The tear doesn't seal.
It widens.
Slowly. Deliberately. Like reality itself has decided it wants to see what happens next.
Space stretches until it thins, then peels back in strips. Time drags its feet, slipping out of sync with itself. The Sea beneath me churns so hard it feels less like water and more like a living nerve—overstimulated, raw.
This place was never meant to hold two beings like us.
Xyrrath steps out of the rift as if he's leaving a quiet room, brushing nonexistent dust from his sleeve. His shape can't quite settle. Parts of him lag, echoing half a second behind, as though causality is arguing about where he belongs.
He looks amused.
"You're straining the frame," he says, glancing around. "That usually takes longer."
I don't waste breath on words.
I move.
The Sea surges forward—not a wave, not a flood, but a collapse. Depth folds inward, an ocean compressed into a single direction. Space buckles as it's driven back toward origin, layers screaming as they shear apart.
Xyrrath vanishes into it.
The Sea tears straight through where he stood and keeps going, gouging a trench across stacked realities. Entire worlds shear loose and tumble away, unraveling as they lose their anchors.
Then he steps out of the side of the attack, emerging from a vertical seam that shouldn't exist.
"You're still thinking in lines," he says lightly.
He flicks his wrist.
Forward breaks.
Momentum twists sideways, then inside out. My own attack snaps back toward me, reality folding like a hinge turned the wrong way. I dig in and rip it apart with brute authority, shredding the inverted force before it can finish the turn.
The backlash explodes.
Three nearby layers rupture at once. Shards of broken space spin off, dissolving into nothing as soon as they lose cohesion.
Xyrrath claps. Once. Slowly.
"Better."
I bare my teeth and reach deeper.
The Sea answers violently.
Colossal shapes rip free from its depths—vast, draconic forms made of pressure and abyss, each one carrying a piece of me. Birth. End. Return. They rise without ceremony and dive straight for him, jaws wide enough to swallow coordinates whole.
He doesn't dodge.
He changes the threshold.
The instant they cross it, their bodies twist. Necks split. Wings fuse into bone spirals. Jaws multiply and scream as their own nature is turned inside out.
They fall back toward me.
I meet them head-on.
Claws tear through corrupted flesh. Waves crush bodies that hold screaming timelines in their ribs. I drown things that try to phase, rip apart others that start to learn.
The Sea burns where corruption splashes into it.
Still, they keep coming.
Xyrrath gestures lazily, and the rifts widen. From them spill his refuse—things stitched together from failed worlds and half-finished ideas. Some crawl. Some float. Some simply appear, already lunging.
There's no pattern. No end.
As I fight, I feel it.
Attention.
Far away, presences stir. Divine domains tighten like fists. Thrones resonate uneasily. Somewhere, Heroic Spirits hesitate, their summoners choking on fear they can't name.
And my pantheon—
I feel them recoil.
Not as rulers.
As children remembering a nightmare.
Their unease brushes against me, faint but sharp. A few of them are sweating now, divine forms trembling as the rift's light bleeds upward through the layers.
"She's awake," someone whispers.
Xyrrath notices immediately.
His smile widens.
"There it is," he says, spreading his arms as another rift splits behind him. "They never looked at you like this when you were sleeping."
I crush a lunging abomination in my grip and fling what's left into the void.
"They forgot," I say.
He snaps his fingers.
Time stutters.
Moments overlap. Creatures I kill reappear seconds later, dragged back from earlier states. Wounds rewind. Death loses its grip, trapped in a shallow loop.
Annoying.
I draw in breath and let my voice loose.
The Sea roars back, the sound shaking every layer at once. Pressure slams down, sealing the battlefield inside a crushing dome. Inside it, existence compresses until thought itself struggles to move.
"That's enough," I say.
I reach outward—not to force, but to judge.
The Sea remembers what these things are not.
The abominations collapse inward, stripped of stolen coherence. Time loops snap like brittle glass, broken seconds scattering uselessly into the dark.
Xyrrath stumbles.
Just one step.
He straightens, eyes bright.
"…Nicely done," he says.
Then he pulls.
The largest rift yet tears open behind him, wide enough to swallow stars. Something pushes through—not quite a creature.
An idea, given shape.
It emerges screaming.
A massive abomination forms, its body a writhing mass of limbs and hollow spaces. Entire timelines flicker inside its flesh, trapped and dying over and over again. Even the Sea recoils from it.
The watching gods go silent.
Xyrrath gestures toward it. "Doubt," he says. "Anchored."
It lunges.
The impact is catastrophic.
Reality detonates. I'm thrown backward through collapsing layers, slammed across dimensions hard enough to blur continuity. I anchor myself by force, plunging my authority deep, ripping into the Sea to hold myself together.
The thing follows, tearing through space without slowing.
Xyrrath walks behind it, unhurried.
"You're holding," he admits. "That surprises me."
I rise, burning corruption peeling off my arm as the Sea cleanses it.
"You'll need more than this," I tell him.
He smiles.
"Oh, I know."
The rifts widen again. More horrors pour through. Reality screams under the strain.
I step forward.
The Sea rises with me.
Let them watch.
If the multiverse has to tear itself open to remember what my name means—
So be it.
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