Beneath the Obsidian

The first crack appears where nothing has cracked in millennia. I feel it before it happens. Planets always do.

A simple line. A simple reminder.

Before you ask—yes, planets can break. I am Aetheris, a world accustomed to silence, stillness, control. Which is why the fracture shimmering across my obsidian plateau feels wrong in a way only I can understand.

The crack glints across my skin, a thin silver incision cutting the darkness with surgical precision. It shouldn’t exist. Not here. Not in the place I perfected into stillness.

Days don’t exist for me—my time moves through idea seasons, magnetic drift, the rise and fall of my storms. And according to every internal metric I trust, I should be stable.

I’m not.

This particular fracture is so fine it almost looks deliberate. As if someone took a blade of light and underlined a truth I refused to name.

At first, I ignore it. Denial is a geological process here. My Whispering Spires hum their disciplined chorus, metallic harmonics rippling through the air to remind me: Remain contained. Remain crystalline. No spirals allowed.

Good advice. I don’t take it.

The obsidian plateau stretches beneath me—just one slab of black glass on an otherwise crystalline world, but of course the crack had to show up here. I made this place to bury things. Obsidian doesn’t reflect. It swallows.

But the crack gleams anyway. It is impossible to ignore. The thing about being made of your own metaphors is that you eventually run out of ways to lie to yourself. I can rename cracks as “adjustments,” fractures as “restructuring,” but I feel every shift in pressure. I am my own seismograph.

The levitating riverbeds at the plateau’s edge rise several meters into the air, responding to the tension in my magnetic field. They hover nervously between floating and falling.

“Hold.” I command.

They obey, trembling.

I shift inward, letting my awareness descend beneath the obsidian. Storm-carved layers pass under me—old lightning frozen into clean geometry, chaos pressed into order through centuries of discipline.

But farther down, something changes.

The hum of the Spires begins to fade.

Silence grows thick and uneven.

I reach The Wall - A pane of dark crystal buried deep, smooth as petrified midnight.

No, it's not natural. I made this.

The crack from the surface trails down to it and stops politely, as if the fracture itself remembers the boundary. I shaped that boundary. To survive myself. And seeing it again feels like finding evidence of a crime I still deny committing.

"This place is not supposed to exist anymore." I think sharply before I can stop myself. "Not where I can feel it."

Pressure drops through my body. One of my straight-lined storms tries to twist itself into a spiral so I snap it out of existence. Unacceptable.

I edge closer to The Wall. It emanates nothing. No heat, no sound, no invitation.

Then—

A pulse.

Soft. Subtle. Like a breath held too long. It reverberates through the metallic chambers of my core, the parts of me built to hold storms, not memories. Nothing beneath me should move like that. Not after all the work I’ve done to keep this place dead.

Another pulse. Slightly stronger, and my entire planetary structure flinches. Storms sharpen. The atmosphere becomes thin enough to sting. The riverbeds above jolt downward in shock.

“Absolutely not.” I bite immediately before bracing myself to go deeper down into the crystal.

Memory answers—not in images, but in reverberations.

Heat.

Collapse.

Darkness.

If I let myself remember the shape of that moment, even for a breath, I know the plateau above me would crack wide open. But the sensation strikes like impact. Not external—internal. A gravitational ache. A reminder of a season when my storms spiraled out of control, when something got too close, too deep, too unmanageable. When proximity became betrayal.

I recoil. Hard.

The plateau shakes.

Several Spires scream off-key.

The riverbeds crash into their old grooves with a sound like bones snapping.

“Enough,” I hiss at myself.

The silence that follows is ragged. This is why I formed the obsidian plateau. This is why I pressed centuries of ice above it. This is why I sealed this wall with surgical precision. Because nothing good resides behind it. Only the warmth I wasn’t built to sustain. Only the ache I couldn’t let melt through me. Only the part of myself I refused to keep.

So I steady my storms. I straighten the atmosphere. I make everything look normal.

Nothing is normal.

The crack across the obsidian glints faintly, patient and insistent. A line that refuses to disappear simply because I prefer a flawless surface.

I move closer to The Wall again—not touching, just hovering, a breath away. The pulse answers me. A quiet, rhythmic beat. Alive, but not living. Dormant, but not dead.

The truth is simple and horrifying: I sealed something here that mattered.

Something warm.

Something vulnerable.

Something that cost me more than impact craters and atmospheric burn.

I buried it in heat, drowned it in obsidian, froze it under glass, convinced myself stillness meant safety. And now the seam I shaped myself is splitting.

I despise this.

I could reinforce the seal. Easily. I could bury it again under new crystal, redirect future storms away from this place, strengthen the plateau until even light couldn’t find a way in.

And yet…I don’t.

I rest my awareness along the crack. Just a gentle press. Just enough to feel whether The Wall still holds.

It does. Barely.

Something beneath it feels me.

Recognizes me.

Waits.

I hate waiting.

I hate being known more.

The Whispering Spires begin to hum in a dissonant, unfamiliar chord—unsettled honesty vibrating through mineral and air. They know. They’ve always known. They simply weren’t allowed to sing about it.

The pulse beats again. Just reminding me: I am here. You put me here. And I’ve always been yours to face.

I drag myself back toward the surface.

The obsidian horizon stretches calmly before me, a flawless black mirror fractured only by that one thin line. The riverbeds hover obediently in the ion-lit air. My storms resume their strict vectors, straight and disciplined.

To an outsider, I would look unchanged - cold, composed, uncompromising. A world that cannot be moved unless she chooses to be.

But something has shifted.

The seam is not closing.

The pulse is not fading.

And I am not the same planet I was before noticing the crack.

I take one final look at the obsidian plateau—my masterpiece, my burial ground, my denial made geological.

“You stay sealed,” I tell the chamber beneath, my voice quiet, cold, and entirely unconvincing. “That’s the best I can do.”

The Wall doesn’t respond. The warmth beneath it doesn’t need to. Because something beneath me remembers. I sealed that chamber because what pulsed inside it was too valuable to destroy and too dangerous to keep.

And now—I remember it back.

Worlds like me don’t break all at once.

We split in perfect lines, one truth at a time.

This was only the first.