Denilson didn’t see the ground fall away. One heartbeat he was running toward her, the next, the world was a vortex of inverted sky and crushing gravity, a maw of newborn physics snapping wide to devour him before he could reach Jenna again.The god voice roared, He contaminates the divine. Reality obeyed.The air thickened into chains, slicing into his limbs, dragging him down into an impossible spiral. He hit a surface that wasn’t a surface, a plane of liquid night that clung like tar, swallowing movement, swallowing sound. His lungs seized.He was sinking into, nothing. Nothing alive enough to hate him.Above, Jenna hovered in radiant agony. Her wings flared like halos in ruin. Her shadow stretched long enough to scrape the horizon.He reached for her again, arm trembling through the suffocating void. She reached back, but her fingers jerked away, seized by the gods behind her eyes.Purge him.The vortex tightened, bone crushing force wrapping him like a vice. His ribs cracked. He

He didn’t land. He was caught suspended inside light that writhed like a living cage. Gravity didn’t exist here. Neither did air. The only thing that truly existed was suffering given architecture.Denilson’s boots hovered inches above a surface that refused to finish forming. The ground glimmered like half-built glass. Walls of unbirth arched upward, riblike, pulsating, swallowing and birthing themselves over and over.The air smelled like lightning trying to drown, and at the center of the chamber, she hung. Jenna.Her arms were stretched outward, bound by chains of pure radiance embedded into her wrists. Her feet dangled limp, her hair floating like she was underwater.The light passing through her made her look almost translucent as though the universe was trying to erase her physicality.A star pulsed just behind her sternum, trying to replace her heart. One beat. Too strong for her ribs.Not strong enough to keep her alive. Her eyes fluttered silver bleeding where brown used to

The speakers crackled into nothing. Static swallowed the alarms. All motion in the isolation bay froze the security officers mid draw, Rhaena mid turn everyone suspended in terror but for their racing eyes. Only Denilson could move, or maybe only he dared to.The air changed pressure, compressing around his ears like deep water dragging the room downward. Light bent, a silver gravity curling through the floor tiles. His skin prickled as if new laws were writing themselves under it.A slow distortion spread through the air, a shape walking directly through the metal wall, dissolving matter into spirals of dust that reassembled behind her like contrition.Jenna emerged, Bare feet. Hair floating in a slow, celestial tide. Skin traced with thin silver veining that pulsed faintly, as though stars had rewired her bloodstream.Her pupils were galaxies, contracting, reforming. A cosmic entity, in a fragile human frame. Denilson couldn’t move.Her gaze slid to him, instant recognition. Emotion

Denilson hit the ground so hard that his bones should have shattered. They didn’t. Instead, the impact sent ripples through the floor of the place he’d fallen into as if the ground were made of taut liquid light stretched over endless depth.His palms burned. His breath came jagged. The world above where Jenna had been ripped skyward was gone, sealed by a membrane of roiling energy that refused even the concept of escape.Darkness pressed in, but not emptiness. No this dark was dense. Alive. Watching. Denilson staggered to his feet, He wasn’t alone. A voice slid like oil through his mind Denilson You fall well. He spun, fists clenched.The darkness coalesced into a figure, humanoid only because it remembered what humans looked like. Tall. Limbs too long. Surface shifting like smoke over muscle.Its face, was Denilson’s face. A warped reflection eyes hollow, smile wrong. “Who the hell are you?” Denilson growled.The thing tilted its head, amused. We are what you left behind in the god’

The fog closed around them like a throat. Denilson stood only a few steps away, but the space between them felt like a precipice a place where one wrong heartbeat could shatter the world.Jenna’s wings flickered, unstable. Her pulse hammered like a trapped animal. Everything in her screamed to run toward him, but the abyss inside his gaze whispered:Come closer. Feed us. The hunger behind his eyes was not love it was claiming.She steadied herself, voice tiny but unbreaking: “Denilson, please. Look at me. The real me.”His jaw tightened fear flickering for just a moment. “I am looking,” he said, and his voice cracked on the truth.The wind twisted sharp around them, peeling up grass like blades. Jenna’s divinity flared instinctually, protecting her as the world’s pulse reacted to her fear.Denilson winced, clutching his skull. “Jenna” his voice strained, torn.“Don’t be afraid of me.” She took a half-step forward.“I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered.“I’m afraid of what’s hurting y