The world was too small for him now.
After days beneath the auroras, after endless attempts and failures, Elias had carved something that felt like control. He could lift himself at will, hover with stability, even glide through the air without constant collapse. The shockwaves still burst too violently, but they obeyed him enough to carve trenches in the snow, enough to launch boulders from frozen ridges.
He already knew how to fly, but now he learned it.
And with each success came hunger. Not the hunger of the body—his body didn't crave food anymore. It was hunger of the soul, gnawing at him with a single thought, how far can I go?
The North Pole had nothing left to teach him. Just frost and silence.
So he left.
At first, he flew across the world itself, soaring over oceans and mountains. He skimmed above storm clouds, lightning forking beneath him. He raced the jet streams until they were too slow to catch him. He crossed continents in hours, watching the curve of the Earth slip beneath his feet.
But it wasn't enough.
Even at the edge of the sky, with air thinning and blue turning black, he felt the world still clinging to him. Gravity still whispered. The Earth still claimed him as its child.
And Elias wanted to know if he could disobey it.
He rose higher.
Through the stratosphere. Past the point where sound could follow. His ears filled with silence so absolute it felt like drowning. His skin should've frozen, his blood should've boiled, but his body didn't care.
He broke through into the void.
Stars.
Not the gentle pinpricks he remembered from nights on Earth. Out here, they were raw, sharp, infinite. Like blades suspended in black ink. The sheer weight of them crushed his chest, though no air remained to carry the pressure.
For the first time since gaining his power, Elias hesitated.
This was not his realm. No human was meant to stand here,
But he clenched his fists, forcing the dread down.
Defy it.
He pushed forward, his body weightless. Earth shrank beneath him, oceans gleaming like shards of glass.
He wanted to scream—at the vastness, at the emptiness, at himself. But in the void, his voice didn't exist.
That was when he saw it.
A crack.
Not in space—not in the fabric of stars or void. A crack in perception itself.
At first, it looked like a line of distortion, like glass fractured under strain. But as he stared, it pulsed, widened, showing glimpses of… something.
The sight froze him.
He saw oceans that boiled like blood. Mountains made of bone. A sky where the stars moved like watching eyes.
Then the crack closed.
Elias floated there, heart racing even though his body no longer needed to pump blood.
"What… the hell was that?" His voice was nothing, swallowed instantly.
But inside his mind, the question echoed louder than any scream.
When he turned back to Earth, a new terror gripped him.
It wasn't just his imagination.
Because Earth itself looked… different.
Elias descended back through the atmosphere, his landing carving a crater into the snowfields of Greenland. He staggered, not from exhaustion, but from the crushing weight of realization.
He hadn't been spared. He'd been exiled.
And whatever crack he had seen… it wasn't a dream.
It was a reminder. A glimpse. That the erasure wasn't perfect.
That somewhere out there, fragments of the old eternity remained.
Maybe even… her.
He pressed his hand into the snow, gripping it like he could crush the world itself.
"I'll find the fracture again," he whispered, voice shaking with fury and obsession. "I'll tear this fake world open if I have to."
The auroras shimmered faintly on the horizon again, as though mocking his vow.
But Elias didn't care. His resolve was forged in something deeper than hope now.
It was forged in defiance.
The North was silent when he returned.
No animals moved across the ice. No storms whispered overhead. Just stillness, the kind of stillness that suffocates the soul.
Elias sat on the jagged edge of the crater he had carved, his breath steady but his hands trembling. Not from exhaustion—he didn't really tire the same way anymore. It was from thought. From memory. From that impossible vision in the void.
The crack.
That glimpse of another reality, bleeding through where it shouldn't exist.
If that place was real, then so was she.
Sienna.
The name alone scraped against his mind like glass. Every time he let himself think it, he felt the world itself resist, like it didn't want the memory to survive here.
But Elias was stubborn. He carved the name into his thoughts, into his will, refusing to let this "reset" take her away from him.
He stood and raised his hand.
The air bent.
Not shattered, not exploded, not torn apart like before. Bent. Subtle. As though the space around his palm leaned toward his command.
He remembered what he had felt before, hovering above the ice: it wasn't about thinking. It wasn't about calculation.
It was about feeling.
And when he focused on that, atoms obeyed.
He inhaled. The oxygen thinned. The nitrogen separated. His vision blurred from the lack of breath, but the molecules shifted.
For a moment, suspended in front of his hand, was a droplet of something unnatural. Not water. Not liquid oxygen. Something that pulsed between phases, flickering like a heartbeat.
Elias stared at it, sweat forming despite the cold.
This wasn't just manipulation. It wasn't just control.
It was creation.
His knees buckled, and the droplet fell, shattering into nothing as it touched the snow. His body spasmed, every nerve screaming at once. A wave of nausea hit him so violently he collapsed onto his hands, vomiting bile that steamed against the frost.
When he finally lifted his head, his vision doubled. His reflection—faint, distorted—stared back at him in the ice.
But it wasn't quite his reflection.
The eyes were wrong.
Too bright. Too sharp.
Watching him.
And then, he heard something.
A voice.
Not external, not carried by sound. It came from the fracture inside his mind.
"Feel more. Break more. The world bends to you because it was born from you."
Elias staggered back, clutching his skull. "No. No, you're not real. You're just…"
But the reflection smiled when he hadn't.
"You've seen the crack. You know the truth. This world isn't whole. You can make it whole again."
The reflection leaned forward, closer to the ice's surface.
"But only if you destroy what's been written."
Elias smashed his fist into the ice, shattering the reflection into shards. His hand bled, the wound knitting shut in seconds, but his mind didn't heal.
The whisper lingered, curling around his thoughts like smoke.
He wanted to believe it wasn't real. That it was just exhaustion, hallucination.
But deep down, he knew.
The reset hadn't erased everything.
Fragments of himself—the versions that had broken apart—were still here. Watching. Waiting.
And now they were trying to speak.
Night fell again, and the auroras bled across the sky.
Elias stood beneath them, his hand raised, watching the molecules bend and twist like glass threads under his will. He pushed harder this time, not with thought, not with logic, but with raw emotion.
Longing. Rage. Defiance.
The air crystallized, condensing into a sphere of liquid light that pulsed like a heart. He felt his veins burn, his muscles tear, his body screaming in protest. But he held it.
For a moment, he felt infinite.
And then it collapsed, exploding into frost and vapor, sending him tumbling into the snow.
He lay there, chest heaving, every nerve on fire. His body begged him to stop.
But his mind refused.
Because now he knew—
He wasn't just bending atoms.
He was bending reality itself.
And reality had started whispering back.
The snow burned against his skin.
Not cold — burning. Each flake a needle, each gust a thousand tiny blades cutting across his flesh.
But Elias didn't move. He lay there, face buried in the ice, chest heaving as though he'd been torn apart and sewn back together a hundred times in an hour.
He wanted to sleep. To let the exhaustion take him.
But the whisper returned.
"You're close."
He clenched his jaw. "Shut up."
"You're beginning to see it. Feel it. Creation is not thought. Creation is instinct. Creation is need."
His body convulsed, bile rising in his throat, his vision flickering like a dying screen.
And in the flicker, he saw them.
Three shadows.
One smiling like a god. One bleeding like a corpse. One staring like a mirror with no reflection.
All watching.
All waiting.
Elias staggered to his feet. The aurora blazed overhead, a river of light carving through the night sky.
"Enough," he rasped. His voice cracked, but the words carried weight.
He raised his hands, palms open, and felt.
Not thought. Not logic. Not control.
Feeling.
He felt the sky pressing down, the earth grinding beneath, the molecules shifting restlessly, waiting for command. He felt his rage, his grief, his longing for Sienna tearing him apart from the inside.
And he poured it all into the world.
The air bent.
Oxygen screamed. Hydrogen shivered. Atoms twisted and compressed, collapsing into impossible density, straining against the laws that held them apart.
A sphere took form. Not water. Not fire. Not ice.
A sphere of raw existence, pulsing like a second heart in his hand.
The aurora dimmed above it. The snow hissed beneath it.
And Elias realized—
This wasn't just power.
This was the beginning of something the universe itself feared.
His knees gave out. The sphere cracked, splintering into vapor, dissipating into the air like a dream broken too soon.
He collapsed again, blood streaking from his nose, his breath jagged, his vision a blur of green light and black shadow.
The whispers grew louder.
"Feel more. Break more. You are the fracture."
He screamed, his voice tearing into the night. "NO! I'm not the fracture—I'm the FIX!"
The echoes rolled across the ice, swallowed by the endless void of the pole. For a heartbeat, silence returned.
And in that silence, clarity came.
Sienna wasn't gone because she didn't belong.
She was gone because he still hadn't made the world whole enough for her to exist.
Her absence wasn't punishment.
It was a promise.
And he would tear through reality itself to reach it.
Elias wiped the blood from his mouth, forced his trembling body upright, and looked northward—further north, beyond even the pole, beyond the sky, beyond the stars.
The aurora bent like a river of fire, pointing him forward.
For the first time since the reset, he smiled.
A broken smile, but real.
"Alright," he whispered. "If the universe is waiting for me—"
He flexed his hand, molecules sparking faintly at his fingertips, the echo of creation trembling just within reach.
"then I'll burn my way to it."
The night swallowed him as he took flight, auroras spilling across the heavens like a crown of fire.
The world was quiet again.