The First Thread Unravels
The sky cracked.
Not with thunder.
Not with lightning.
But with silence—an unnatural stillness that bent the laws of sound itself. Birds froze mid-flight. Conversations died on tongues. Somewhere on Earth-1912, a child looked up at the sun and saw it blink.
And then the world began to end.
Buildings crumbled—not from explosion, but erasure. As if the code of reality had been deleted line by line. A golden statue of Earth's protector—Superman—stood proud above Metropolis's central plaza. In an instant, it vanished. Not destroyed. Not shattered.
Forgotten.
No one screamed. No one had the chance. Memories collapsed before voices could rise.
---
High above, hovering between the last moments of time and the first moment of oblivion, he watched.
A man.
No—something once called a man.
Hair like molten gold, eyes dim as eclipsed suns, a body neither living nor dead. The Sentry.
Or rather, what remained of him.
The Void had consumed what Robert Reynolds once was. Now, he was becoming something else.
"There is no need for fear," he whispered, though none remained to hear him. "Fear implies hope. And hope... is the first lie."
He stretched out his hand, and with the gesture, a continent faded from existence. Not destroyed. Not transported. Unwritten.
And far beyond the multiverse, in the vast white chambers of the Monitor Realm, alarms that hadn't sounded in eons roared to life.
Golden circuitry sparked. Ancient scripts ignited across the cold marble floor.
A single phrase echoed through the infinite halls:
"Narrative breach detected. Threat level: Unbound."
---
They had prepared for this.
The Monitors—keepers of story and continuity—had foreseen the rise of one who would devour the narrative itself.
And they had built a weapon.
No—a guardian.
A shell of divine armor forged from hyper-story and fueled by the core essence of heroism.
It stood dormant now, bathed in gold, wrapped in metaphysical chains.
A Monitor stepped forward. Tall. Pale. Expressionless.
With a single touch, the locks broke.
The chamber pulsed with life. The armor stirred.
Within the golden husk, a soul returned.
Not just any soul.
Kal-El. Superman.
But not as a man.
Not as a Kryptonian.
As an idea.
His eyes snapped open, glowing with narrative fire.
"A new thread unravels," he said calmly, his voice echoing through eternity. "The story must be saved."
And from that moment on, the multiverse would never be the same.