There was no sound on the other side of the portal.
No sky. No forest. No color.
Just wind.
Dry, hissing wind that carried dust across cracked stone and whispered through shattered ruins like a dying breath. Torian stepped out of the light into a land that felt stretched thin—like the skin of the world had been peeled back and left to dry in silence.
The sky was gray and unmoving, split by black streaks like frozen lightning across a canvas of fog. Mountains once tall had crumbled into stumps. Trees—if they could be called that—were petrified silhouettes jutting from the ground like broken teeth.
Skarn emerged behind him, his claws silent on the brittle rock. His wings folded back quickly, instinctively, as if he could feel the wrongness in the air.
⸻
The Air That Wasn't Air
Torian took a breath.
The air burned his lungs—not with heat, but with emptiness. It was thinner than it should have been. Wrong in a way he couldn't explain. He knelt, ran his hand across the ground.
It left black dust on his palm.
Not ash. Not soil.
Dust like… bone.
He stood slowly.
"This isn't home," he said.
"It's not anything."
⸻
They walked in silence.
The ground beneath them cracked with each step. In the distance, jagged cliffs rose from a gray ocean—if it was even water. The tide did not move. Nothing shimmered. Just stillness.
A ruin stood ahead—arches made of stone and time, broken and leaning like ribs of a long-dead beast. Beyond it, something shimmered. A reflection in a pool.
Torian stepped toward it.
Then stopped.
⸻
Flickers of Death
There, in the mirror of still water, stood a body.
His own.
Burned.
Broken.
Lying in the exact position he now stood.
Eyes open.
Chest torn.
One hand outstretched, fingers curled toward a sword lying just beyond reach.
Torian stepped back, breath catching in his throat.
The image didn't follow.
It just lingered.
Then rippled—
And vanished.
⸻
"What is this?" he whispered. "What did we step into?"
Behind him, Skarn growled low.
Not at the water.
At the air.
Something had changed.
The wind had stopped.
And in its absence came something colder.
Something aware.
⸻
The Collapse of Time
Torian felt it then—not in the flame, not in the spiral, but in the marrow of his bones.
Time was wrong here.
Not slowed.
Not broken.
Collapsed.
He could feel every step he had ever taken… and would ever take… brushing against this place. Like all versions of himself were being pulled toward the same ruin. The portal had not brought him home.
It had brought him to a loop.
Where everything failed.
Where everything ended.
Where he died—again and again.
⸻
Skarn turned sharply toward the cliffs.
He tensed.
Then released a guttural growl—a deep warning.
Torian followed his gaze.
Shapes were rising from the gray tide.
Drifting across the broken shore.
Dozens of them.
White eyes glowing through black mist.
Not creatures.
Not people.
Not even beasts.
Hunters.
They didn't walk.
They glided—low across the broken shore, as if their feet had forgotten how to touch ground. Tall and thin, their forms were silhouettes of what might once have been human. Black, rippling skin flowed like smoke over brittle bones. White eyes shined through the fog. Their arms were long, hanging past their knees, fingers sharp and curled inward like talons.
And they made no sound.
Not when they moved.
Not when they breathed.
Not even when they attacked.
⸻
The first hunter lunged.
Skarn didn't wait. With a thunderous beat of his wings, he launched forward, colliding with the creature mid-leap. Claws sank into mist-flesh. Bone cracked. The hunter hissed—not a voice, not a scream, just a sound like paper tearing underwater.
Torian charged after, his spiral flaring faintly.
But when he raised his hand, the flame inside him flickered—
Then failed.
Only smoke.
His fire refused to obey.
The spiral was still there, pulsing weakly, but this world was fighting it—like a body rejecting an organ it didn't recognize.
"Fine," he growled.
"Then I'll fight the old way."
⸻
Across the Shattered Islands
The ground beneath them shattered as they ran. The broken land split into drifting platforms of stone that floated slowly across the gray tide. Torian leapt from one to another, dodging strikes and grappling with enemies that weighed nothing but struck like iron.
Skarn circled overhead, wings slicing the wind, slamming down into clusters of hunters and tearing them apart. But for every two they destroyed, three more rose from the water, drawn by the Spiral flame embedded in Torian's chest.
"They're feeding on it," he realized.
"They want me."
They weren't after the world.
They weren't even after Skarn.
They were after him.
The Spiral was calling to something.
And these things were answering.
⸻
Torian ducked beneath a swipe of black claws and drove his elbow into the hunter's ribcage. It folded inward like wet cloth. He followed with a brutal knee that launched the thing into the fog. No flame. No magic.
Just pain.
He landed on a slanted rock platform, just as Skarn dropped beside him.
They were surrounded.
Dozens of hunters circled the stone island, gliding forward, eyes glowing brighter now.
But they weren't attacking.
They were waiting.
As if something stronger were coming.
⸻
The Mirage
In the distance—across the floating archipelago of ruined earth—a figure stood still.
Not a hunter.
Not human.
Torian squinted.
And felt his knees buckle.
It was him.
But older.
Ravaged.
Burned down to the bones, but still standing, a spiral hollowed out in his chest like a wound that never healed.
The older Torian looked at him.
And shook his head.
Just once.
A flicker of regret.
Then vanished.
The hunters screamed—their first sound—and charged.
They fought until their bodies could give no more.
Torian's fists were bruised and bloodied. His knuckles split open. The bark-like veins that once pulsed with flame now burned cold. His spiral flared dimly, as if barely clinging to existence. Skarn panted, his fur streaked with black mist and shallow wounds, his crystal-bone wings chipped at the edges from glancing strikes.
But they were alive.
Surrounded by the ash-covered remains of creatures that had no names.
The last hunter fell silently, evaporating into dust with a hiss.
Silence returned.
But this silence was different.
It wasn't still.
It was waiting.
⸻
Beneath the World
The ground beneath Torian shifted again—not from impact, but from disruption.
He dropped to one knee, clutching his chest as a surge of pain erupted from the spiral etched into him. Not physical pain—temporal pain. Time moved wrong inside him. He could feel echoes brushing against his skin. Could hear his own voice whispering from events that hadn't happened yet.
Visions flashed before his eyes:
• Skarn, screaming.
• A sword made of starlight, shattering in his hand.
• The purple forest burning, melting like wax.
• And himself—dead again, this time impaled on a spike of black glass beneath a bleeding moon.
He gritted his teeth.
"Why are you showing me this?" he whispered.
The spiral responded.
Not with images this time.
With understanding.
⸻
This was not the future.
It was every future.
Collapsing into one another.
Overlapping.
Feeding.
Failing.
The portal they stepped through hadn't led them back to their world.
It hadn't even led to another.
It had dropped them into the wound between realities.
A dying junction.
Where every timeline where Torian had failed was bleeding into the next.
A place where Spiral-bearers were drawn.
And devoured.
⸻
The Burden Realized
He stood.
Skarn limped beside him, growling low as mist curled up around their feet once again.
But there were no more enemies.
Only echoes.
Flickers of the world trying to exist and failing to take shape.
Torian turned in a slow circle.
Mountains shifted.
Ruins blurred.
The cliffs reformed and broke apart again.
"We're not getting home," he said, voice cold.
"Not until we fix this."
Skarn's eyes narrowed.
Not in confusion.
In agreement.
The flame inside Torian pulsed once more.
Weaker now—but still there.
It didn't burn for survival anymore.
It burned for correction.
⸻
He wasn't just trying to get back.
He wasn't even running from this place.
He was here to stop it.
To stop the end of all timelines.
⸻
He raised his eyes toward the shifting sky.
"Let's find the source."
Skarn spread his wings.
And together, they took off—
Into the broken light.