Sonny nods. “Turns out… not.”
The words land harder than I expect. I go very still. “What do you mean, not?”
Jack steps in this time, his tone more measured. “They’re not random,” he says. “Not anomalies. Not some weird cosmic accident.”
“Then what are they?”
Sonny meets my gaze. “They were made.”
Something cold slides down my spine. “Made,” I repeat.
“Started,” he corrects. “That’s the word the records used. Initiated. Engineered. However you want to spin it.”
My brain tries to catch up. “By who?”
Sonny doesn’t answer immediately, which tells me everything.
“Don’t do that,” I snap. “If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
He exhales. “King Ithius.”
The name hits like a dropped weight.
I blink. “The King?” I say. “Aelith’s father?”
“Yeah.” Sonny nods.
“He’s dead.” Hell, he died a long time ago.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” Sonny says.
I stare at him. “You’re telling me the dead king started ripping holes between worlds?”
“I’m telling you,” Sonny replies carefully, “that about a century ago, he started experimenting with something the records refer to as ‘dimensional convergence points.’”
“Rifts,” Jack translates.
“Right,” Sonny says. “Early versions. Unstable. Small. The kind of thing you don’t notice unless you’re looking for it.”
“And then?”
“And then,” Sonny continues, “it gets messy.”
My breath hitches. “Define messy.”
“There are gaps in the records,” he says. “Missing sections. Destroyed documents. Whole chunks of research just… gone.”
“Convenient.”
“Very.” Sonny shrugs but is also clearly pissed off by the whole thing.
Jack shifts his weight slightly. “But there’s enough left to piece together a timeline.”
“Which is?”
Sonny ticks it off on his fingers. “Ithius starts experimenting roughly a hundred years ago. Small-scale stuff. Controlled. The kind of thing that doesn’t raise alarms.”
“Then something changes,” Jack adds.
