The fabric of everything thinned.
Then, it frayed.
Time collapsed inward. Seconds condensed into singularities, memories folded into themselves like burned photographs curling at the edges. The clock stopped ticking, and the gears behind it melted into slurry.
Light stretched until it vanished. Shadows dissolved. Entire galaxies bled into spirals of colorless decay.
In this, Kivas' signature of existence drifted through the collapse, caught in a current she couldn't sense. Her thoughts floated in half-formed pulses, tangled in the ripples of an unseen tide.
She didn't resist. Her consciousness had been silent for so long it forgot the language of refusal.
Everything was unspooled.
The universe slumped, then rolled. What was once expansion became motion with no precedent—no strong concept existence. It became a momentum that wasn't forward nor backward, as if it churned toward something new.
The stars didn't return to origin. They followed an unknown direction, folding into impossible trajectories.
Molecules gathered. Particles danced again. Life stitched itself together with alien rhythm.
And somewhere amid that spiral, she formed.
Kivas's body returned—first bones, then nerves, then wet red tissue pressing against warm, wrinkled skin. Her lungs shuddered into motion. Her scalp itched as follicles rewove into her skull. Veins flared to life. Her eyes fluttered, but her vision remained steeped in overwhelming black.
She was breathing, though the space around her offered no air. Her fingers twitched. Skin glistened with newborn dew. Every inch of her flesh tingled with unbearable sensitivity, as if pain itself had forgotten how to differentiate from sensation.
She wasn't alone in the spiral.
All around her, things emerged from the unwinding threads—shapes, creatures, remnants of every ecosystem that ever was. Wolves with skin like silver smoke. Crocodiles reborn from ancient bone. Dandelions bloomed in midair and scattered into seeds that spun toward distant coils of living color.
Bugs. Rodents. Predators. Flowers. Reefs of vibrant plankton. Even microorganisms shimmered like stars in fluid constellations. The dead returned, not in defiance of entropy, but as participants in a new law. They spun together, tangled, churning toward something greater.
Kivas drifted between them, carried like sea foam in a galactic whirlpool.
Every being shared the same trajectory. No will. No resistance. Just spiral. A deeper spiral. Endless, blooming, overwhelming.
However, far above the flood of returning forms, the heaven split like wet canvas.
A fracture ran through the empty dark, and from it descended a colossal hand—eight fingers long and slender, carved with lines that shimmered like molten starlight. It reached gently into the core of the spiral and cradled the reemerging All.
The gesture wasn't violent. It was quite deliberate. Reverent. As if the spiral wasn't just seen, but cherished.
That hand belonged to something beyond the scope of dimensions. A figure whose silhouette bent distance, whose height breached the barrier between thought and matter. Its presence pulled concepts apart. Language unraveled in its wake, and even time dared not exist near it.
The entity held the spiral as one might hold a child's breath.
Now, in its palm, every resurgent thing continued to move. No screaming. No chaos. Only the slow, infinite spin.
But nobody could know it, not a single thing could comprehend it outside of those who were informed of its existence, like those of observers from a different dimension, plane of existence.
And in a mere snap, the universe-claiming hand gripped shut, consuming everything in its grasp.
Everything became a mystery.
Until suddenly.
Kivas consciously felt her legs return. Her chest. Her heartbeat.
She landed, kneeling on ground that pulsed like the inner lining of a womb made from star matter. Her breath was shallow. Her muscles spasmed with leftover echoes of annihilation.
She opened her eyes—and saw nothing. Only the idea of distance. Her pupils adjusted to darkness that carried shape, but no definition. Her bones ached with unfamiliar gravity. Her skin sagged, subtly dissolving into soft mist, then congealing again.
Her hair clung to her face, soaked with unspoken sorrow.
"I…"
The word fell out, fragile and hoarse.
Her mind felt bruised. Like she'd been scraped across the underside of reality and forced to remember everything she had forgotten.
A tear welled up—but didn't fall. It evaporated mid-journey, absorbed by the pulsing air.
"I feel… strange."
Her body hunched forward. Her spine groaned under its own weight. Not human. Not whole. Something less, something undefined. A being between forms, unsure if it still had the right to call itself a name.
"But..." Her voice cracked. "Why… does it matter how I feel?"
She gripped the ground—if it could be called that. Her fingers sank slightly into the surface. It pulsed beneath her like a slow drumbeat, steady but unfamiliar. Warmth radiated from it.
She didn't cry.
She didn't scream.
She just sat there, hollowed out, trembling, her heart stumbling with every beat.
Then, the air hissed.
Before her, a seam tore through space. A clean vertical slit, as if the fabric of dimensions had been pinched and pulled apart by unseen claws.
From the opening poured eyes.
They blinked, rotated, dilated. Eyes with no symmetry. Eyes with teeth where pupils should be. Some glowed; some wept; others simply stared with cyclopean stillness.
They peered.
Dozens. Then hundreds.
Each one locked onto her—Kivas, the feeble creature kneeling on the living soil of the reborn spiral.
The pressure of their gaze flattened the world. It was not of weight that one could sense immediately, but that of an intellectual recognition.
As if she'd been tagged. Observed. Chosen.
She flinched. Her limbs barely responded. Her throat went dry.
She wanted to speak. To ask. To beg. But words dissolved into breath before they could take shape.
The eyes remained still.
Behind them—shadows churned. Shapes too vast for perception. She could feel them shifting, shifting, shifting.
The eyes were only windows. The thing behind was still hidden.
Yet somehow, impossibly, it smiled.