Malphas gazed around for a fleeting moment, a flicker of something ancient and sorrowful in his crimson eyes, a memory of a time when this place had been a different kind of prison.
Then he shook his head, the memory dissolving like smoke, and disappeared.
When he reappeared, he had crossed countless, impossible distances. He stood in the void of the Transcendent Origin Folds, an unknown number of light-years away from the decimated golden jewel of Aeternitas Concordia.
From here, the devastation was a distant, silent scar on the fabric of existence. He could see the Tears, the gaping, necrotic wounds in reality, and the brilliant, frantic lights of the Living Existences converging around them like antibodies rushing to a mortal wound.
His gaze swept over the battlefield, his perception a scalpel that dissected the chaos.
