ELARA POV
The sky was breaking.
I watched in horror as black fissures spread across the heavens like cracks in glass. Reality itself was shattering, and through the gaps, something wrong poured through.
Not darkness exactly. Darkness was something. This was the absence of something. The void between existence and non-existence given terrible form.
Creatures—if you could call them that—emerged from the cracks. They weren't monsters. They were holes in reality shaped vaguely like living things. Anti-life. Anti-magic. Anti-everything.
One touched a soldier fifty feet away.
He didn't die. Dying implied transition from life to death.
He simply ceased. Like he'd never existed at all. The space where he'd been standing just... empty.
"The Void," the Firstborn breathed beside me, its newly physical face pale with an ancient terror. "I'd hoped we'd sealed it permanently when we split. Apparently not."
