Look, I'm going to tell you something that will mess with your head, doors aren't supposed to exist where there's nothing but solid rock. But there Ava was, staring at one anyway, boots grinding against broken stone as she stepped through what should've been impossible.
The universe didn't even have the courtesy to warn her before it fell apart.
One second she's standing on ground that made sense. The next? Floating in some twisted void where the air itself had turned into ribbons of sick purple light, crackling with electricity that made her skin crawl. You know that feeling when you stick your finger in a light socket? Imagine that, but everywhere, all at once, like the atmosphere itself had turned electric and hungry.
Her HUD went absolutely berserk, red errors everywhere, coordinates gone, no idea which way was up or down. Just screaming static from every direction, the kind of white noise that feels like it's drilling holes in your skull. The metallic taste of fear coated her tongue as warning bells that didn't exist rang in her ears.
Then gravity remembered it existed and slammed her back down hard enough to crack marble under her feet. The impact rattled through her bones, a jarring reminder that physics still applied even when everything else had gone insane.
The silence that followed was worse than the chaos. Heavy. Oppressive. Like the whole world was holding its breath, waiting for something terrible to happen. You could practically taste the anticipation in the air bitter, metallic, wrong.
And that's when she heard it this low, pulsing hum coming from underneath her boots. Not mechanical, not quite organic either. Something in between that made her teeth ache. The temple around her was dying, pillars leaning like drunk giants, vines choking everything in sight with the kind of aggressive growth that spoke of unnatural influence. Above, the sky had been ripped open like cheap fabric, violet storm light bleeding through the broken roof onto statues with their faces worn smooth. Blank skulls screaming at nothing, their empty sockets somehow more expressive than any carved features could've been.
The air smelled wrong too ozone and old blood, with an underlying sweetness like flowers left too long in stagnant water. Every breath felt thick, contaminated, as if the atmosphere itself was infected with whatever had been unleashed here.
Ava's fingers twitched near her claws as she moved deeper into this breathing ruin. Because yeah the place was definitely breathing. She could feel it in the subtle shift of air pressure, the way dust motes swirled in patterns that had nothing to do with wind. Watching too, with an intelligence that made her skin crawl. And right at its heart, kneeling at some ancient altar, was her sister.
Niraya looked like hell warmed over. Hair matted with sweat and blood that had dried in crusty streaks, tears of actual scarlet leaking from her eyes like she was some kind of broken faucet. The metallic smell was stronger here, mixed with something that reminded Ava of burning circuits. Her white robes were stained rust-red, fabric torn in places where cybernetic components had burst through skin, and floating around her were these glowing symbols that kept flickering like a bad hologram about to crash.
The sigils pulsed with their own heat, Ava could feel the warmth radiating from them even at a distance, making the air shimmer like summer asphalt. Each symbol seemed to be fighting against itself, code and mysticism clashing in ways that shouldn't have been possible.
"Niraya." The name felt like swallowing glass, sharp and cutting all the way down.
Her sister's head came up, movement jerky like a puppet with tangled strings, and Ava's stomach dropped into her boots. Half of Niraya's face was still the person she'd grown up with—same stubborn jawline, same scar above her left eyebrow from when they were kids and she'd tried to climb the storage units behind their apartment. The other half? Pure void. A wound in reality itself that hurt to look at directly, like staring into a black hole that stared back.
"You're too late," Niraya said, voice scraped raw from chanting things that shouldn't exist. Each word sounded like it was being dragged over gravel, and there was an echo to it that came from somewhere else entirely. "It's already begun."
The altar under her knees started throbbing like a giant heart, each pulse sending vibrations up through the floor and into Ava's bones. Golden chains writhed across the marble, metal heating up until the air above them wavered with thermals. With each pulse, hairline cracks spread through the stone like a spider's web of doom, and the sound they made was like fingernails on a chalkboard magnified a hundred times. The floating symbols convulsed in bright spasms, keeping time with something that was definitely not supposed to have a heartbeat.
Ava's mouth had gone bone dry, saliva thick and gummy with terror. She ignored the muffled screams echoing from the shadows, her squad was probably dead, or worse. The sounds they'd been making before the silence fell had been... wrong. Not quite human anymore. She closed the distance in three quick steps, ice settling in her veins despite the oppressive heat radiating from the altar. "You don't get it. What you're trying to wake up? It's not a god. It's a glitch in reality. If it fully wakes.."
"It never went to sleep," Niraya cut her off, sharp as broken glass. Her remaining eye was bloodshot, pupil dilated so wide it was almost all black. "It's been awake this whole time. We're just fragments in its broken code, copies in a corrupted system running the same failed loop over and over. "This..." she gestured at the chains and runes with a blood-slick hand, fingers trembling from whatever she'd been channeling, "is the exit door."
The floor buckled under Ava's feet with a sound like a gunshot. A chain snapped free, spiraling up in a shower of static that tasted like copper pennies and burnt plastic. Her HUD went haywire again, error messages flooding her vision in angry red text, and for one terrifying moment she saw double...this ruined temple and another version where Niraya lay dead in a pool of her own blood, face frozen in betrayal, eyes wide and accusing.
The overlapping realities made her vision swim, nausea clawing up her throat. Then everything snapped back together like a rubber band, leaving Ava shaking on the edge of everything she thought she knew.
Niraya staggered to her feet, blood pouring from her palms where her cybernetic implants were fighting a losing battle against whatever magic she'd been channeling. The smell of burning flesh mixed with ozone was making Ava's eyes water. Glyphs flickered across her sister's fingers, code rewriting itself in the air like digital cancer, each line of text burning itself into existence before dissolving into sparks. Her hands were a war zone of tech and magic, both sides losing spectacularly, skin splitting where incompatible energies met and clashed.
"I'll burn every version of myself," she said with the kind of cold certainty that made Ava's blood freeze in her veins. "All of them. Every branch, every loop, every possibility, until something finally breaks. Until the system crashes hard enough that something real can crawl out of the wreckage."
Behind her, the altar tore itself apart with a sound like thunder mixed with breaking glass.
What crawled out wasn't divine, it was engineered, built by something that understood neither mercy nor sanity. A God-Engine, all twisted chains and dying starlight, with shards of dead planets embedded in crystal armor that reflected impossible colors. At its center sat one vertical eye, blazing amethyst that burned with cold fire, and when it looked at Ava, she felt it seeing through every layer of reality straight into her soul. The weight of its attention was crushing, like being stared at by a mountain.
It screamed without sound, a crushing wave of gravity that tried to fold her bones inward, and the taste of metal filled her mouth as her teeth threatened to crack under the pressure.
Ava dropped into a crouch, claws exploding from her hands in fractal steel before she even thought about it. Nanotech responding faster than conscious thought, tiny machines flooding her bloodstream with combat stimulants that made everything sharp and bright and immediate.
Then Niraya attacked.
A black glyph tore through the air between them, bending light into impossible shapes that made Ava's brain hurt to process. The symbol carried the smell of burnt electronics and something organic going rotten. Ava moved on pure instinct, slicing through the corruption with surgical precision, feeling the resistance as her claws met whatever passed for substance in the construct. It dissolved into glittering dust and scattered static that tasted like battery acid.
Her claws found their mark.
The impact sent shock waves up her arms as metal met flesh and bone. Niraya spun away, crashing into a pillar as debris rained down like the bones of giants. Blood splattered across broken marble in arterial sprays, and the copper smell was so thick Ava could taste it coating her tongue. Her sister's shoulder was shredded, flesh and metal sparking and twitching as severed connections tried desperately to maintain integrity.
But she got back up, always did, grinning through broken teeth with blood staining her lips crimson.
"Too late," she spat, pink foam bubbling at the corners of her mouth. "Even if you kill me and you know you can't, not really, I made sure I won't die alone."
Another chain shattered with a sound like a church bell cracking. The sky ripped open wider, and through the tear Ava could smell things that shouldn't exist, burnt coffee and hydrogen sulfide, vanilla and charred meat, a nauseating cocktail that made her gag.
Other realities started bleeding through like watercolors running together in the rain;infinite versions of this moment crashing together like broken mirror shards. Ava saw herself dead in one world, throat opened to the bone. Saw Niraya triumphant in another, standing over her corpse with that same bloody grin. Saw entire existences where neither of them had ever been born, where their parents had never met, where their home planet was nothing but radioactive glass.
Each glimpse lasted only a heartbeat, but the sensory overload was staggering; different smells, different textures, different weights of gravity and composition of air. Her body couldn't decide which reality to respond to.
Ava shifted her stance, claws shimmering with deadly intent, fractal patterns spiraling along the edges as her nanotech prepped for the kill. The familiar weight of enhanced bone and muscle felt reassuring after all the chaos, something solid and real she could depend on.
The God-Engine convulsed behind the altar, plates grinding against each other with the sound of tectonic shifts, chains snapping like old bones under pressure. Each movement sent waves of heat and cold washing over them alternately, as if the thing couldn't decide what temperature it wanted to be.
No more talking. No more explanations. The time for words had passed the moment Niraya chose her path.
Just a fight to the death, the kind of brutal simplicity that cut through all the cosmic horror and made things clear again.
Niraya raised her hand, and reality bent around her fingers like glass warping over fire.
Ava surged forward, claws arcing for the kill, their movements twin echoes of the same brutal upbringing, one forged in war, the other in ruin.
Their strikes were about to meet.
Then the God-Engine screamed.
It wasn't sound. It was the voice of collapsing suns, the final breath of stars burning out in distant, forgotten systems. The pressure flattened the air itself. Ava's bones vibrated. The fractured chains snapped outward, curling like the tendrils of something older than physics, older than language.
Both sisters froze mid-air—caught in a lattice of unfolding dimensions, held in the grip of something thinking in terms no living thing should ever translate.
A light rose from the Engine's core. Not golden nor divine.
It burst and the room went white.
For an instant, Ava saw everything. Every version of this fight. Every failure. Every future. Infinite Nirayas, infinite Avas, infinite betrayals colliding in the same heartbeat.
She closed her eyes as the fog outside rushed in, not drifting, but dragged, pulled by some vast, unseen hunger.
The shapes came with it.
The things that had torn her squad apart.
A thin, bitter smile flickered across her lips. Not defiance. Not hope.
Acceptance.
The light consumed everything.
And then—
Nothing.