The corridor was collapsing. Heat rolled through the air, rippling metal, peeling concrete from the walls. The roar of the awakened entity thundered like a storm pressing against their bones. Every flicker of its light ate shadow, devouring space until there was nowhere left to stand.Davis remained calm, He stood as if the chaos was a staged performance for his private amusement, his suit torn but straightened, his hands loose at his sides. His eyes glowed faintly not reflection but illumination, like something inside him had already been claimed.“Do you feel it?” Davis asked softly. His voice did not need volume to carry; it slid into their ears like silk dragged across a blade. “The threshold is widening, The lock is gone, Everything we built was to keep this moment from arriving. And now” He smiled faintly. “Now you’ve accelerated it.”Raymond swayed on his feet, one hand pressed against his ribs. He looked as though gravity itself was trying to crush him, but his eyes burned.“Y

Ayla’s pulse hammered in her ears. She could hardly comprehend the sight before her. Raymond no, something wearing Raymond’s skin stood at the epicenter of the obliterated corridor.His body radiated fire from within, veins etched in molten light, one eye burning like a star while the other flickered with raw humanity. And that voice that terrible, doubled voice. “Choose quickly, Ayla. Before there’s nothing left of me to save.”The words hit harder than the collapsing stone, harder than the blast that had vaporized half the underground chamber. She wanted to deny it, to tell him there was no choice to be made but her gut twisted.She saw it in his trembling, in the strain of his jaw, in the flicker of desperation inside that single human eye. The man was losing, the entity was winning and time was running out.Her mind reeled. If she fought him outright, she could die worse, she could kill him. If she fled, he’d be gone, devoured, erased. And if she tried something reckless, somethin

The ground split open like a wound in the belly of the earth. Ayla stumbled back, coughing through dust and smoke as the fissure widened, glowing with a molten red that seemed deeper than fire, deeper than hell itself.From it poured the shadows hundreds at first, then thousands each molten, formless, alive with hunger. They didn’t walk, they surged, writhing like ink spilled in water, each figure taking shape only to dissolve into flame and ash before reforming again And at the center of it all was Raymond.He was bound in chains of living light, his body wracked by spasms as though every nerve inside him were being torn apart. His furnace glow guttered, sputtered, but refused to extinguish. One human eye fixed on Ayla across the chaos. The look in it was agony, but also plea.“Raymond!” Her throat was raw, every cry drowned beneath the roar of the horde. She shoved debris aside, sprinting across the fractured stone as shadows clawed upward around her.The first of the creatures lash

The explosion had no sound. It was not thunder, not fire, not shrapnel, It was erasure. A ripple that spread through the void like ink spilled into water, swallowing shadow and light alike. Ayla’s body convulsed as the tether detonated, flinging her and Raymond into weightlessness.Her ears rang, her lungs seized, her vision smeared into static. Then silence again She forced her eyes open, the void was gone. In its place stretched something worse.It was a field without end, flat and featureless, as if they stood inside the first sketch of creation lines of chalk and ash bleeding into gray infinity.The air was still, but it pressed against her skin like stone. No sky, no ground, no horizon only endless gray, and hanging in the center of it all, Raymond Or what was left of him.He floated, chains still piercing his body, but the light inside him was no longer tethered to the abyss. It spilled outward, raw, uncontrolled, tearing his flesh open in fissures that glowed like magma. His fu

Ayla ran, Her lungs burned with air that tasted of ash, her boots hammered broken asphalt, and every step felt like it wasn’t enough because behind her came the sound. Not footsteps, Not human. A synchrony of impacts, like one enormous organism moving in perfect rhythm.The furnace-eyed figures pursued, their unity too precise to be real, their arms glowing with the raw heat of ruptured stars. The city around her was unrecognizable.Streets she had walked only months ago were skeletons now collapsed facades, bent steel beams poking skyward like fractured bones. Signs dangled crooked, Traffic lights swung, lifeless. The capital of the United States lay in ruin, and she was running through its corpse.The first blast struck. A shriek of light cut the air, scorching past her shoulder. The building beside her detonated in a storm of shattered glass and fire. The shockwave flung her sideways, skin stinging. She hit the ground, rolled, came up with her throat raw from coughing.Another blas