"Mom, what's that?" a small boy asked, pointing up at the sky with the kind of innocent curiosity only children seemed to have left to spare.
His mother didn't look up right away, too absorbed in haggling over the price of vegetables to register the question as anything more than background noise. It was only when he kept pointing, insistent, tugging at her sleeve, that she finally glanced up to see what had captured his attention so completely.
Her knees gave out before her mind had even finished processing what she was looking at.
A massive tear split open across the sky, wide enough to swallow half the city beneath its shadow. The inside of it was wrong in a way that defied easy description — black, but not the black of night, threaded through with veins of pulsing purple and sickly red, like something enormous was breathing just behind the fabric of the world. Spatial energy rolled outward from the wound in slow, visible waves, and everything those waves touched simply ceased to hold its shape. Buildings sheared in half as cleanly as if sliced by an invisible blade. People who hadn't managed to run in time vanished beneath collapsing concrete and falling debris, crushed as easily as insects underfoot.
And that, as the ground continued to groan and crack beneath the weight of it all, was only the beginning.
"Danger level of the portal is Level Three," said a man with glasses and deliberately spiked hair, his voice clipped, professional, betraying nothing beyond the facts themselves.
"Why did this happen?" The question came from another man across the table, flame-red hair catching the harsh light of the command room, his confusion edging toward something closer to panic. "There was no warning. No spatial disruption readings. Nothing."
"What matters right now," a third voice cut in, sharp and tired, "is the casualties. They're piling up faster than we can track them."
The table fell silent at the next voice — low, even, carrying the kind of authority that didn't need to be raised to be obeyed. "What we do," the man said, "is fight. Call every agency within range. We save this city, or we don't survive explaining why we didn't try."
Chairs scraped back. Orders began moving before the sentence had even fully landed.
Klaus's whole body trembled in sympathy with the walls, the floor beneath him buckling in slow, sickening waves as the earthquake tore through the structure around him.
He tried to stand, tried to make it to the door, and failed twice before his legs cooperated enough to hold him upright. By the time the shaking finally stopped, his stomach had already lost the battle — he doubled over and emptied whatever he'd eaten onto the cracked floor, the world tilting sideways around him in the aftermath.
He forced himself to move anyway, shaky and disoriented, bracing against whatever still stood to keep himself upright.
What greeted him outside his room wasn't a house anymore. It was ruins — broken stone scattered everywhere, support beams jutting out at angles that made no structural sense, dust hanging thick enough to taste.
"Mom?"
Nothing answered. He called again, louder, the word cracking somewhere in the middle as real fear started crowding out the disorientation. He half-stumbled, half-leapt down what remained of the staircase, scanning every broken room for any sign of her.
He found his father first — kneeling on the far side of the collapsed living room, hunched over a slab of shattered rock and concrete, his shoulders shaking in a way Klaus had never once seen from him before.
Klaus's legs gave out entirely the moment he got close enough to see what his father was looking at.
Strands of hair, unmistakably hers, splayed out from beneath the slab, dark and matted with something that hadn't been there that morning.
He didn't remember deciding to fall to his knees. He simply found himself there, staring, waiting for some part of this to resolve into a different, survivable truth. It didn't.
His father's mouth opened, and the sound that came out wasn't a voice Klaus recognized — low, cracked, something that had clearly been pulled apart and reassembled wrong somewhere deep inside him.
"So. They want a fight."
The air around him changed before the sentence had even finished. A pressure built, thick and suffocating, radiating outward from his father's kneeling form in slow, concentrated waves — black, dense, and utterly without mercy, the kind of energy that made the ruined house around them feel like it was holding its breath.
"I'll give it to them."
The words left him flat, almost calm, which somehow made them more terrifying than any scream could have managed. Dust and debris began lifting slightly off the ground around his feet, caught in the pull of something vast finally being allowed off its leash.
Klaus stayed frozen where he knelt, grief and fear tangled together so tightly he couldn't separate one from the other anymore, watching his father's bowed shoulders begin, slowly, to rise.
Whatever his father had been keeping hidden his entire life, it was awake now.
And somewhere above the ruined skyline, the tear in the sky pulsed once, almost as if it had heard him.