream loud enough.”Ashar’s fire dimmed into a hard, controlled glow. “Then w

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   The Bloodlines Wake

    Darius Kelm’s hidden vessel drifted beyond the moon like a dead thing pretending it had no teeth. Its hull was blackened from the array’s collapse, power bleeding from cracked engines, and every visible weapon remained silent. That silence did not comfort Mae. She stood aboard their ship with Earth glowing below and the five gods surrounding her at a distance they had learned not to cross. Somewhere inside that ruined vessel, Darius still held one memory core.Lucien found it first. His chains connected to the ship’s navigation systems, tracing the dead vessel’s weak signal through layers of false static and corrupted Council encryption. “He is not moving toward Earth,” he said. The white light along his chains sharpened into thin lines of law. “He is broadcasting outward.” Mae’s stomach tightened before the map opened.Stars filled the projection in front of them. Not just Earth, not just nearby colonies, but scattered worlds across old routes Mae did not recognize. Some were marked

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   The Ones Who Answered

    Mae heard the children whisper her name from somewhere beyond the dark. Five voices overlapped inside the pulse, each one distinct enough to feel real and distant enough to feel impossible. Sethis held her between Earth and the moon, wrapped in shadow that breathed around them like a second atmosphere. His arms remained careful, tense with the effort of not holding her tighter than she had allowed. Below them, Earth glowed with wounded light, and above them, the broken remains of the Godslayer Array drifted like black snow.“Tell me you heard that,” Mae whispered. Sethis looked down at her, his face lit by violet reflections and the soft dark of his own power. “I heard them,” he said. His voice nearly broke on the last word, but he forced it steady for her. Mae hated that she noticed the effort, and she hated more that it mattered.The shadows shifted around them, carrying them slowly toward the atmosphere while the ruined array burned behind the moon. Mae kept listening for the voice

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   Run Toward Him

    The child’s voice faded from Mae’s blood, but the command stayed. Mother, run toward him. It made no sense, because every instinct she owned told her to run from Darius, from the array, from the five gods being dragged toward extinction by invisible hooks in the sky. Ashar staggered first, one knee striking the broken pavement as fire tore upward from his spine in a violent stream. Riven cursed and slammed both wings into the ground, trying to anchor himself while stormlight ripped loose from his feathers.Lucien’s chains buried themselves through the street and into the bones of the city. White law blazed across every link, but the Godslayer Array kept pulling, dragging symbols from his skin like it was reading him apart. Sethis bent forward with one hand pressed to his chest, shadows pouring upward in thin strips that vanished into the red sky. Kaine stood the longest, jaw clenched, gold ruin clawing its way out of him one pulse at a time. Mae watched the five of them being taken ap

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   Calm Before the Storm

    The silence that followed was crushing. Smoke curled along the fractured walls. Dust hung heavy in the air. The ground beneath Mae’s feet was scorched and split like the aftermath of a localized earthquake. The room, once chaotic with battle, now stood eerily still. Mae stood in the center of it all

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   The Unbroken Chain

    Lucien’s thoughtsI’ve been waiting for this moment, knowing it was coming. It always has been. The pulse. The crack in time that echoes through the marrow of my bones, through the space between seconds. She has always been there, just out of sight, just beyond reach. But never fully seen. I never s

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   Systemic Optimization

    Silence. It wasn’t empty, it was heavy, pressing down like gravity shifted in the room. No one moved. No one dared speak. Kaine was still on the floor, his hands limp in his lap, shoulders sagging like someone had cut the strings that once kept him dangerous. Mae stood between him and the others, h

  • Claimed by the Fallen Five   Becoming

    Riven wasn’t done. He stalked toward Kaine again, fists clenched so tight his knuckles were bone white. “You lied. You planted a tracker. You made her doubt herself, put her through hell, and now, now you’ve got something else to say?” Kaine’s lip curled, blood at the corner of his mouth from where

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