Kaelen walked.
For the first time in weeks, he didn't feel like he was fleeing. He felt like he was patrolling.
The power of [Denial] hummed in his chest, a cold, quiet battery. It wasn't infinite. He could feel it draining slightly just by maintaining the one-meter radius of stability around him, but the difference was staggering.
Outside his circle, the world was a blur of gray static and trembling matter. Inside, the air was clear. The dust settled on the ground instead of floating endlessly. The purple bruise of the sky looked almost blue through the filter of his Authority.
He was a walking bubble of reality in a world of illusion.
He needed to test the limits.
He followed the cracked remains of a boulevard north, moving away from the shipping depot. The industrial gray gave way to something that had once been green.
He stopped at the edge of a city park.
It wasn't dead. Dead would have been natural. This was wrong.
The grass hadn't withered; it had transmuted. The blades had turned into jagged slivers of gray glass. They didn't bend in the wind; they chimed. A soft, dissonant tinkling sound that set Kaelen's teeth on edge. The trees were frozen in the middle of exploding, their bark peeled back to reveal not wood, but static-filled void.
And in the center of the park stood a fountain.
It was dry, choked with a thick, black sludge that oozed from the cracks in the stone.
The "Rot."
Kaelen stepped onto the grass. Crunch. Crunch. The glass blades shattered under his boots.
He approached the fountain. The smell hit him first—ozone, sulfur, and the coppery tang of old blood. The sludge bubbled slowly, a heavy, viscous motion that defied gravity. It was concentrated entropy. Pure rejection of life.
Kaelen stood at the rim.
He extended his hand.
I am real, he thought, focusing on the hum in his chest. This corruption is an error. This Rot does not belong here.
He pushed his will outward.
[ DENIAL ACTIVATED ]
The blue text flickered in his vision. The radius of his Authority expanded, surging forward like a shockwave.
It hit the fountain.
The reaction was violent.
The black sludge hissed, recoiling as if burned. It didn't boil away; it reverted. The Authority forced the data of the world to reset to a previous state.
The black ooze turned clear. The thick slime thinned into water. The cracks in the stone sealed themselves up, the masonry knitting back together with a grinding sound of stone against stone.
And then, Kaelen heard it.
Not a sound in his ears, but a sound in his blood. A resonance that vibrated through his very bones.
...please...
He froze.
The air inside his circle grew freezing cold. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a second. The world around him—the glass grass, the gray sky, the ruined city—faded into white.
For a split second, Kaelen wasn't standing in a ruin.
He was standing in a golden afternoon.
The park was lush, vibrant green. The air smelled of jasmine and wet earth. He could hear the laughter of children, the bark of a dog, the distant hum of traffic. Life. Overwhelming, noisy, chaotic life.
The fountain was flowing with crystal water, spraying mist into the sunlight.
And sitting on the edge of the fountain was a woman.
She was huge—at least ten feet tall—though she sat hunched over like a weeping child. Her skin shimmered like sunlight hitting the surface of a lake. Her hair was a cascading waterfall that floated in the air behind her. She wore robes woven from river foam and lily petals.
A God.
A minor deity of this park. A spirit of small joys, of afternoon rest, of the water that cooled the city.
But she wasn't looking at the children playing. She wasn't looking at the worshippers who unknowingly tossed coins into her waters.
She was looking at the sky.
Kaelen looked up.
The sky was cracking.
A black line, thin as a hair, was splitting the heavens. It wasn't a storm. It was a tear in the canvas of reality. Through the crack, Kaelen saw nothing. Not space. Not stars. Just a terrifying, absolute absence.
The Goddess was trembling. The water in the fountain turned turbulent, responding to her fear.
"I cannot hold it," she whispered. Her voice shook the ground beneath Kaelen's feet. It sounded like a rushing river. "It is too heavy."
She looked down at her hands.
They were beginning to dissolve. The fingertips were turning into mist, scattering into the wind.
"If I leave, the water dies," she wept. "If I stay, the Void takes the children."
She looked at the people in the park—the mothers pushing strollers, the old men playing chess. They didn't see the crack in the sky. They didn't see their Goddess dying to keep the roof from falling on their heads.
The tear in the sky widened. The silence began to leak through.
The Goddess stood up.
She raised her dissolving hands toward the crack. She expanded, her form turning into a massive pillar of water and light, bracing herself against the falling sky.
"I am sorry," she sobbed. "I am so sorry."
She pushed back against the Void.
And then she screamed.
It was a silent scream. A scream of a soul being unmade. It shattered the windows of the reality around her.
SNAP.
Kaelen gasped, stumbling back.
The golden afternoon vanished. The green park was gone. The smell of jasmine was replaced by the stench of ozone.
He was back in the gray ruin, kneeling on the glass grass, his lungs burning as if he had drowned.
He looked at the fountain.
The sludge was gone. The water was clear, stagnant but clean. The stone was solid.
But on the rim of the fountain, where the woman had been sitting in the vision, there was a mark.
A handprint. Burned into the stone. Deep, desperate, and terrified.
Kaelen stared at it, his heart racing like a trapped bird.
He had thought the Gods left because they were cowards. He thought they fled to save themselves when the Void came. That was the story the silence told.
But that woman... she hadn't fled.
She had held the line. She had turned herself into a pillar to hold up the sky for five more minutes, just so the children could finish their game.
They didn't leave, the realization hit him, heavy as a stone in his gut. They were consumed.
[ SYSTEM NOTICE ]
[ MEMORY FRAGMENT RECOVERED: The Weeping Spring ]
[ ECHO ASSIMILATED ]
[ AUTHORITY EXP +50 ] [ CURRENT STATUS: OBSERVER (LEVEL 1) - 65% ]
Kaelen wiped sweat from his forehead. The power of [Denial] had faded, his reserves drained by the effort of the vision. He felt hollowed out.
He looked at the fountain one last time.
"I saw you," he whispered to the empty air. "I remember."
It was a small thing. A useless gesture in a dead world. But it felt necessary. Witnessing was the only offering he had left to give.
He stood up, steadying himself against the stone rim.
He reached down to fill his empty water bottle with the purified water.
GRIND.
A low, vibrating sound came from the street beyond the park.
Kaelen froze.
He turned slowly.
In the distance, shapes were moving in the gray fog.
They weren't Hollows. Hollows were passive; they stood still and waited for you to give up.
These were aggressive.
They looked like distortions in the air—jagged, spiked shapes of static that scraped against the asphalt. They moved with a jerky, glitching rhythm.
Void Mites. Scavengers of the new order.
And they were turning toward the park.
Kaelen realized his mistake instantly.
By purifying the fountain, by stabilizing the reality, he had created a "Light" in the darkness. In a world of entropy, order was a beacon. It was a signal fire.
And the moths that ate reality were coming to put it out.
The Void hated order. And Kaelen had just shouted into a library.
He checked his Authority reserves.
[ AUTHORITY: 15% ]
He couldn't fight them. Not a pack. Not with his battery this low.
"Mistake," Kaelen whispered to himself.
He capped the bottle. He grabbed his bag.
He didn't run—running triggered the predator instinct in the world—but he walked fast, putting the fountain behind him.
He slipped into the shadows of an alleyway, pressing himself against the brickwork, holding his breath.
He watched.
The creatures reached the park.
There were three of them. They moved like glitching video, snapping from one point to another.
They reached the fountain.
They didn't drink. They attacked.
They threw themselves at the stabilized stone. They clawed at the clear water.
CRASH.
The sound of stone shattering echoed through the silent city.
The creatures tore the fountain apart. They infected the water, vomiting black sludge back into the basin. They destroyed the order he had created, aggressively, hatefully.
They didn't stop until the fountain was a pile of rubble and the water was black again.
Kaelen watched from the darkness, his hand gripping the strap of his bag until his knuckles turned white.
He had the power to fix the world.
But the world would try to kill him for doing it.
He turned away and vanished deeper into the ruins. He needed food. He needed rest. And more than anything, he needed to get stronger before he lit another fire in the dark.
The Goddess had died holding the sky. Kaelen wasn't ready to die for a fountain.
Not yet.