Fractures of Fate
The wound was not physical.
It was foundational.
The punch hadn't shattered Superman's body—it shattered his symbol. His emblem, the House of El's crest, flickered like corrupted data. Reality trembled as hope itself began to unthread from the fabric of existence.
He dropped to one knee, cosmic blood—glowing with the dreams of infinite civilizations—dripping from his chest. Yet his gaze never left Sentry.
Void-Sentry stood still, his silhouette warping as shadowy tendrils whipped behind him like frayed cloth. His voice echoed like a thought spoken through a dying star.
> "I touched the truth inside you, Kal-El. You're not invincible. You're not incorruptible. You're a relic. A lie kept alive by storytellers afraid of the dark."
Superman clenched his fist.
"Then let me be the lie that never dies."
---
The multiverse reeled.
With Superman's conceptual form damaged, timelines began to flicker. Alternate Earths rippled like reflections on cracked glass.
On Earth-22, Kingdom Come Superman clutched his chest and dropped to one knee mid-speech.
On Earth-38, Kara Zor-El collapsed as her memories of her cousin began to fracture.
On Earth Prime, Jon Kent, mid-battle, looked to the sky—tears burning down his face—without knowing why.
The heartbeat of Superman across the multiverse was failing.
And the cosmos felt it.
---
Far beyond, in a realm between realities, a figure stirred.
Golden armor. Twin ravens swirling above his shoulders. Eyes like the edge of time itself.
Rune King Thor.
He opened the Book of Ages with a single hand, flipping past Ragnarok, past the Godbomb, past the War of Realms... until he found a blank page beginning to fill itself with blood-red script.
> "The Sentry has breached the Axis of Story," he muttered. "And the one who guards hope bleeds."
With a clap of thunder that cracked the dome of Valhalla, Thor lifted Mjölnir-Eternal, its handle forged from the spine of Yggdrasil itself.
"Then let this war be godly."
He vanished in a bolt of myth.
---
Elsewhere—beneath the shimmer of a forgotten universe—a man in a blue and red suit stood above a crystalline skyscraper, watching space fold inward.
He was Peter Parker.
But not the one you know.
Cosmic Spider-Man.
The Enigma Force surged within him, sensing the collapse.
> "A force that eats stories?" he muttered. "Yeah... I've got a story or two."
He shot forward through the Multiversal Web.
---
And in a place only whispered about by the maddest sorcerers, a man in half-red, half-gold robes opened his eyes.
> "Strangefate… awakens."
---
Back in the battlefield, Superman struggled to stand.
Every movement cost him stories. Memories. Identity.
He heard Martha's lullaby slip from his mind like a fading dream. He saw Lois's face blur into uncertainty. He felt Jonathan Kent's arms vanish from his childhood.
But even so…
He stood.
Because even dying myths can stand.
And as the darkness surged toward him once more, the sky cracked open behind him.
Thunder.
Lightning.
A web.
And the shimmer of sorcery.
Superman smiled through the blood.
"You're late."
Thor landed with a crash of runes.
Cosmic Spider-Man swung down on threads of pure fate.
Strangefate emerged from shadow and spoke with two voices.
And Void-Sentry, for the first time… tilted his head in curiosity.
> "Three more stories, then? Let's see how they end."