Ash drifted from a blood-colored sky.
Lev trudged through the ruins, boots grinding against glass and debris. The horizon shimmered with heat and radiation, buildings sagging into molten silhouettes. Every breath tasted like rust.
He pushed a hand through his dark hair, now streaked faintly with soot, and narrowed violet eyes that glowed faintly against the gray world.
That glow wasn't human...it was what time had done to him. What crossing too many timelines had left behind.
"Still the same hellhole," he muttered.
The wind screamed across the empty street, carrying the faint echoes of something not quite human. Somewhere far off, a beast roared, its cry cracking the air like thunder. But Lev didn't slow. His attention was fixed on the thin fractures of light scattered through the world like threads of glass.
Dimensional cracks.
They pulsed faintly when he neared, reacting to the distortion that lived inside him. Most were useless, unstable flashes of other worlds. He saw fragments: cities still burning, oceans frozen mid-wave, corpses staring into the void. But sometimes… sometimes he heard her.
"Lev…"
He froze. The voice was faint...Talia's. Or something wearing her tone.
He turned slowly, violet light flaring in his eyes as he focused on a sliver of white energy twisting just above the pavement. "Talia? Is that you?"
Silence.
Then static. A whisper too distorted to recognize.
Lev's chest tightened. "Damn it."
He stretched out a hand. The crack hummed in answer, its light trembling. Chaotic Blue energy flickered along his arm. The side effect of being what the others called an anomaly. He'd traveled too far through timelines, torn through too many dimensions. Reality no longer recognized him as belonging anywhere.
When his palm brushed the crack, the world shuddered.
A flood of images tore through him...worlds layered atop one another like shards of a broken mirror.
In one, Talia was bleeding on the battlefield.
In another, she smiled beneath golden sunlight.
And in a third...she was gone completely, replaced by darkness.
Lev's jaw tightened. "You're out there. I can feel it."
The crack pulsed, feeding off his magic. His veins blazed blue beneath his skin; the air warped with heat. He forced the tear wider, reality groaning around him as time bent and folded.
"I have to find you, Talia," he said, voice shaking with effort. "Then we'll go find Kai and the others… like we promised."
The fissure widened, wind shrieking through it. The smell of ozone filled the air. Lev's black hair whipped around his face as his violet eyes burned brighter, reflecting the storm inside him.
A shape appeared beyond the crack—distorted, flickering. A woman's outline, smiling softly.
"Talia…"
But something was wrong. Her eyes were hollow, her voice too light. Like a puppet reading lines it didn't understand.
Lev stepped back. "That's not her."
The smile twisted, stretching too wide. The air on the other side rippled, and a voice that wasn't hers spoke in perfect clarity.
"Stay asleep, anomaly. The scene is perfect without you."
Lev's heart went cold. "So that's your game."
He pressed both hands against the light, power flaring around him like lightning. The ground trembled; the crack shrieked as he poured everything he had into it.
"I'm not letting her rot in your illusion."
Blue-white light swallowed the ruins, bending gravity itself. Dust lifted from the ground as though drawn toward the tear. His body screamed from the strain—timeline pressure clawing at his skin, trying to rip him apart.
"Let's see," he hissed through his teeth, "if the universe can handle one more anomaly."
The world convulsed. The fissure exploded outward in a burst of violet fire.
And as the light engulfed him, the last thing Lev saw was her reflection in the shattering glass—
Talia's eyes snapped open as if she'd finally heard him.
The world began to tremble.
At first, it was subtle—the chandelier above her table swayed gently, and the faint clink of dishes echoed from the kitchen. Then the sound warped, like a record dragging too slow. The air thickened, and the golden light of the house flickered, dimmed, then flared too bright.
Talia gripped the edge of the table, heart pounding.
"What's happening?"
From somewhere in the distance, a faint sound echoed, like glass cracking underwater. A high, constant pitch that set her teeth on edge.
The Grand Director appeared in the doorway, still wearing Adrian's face, but it was… wrong now. The mask peeled slightly at the edges, revealing glimpses of pale porcelain beneath. His smile twitched.
"Something's interfering," he murmured, as if speaking to himself. "No, no, no...she shouldn't be able to hear it."
"Hear what?" Talia demanded.
He turned toward her, that soft, too-perfect concern returning for a heartbeat. "You're breaking the scene again, my dear. If you keep this up, you'll..."
The sound came again.
This time louder. Sharper.
Crack.
The air above the table split open like lightning tearing across the ceiling. Light bled through, a brilliant violet that didn't belong to this world. The illusion shimmered, its edges glitching like corrupted film. The golden walls began to drip color, revealing a gray void beneath.
Talia stumbled back, shielding her eyes.
"Lev…?"
The Grand Director's smile shattered. His voice dropped to a distorted hiss.
"No. Not him. Not here!"
Another crack tore through the air...this one wide enough to reveal a silhouette stepping through blinding light.
Black hair whipped around his face. His violet eyes burned through the haze, cold and wild. Time and space seemed to recoil from him.
"Step away from her," Lev said.
The Grand Director's form convulsed, half-human, half-shadow. The porcelain of his face split further, jagged cracks crawling down his neck. "Anomaly. You don't belong in this scene!"
Lev's lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Then let's end the scene."
He lifted his hand, and violet energy surged from his palm, tearing the floor into fragments. The Director screamed, voice splitting into thousands of overlapping tones. His illusions flickered, thousands of versions of Adrian's face breaking apart at once, dissolving into smoke.
Talia fell to her knees as the walls warped into gray static. The café. The park. The house. Everything she had lived in...all of it was unraveling.
Lev moved faster than she could see. His hand plunged through the Director's chest, and where there should have been flesh, there was only glass and ink spilling outward. The Grand Director's eyes widened, porcelain cracking in long, beautiful fractures.
"You'll destroy her too!" he screamed. "If the stage falls, she falls with it!"
"Then I'll catch her," Lev snarled.
With one final pull, the crackling energy in his arm erupted, violet lightning bursting from his fingertips. The Grand Director's body shattered, breaking into hundreds of mask-like fragments that scattered across the void, each one whispering applause before vanishing into dust.
The world screamed.
And then—silence.
Lev dropped to one knee, breathing hard. The glow in his veins dimmed, leaving faint streaks of blue under his skin. He looked up at her—Talia, trembling in the debris of the collapsing illusion.
Her voice trembled. "Is it really you?"
He met her gaze, the violet light in his eyes softening. "It's me. You were trapped in someone's story."
She glanced around—the ruins of the illusion dissolving into ash. The air shimmered with remnants of gold and shadow. "Then… this world…?"
"It's over," Lev said quietly. "He can't reach you anymore."
Talia's eyes burned with unshed tears. "I heard you. Before everything started to fall apart. I thought I imagined it."
He smiled faintly. "You never imagine me."
The last of the false sunlight flickered out, replaced by the ashen gray of the real world. Smoke and silence wrapped around them. Lev reached out his hand, rough, warm, and real.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go find Kai."
Talia took his hand. For the first time since the illusion began, she felt the solid weight of gravity, the sting of real air, the pulse of her own heartbeat.
Behind them, the shattered pieces of the Grand Director's mask scattered like stars, whispering one last line before fading forever
"The curtain always falls."