The Tower of Fate had never felt so quiet.
Kent Nelson stood before the golden mirror in the eastern chamber, watching his own reflection ripple like disturbed water. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the marrow of his bones — the way Nabu's presence in the back of his skull had gone still, expectant, like a held breath.
"You feel it too," Kent said aloud, though no one else stood in the chamber.
*I feel a tear,* Nabu's voice answered, ancient and dry as parchment. *Not in our reality. Beside it.*
Kent frowned. In thirty years of wearing the Helmet of Fate, he had crossed timelines, walked through the Dreaming, and bartered with entities older than stars. But a tear *beside* reality — a seam between worlds that shouldn't touch — was new even to him.
"Show me."
The mirror's surface stopped rippling and turned to smoke, then cleared into a vision: a city that looked like New York but wasn't quite — the buildings taller in places, the skyline crowned with something huge and circular hovering in low orbit, a golden ring turning slowly against the clouds. Below, on a rain-slicked street, a man in a long blue cloak with a red amulet at his throat traced glowing orange symbols into the air, holding back what looked like a swarm of shadow-things pouring out of a cracked storefront window.
*A sorcerer,* Nabu said, and there was something Kent had never heard in his master's voice before. Interest. *But not one of ours.*
"Where is this?"
*Not where,* Nabu corrected. *When you ask where, you assume one tapestry. This is another thread entirely. A world where magic wears a different face, where gods wear iron and men wear gods' names as titles. The tear runs between your world and theirs. And it is widening.*
Kent's stomach dropped. "Widening how fast?"
*Ask instead what happens when it finishes widening.*
That was Nabu's way of saying *badly.*
Kent exhaled and reached for the Helmet of Fate where it sat on its pedestal, its ankh-crowned surface catching lamplight like a living thing. He had hesitated before, early on — the helmet took as much as it gave, and wearing it meant surrendering the wheel to a passenger three thousand years older than human memory. But hesitation was a luxury for a world that wasn't cracking down the middle.
"Then we go stitch it shut," Kent said, and lifted the helmet.
*Or,* Nabu said, *we go see what's worth saving on the other side first.*
The helmet came down. Gold light swallowed the chamber. And when it receded, it was not Kent Nelson who stood in the Tower of Fate.
It was Doctor Fate — and the mirror was no longer a window. It was a door, standing open.
---
Three thousand miles away and one universe over, Stephen Strange felt the Sanctum's wards scream.
He was mid-stitch on a containment glyph, sweat beading at his temple, when the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees in half a second. Wong appeared in the doorway before Strange even called for him, the older sorcerer's eyes already fixed on the far wall — where a circle of gold light was opening in the air like an iris, wide and slow and entirely uninvited.
"That is not one of ours," Wong said flatly.
"No kidding." Strange raised his hands, orange sparks gathering at his fingertips. "Ancient One never mentioned a — "
The golden circle finished opening.
A figure stepped through wearing a helmet like a golden skull, cloaked in deep blue and gold, power crackling off him like static before a storm. He looked at the two sorcerers with eyes that glowed the color of old coins, and when he spoke, two voices came out at once — one tired and human, one vast and utterly without patience for small talk.
*"Your reality has a wound,"* Doctor Fate said. *"And you are standing entirely too close to it to have noticed."*
Strange lowered his hands about half an inch. Not all the way. Never all the way, not for a stranger who'd just kicked a hole through the Sanctum's strongest wards like they were wet paper.
"Okay," Strange said carefully. "You have about ten seconds to tell me who you are before I find out the hard way."
*"Kent Nelson,"* said the human voice. Then, layered beneath it, deeper: *"And Nabu, Lord of Order. We didn't come to fight you, Stephen Strange. We came because something is eating the seam between your world and mine — and if it finishes the meal, it won't stop with an appetizer."*
Wong and Strange exchanged a look that carried an entire conversation in half a second.
"Show me," Strange said.
Doctor Fate raised one gloved hand, and between them, hovering in the cold Sanctum air, a map of golden threads bloomed into being — a lattice of light representing two universes stitched at the edges, and at one point along that seam, a black and spreading rot eating the threads one by one.
*"Someone is unraveling the boundary on purpose,"* Nabu's voice said. *"On my side, we call this kind of hunger a Nth thing. I suspect your world has its own name for it."*
Strange stared at the rot spreading through the golden lattice and felt the specific, familiar chill of a problem far bigger than the room he was standing in.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "We've got a name for it too."