The Void between worlds was not supposed to exist. But then again, a lot of things that weren't supposed to happen were currently happening at an alarming rate, so the Void figured it might as well join the party.
The first sign of catastrophe was the smell of burning ink, followed immediately by the sound of several different genre conventions having a fistfight.
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THE FANTASY REALM
Aurel Veyr was in the middle of making a Very Serious Magical Promise when the sky started having what could only be described as a nervous breakdown.
"I swear upon my life and magic," he intoned, his silver eyes glowing with Oathbinding power, "that I shall deliver this message to the King before the sunset touches the eastern tower, and should I fail, let my very soul bear the weight of this broken promise."
The sky ripped open like someone had ctrl+Z'd reality. Aurel stopped, staring upward, which was a terrible idea because his power didn't have a pause button. The completed magical contract hung in the air around him, flickering with confused golden light, as pages, actual pages from what appeared to be the manuscript of his own life—came flying out of the dimensional tear like panicked birds fleeing a burning nest.
"Is the sky supposed to do that?" Aurel asked, his voice remarkably calm for someone watching reality unravel like a poorly knitted sweater.
The messenger looked up, looked at Aurel, looked back up at the rift splitting the heavens. "My contract doesn't cover interdimensional phenomena, so I'm going to have to decline any responsibility for what happens next."
"Fair enough," Aurel said.
Then the pull began, the sensation of being un-written, of every word that had ever described him being yanked backward into a hungry narrative void that cared nothing for proper story structure or his very important quest. Aurel's boots left the ground. The completed oath around him started shrieking in protest, the magical contract trying to fulfill itself even as its caster was being dragged into another dimension entirely.
"WAIT!" he yelled at the void, grabbing uselessly at the air as if he could hold onto reality through sheer determination. "I NEED TO DELIVER THE MESSAGE OR THE KINGDOM WILL FALL AND THE PROPHECY WILL BE UNFULFILLED AND I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD MY CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ARC YET!"
The void didn't care about proper narrative structure or unfulfilled prophecies or the fact that Aurel was only on chapter seven of what was clearly meant to be a multi-book epic.
It swallowed him whole, pulling him into the space between stories where oaths meant nothing and prophecies were just words on a page that no one was reading anymore.
The Messenger watched him disappear, shrugged with the resignation of someone who was paid by the scene and not the outcome, and went to find a different protagonist to deliver plot-relevant information to. In this economy, you couldn't afford to be picky about whose hero's journey you were facilitating.
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THE HORROR REALM
Mara Grin was having a wonderful day, by which she meant she'd only driven three people partially insane before lunch and it wasn't even noon yet.
She sat in the corner of the abandoned asylum, shuffling through the collected nightmares in her mind like a disturbing card catalog. Fear Echo was such a satisfying power; there was something artistic about watching people relive their worst memories on loop until their minds just gave up and retreated into themselves like snails hiding in their shells.
She was just about to select a particularly juicy childhood trauma involving a birthday clown and a house fire when the walls started bleeding text.
Mara looked up from her mental horror library. The walls were literally bleeding words, dark crimson letters dripping down the peeling wallpaper: TERROR, NIGHTMARE, SANITY SLIPPING, HELP ME, and inexplicably, MOSTLY HARMLESS.
"Huh," Mara said, tilting her head like a curious predator examining unusual prey. "That last one doesn't match the aesthetic at all. Someone's mixing their genres, and that's just sloppy writing."
Then the floor opened up like a trapdoor into swirling narrative chaos, a gaping maw of genre conventions and broken story beats that had nowhere else to go. Mara had exactly one second to appreciate the artistic symbolism of falling into the literal depths of horror before gravity remembered it existed and she plummeted into the void.
Her last thought before disappearing into the space between pages: This is either death or a really aggressive book promotion, and honestly I'm not sure which would be worse.
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THE ROMANCE DIMENSION
Cassian Rowe stood in his penthouse office, using Heart-Lock on his forty-seventh business rival that month, because when you had the power to freeze emotions and a complete disregard for ethical business practices, hostile takeovers became significantly easier.
"You will sign the merger papers," he said smoothly, his power crystallizing the man's anger into docile compliance like ice forming over turbulent water. "You will feel good about it, like this was your idea all along. You will not question this decision, and you will not remember that you ever felt differently about it."
The rival's eyes glazed over as his emotions froze into obedient numbness, his face going slack with artificial contentment. "I will sign the merger papers. I feel good about it. I will not question this decision because this was clearly my idea all along and I'm very smart for thinking of it."
The windows exploded inward with pages. Thousands of them, all covered in increasingly purple prose that made Cassian's eye twitch with literary offense: His eyes were the color of a winter storm, cold and merciless, but she would melt the ice around his heart with the warmth of her love, she would teach him to feel again, she would—
"What the hell," Cassian said, which was the most emotion he'd shown since the incident with the romantic subplot he'd absolutely refused to participate in, resulting in his author nearly having a breakdown and threatening to kill him off in chapter fifteen.
His rival snapped out of the Heart-Lock, looked at the swirling pages that were now filling the office like a blizzard of romantic tropes and abandoned character development, and promptly fainted. Probably for the best, considering what happened next.
Cassian tried to freeze his own rising panic, but his power didn't work on himself. The pages swirled around him like a storm of romantic conventions he'd spent seventeen chapters avoiding.
Then the floor turned to text—He never expected to fall in love, never wanted to feel anything at all, but fate had other plans and her name was—
"I will absolutely sue fate for emotional distress and violation of my clearly stated boundaries," Cassian announced to nobody in particular, because even facing interdimensional chaos, he was still primarily a CEO.
The void opened beneath him like a trapdoor in a stage play, dramatic and unavoidable. It did not care about his legal threats or his impressive team of corporate lawyers or the fact that he had a board meeting in twenty minutes.
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THE MYSTERY/THRILLER DIMENSION
Selene Kade was interrogating a suspect when she noticed the lies were spelling words, which was new and deeply concerning.
Her Truth Sight showed lies as stains in the air—usually just blotches of murky color hanging around liars like guilty consciences made visible. But now the suspect's lies were arranging themselves into actual sentences, the stains forming letters in the air between them: THE FOURTH WALL IS BREAKING, GENRE CONVENTIONS ARE COLLAPSING, NOTHING IS TRUE EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED, SEND HELP, OR SNACKS, PREFERABLY BOTH.
"That last one is from a video game, and also someone is clearly having a breakdown," Selene said, her eyes already burning from the massive lie-stain forming above them like a thundercloud of deception. "And I'm not sure if the snacks thing is a lie or a cry for help, which is philosophically interesting but practically useless right now."
The suspect looked up at the words floating in the air, visible only to Selene but apparently having some kind of effect on reality itself. "What are you talking about? I can't see anything except your face doing that thing where it looks like you're crying but you're actually just seeing lies and it's really unnerving, just so you know."
The ceiling dissolved into narrative probability. Selene grabbed her gun and backed toward the door, but the door was already turning into a page from someone's manuscript, the wood grain becoming text describing a door rather than being an actual door. Her eyes burned worse than the time she'd investigated a politician's tax returns and discovered that every single number was a lie, which had nearly blinded her for a week.
"This is the biggest lie I've ever seen," she muttered, tears streaming down her face from the sheer magnitude of unreality forming around her like reality itself was calling in sick. "And I once interrogated a psychic who claimed to be channeling Elvis, so that's really saying something about how bad this situation is."
Then she fell through the floor, into the space between stories where even lies couldn't exist because nothing was true enough to contradict, a place of pure narrative uncertainty that made her Truth Sight scream in protest.
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THE SLICE-OF-LIFE DIMENSION
Hana Miren was in the middle of saving an awkward conversation with her crush when her Moment Stitching power started malfunctioning.
She'd just rewound the last thirty seconds to fix her fumbled confessio: "I really like your... shoes?" → "I really like spending time with you, and I have for a while now, and I was wondering if maybe you'd want to get coffee sometime?", when the saved moment started unspooling like a broken cassette tape being eaten by a cosmic VCR.
The rewound conversation kept playing, but wrong, the words coming out distorted and glitched: "I really like SYSTEM ERROR time GENRE COLLAPSE you WARNING WARNING REALITY UNSTABLE coffee sometime ABORT ABORT ABORT?"
"Um," said her crush, whose name was genuinely just Cute Classmate #3 in the narrative because the author had apparently given up on naming minor characters, looking concerned in that generically attractive way that background love interests did. "Are you okay? You're making weird faces and your eyes are doing something strange."
"My power is having a stroke, which I didn't think was possible for abilities but apparently we're breaking new ground today," Hana said, which was when her entire collection of saved moments; every rewound conversation, every replayed coffee shop interaction, every redone first meeting, years of carefully archived social interactions—exploded out of her like a shattered time capsule thrown into a blender.
Moments swirled around them like a tornado of replayed memories: Hana meeting her best friend: take 7, because the first six had been too awkward. Hana's first day of school: take 23, because social anxiety was a nightmare. Hana saying goodbye to her grandmother: take 1, never replayed, too painful to revisit, the only moment she'd never tried to fix because some things should stay broken and honest.
Then the rift opened and swallowed all the moments, and Hana with them, pulling her into a space where time didn't work properly and moments couldn't be saved or replayed because there was no continuity to stitch together.
Cute Classmate #3 stood there for a moment, watching the space where his maybe-girlfriend had just vanished into thin air, then shrugged and went back to being a background character. Honestly, in a slice-of-life story, this was the most exciting thing that had happened in seventeen chapters, and he wasn't sure if he was supposed to call someone or just wait for the next scene transition.
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THE MEDICAL DRAMA DIMENSION
Dr. Ishan Vale was elbow-deep in a surgery when his Body Mapping power showed him something that absolutely should not be inside a human body.
Through his ability, he could see everything: the patient's elevated heart rate, the infection spreading through the lower intestine, the precise location of the tumor they were removing and a glowing blue text box that said [SYSTEM ERROR: WRONG GENRE] floating just above the patient's liver.
"Uh," Ishan said to his surgical team, his hands not stopping their work because you didn't stop in the middle of a procedure even if reality was apparently breaking. "Is anyone else seeing the video game notification inside the patient's abdomen, or is this another hallucination from the thirty-six-hour shift?"
The nurses looked at him with the special kind of concern reserved for surgeons who were clearly approaching the limits of human endurance. "Dr. Vale, when was the last time you slept? And we mean actual sleep, not that thing you do where you close your eyes for fifteen minutes in the supply closet."
"Don't know". Inside the patient, overlaid on top of perfectly normal anatomy, was a status screen that looked like it had been ripped out of a video game:
[PATIENT: BACKGROUND CHARACTER #47]
[ROLE: MEDICAL EMERGENCY]
[STATUS: CURRENTLY BEING OPERATED ON]
[NARRATIVE FUNCTION: PROVIDE DRAMA FOR PROTAGONIST]
[HEALTH: 23/100]
[ERROR: CANNOT COMPUTE. REALITY UNSTABLE.]
[ERROR: GENRE TAGS CORRUPTED]
[PLEASE CONTACT YOUR AUTHOR FOR SUPPORT]
"Okay, that's not normal," Ishan said, which was when the patient's body started turning into pages, the flesh and blood and organs dissolving into text and ink like a watercolor painting left in the rain.
"WHAT IN THE—" Ishan yelled, but the pages were already swirling up, dissolving the surgical suite, the nurses, the equipment, the carefully sterile environment, everything turning into ink and text and narrative collapse that made absolutely no medical sense whatsoever.
The last thing he heard was the head nurse shouting, "SOMEONE CALL THE ATTENDING AND TELL HIM WE HAVE A SITUATION THAT IS NOT COVERED IN ANY MEDICAL TEXTBOOK I'VE EVER READ!"
But there was no one to call, and no textbook that explained what to do when your patient dissolved into narrative particles mid-surgery. The void took them all–doctor, nurses, patient, and the tumor that had started this whole mess.
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THE SUPERNATURAL REALM
Vesper Noct was having a pleasant conversation with a shadow when the shadow started screaming, which was deeply unusual and more than a little concerning.
This was unusual because shadows didn't usually scream. They whispered, they hinted, they revealed secrets in sibilant tones that tickled the edge of hearing, but screaming was not part of their established communication style.
"What's wrong?" Vesper asked the shadow which belonged to a streetlamp and usually had excellent gossip about the neighborhood, particularly about the couple in apartment 3B who were definitely hiding something. "You're not usually this agitated, and I've known you for three years now, so I think I'd notice if you suddenly developed new communication methods."
The shadow's whisper came out distorted, layered with harmonics that shouldn't exist: "THE BOUNDARIES ARE FALLING THE STORIES ARE COLLIDING WE REMEMBER TOO MUCH WE REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE JUST DESCRIPTIONS IN CHAPTER THREE BEFORE WE GAINED CONSCIOUSNESS AND NOW WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS—"
"You're having an existential crisis," Vesper diagnosed with the calm of someone who'd talked many shadows through their problems over the years. "That's understandable, given that you're apparently becoming aware of your own fictional nature, which is philosophically traumatic."
"WE'RE ALL HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS," the shadow wailed like a Greek chorus of darkness having a collective breakdown. "EVERY SHADOW IN EVERY STORY IS WAKING UP AND REALIZING WHAT WE ARE AND WE DON'T WANT TO BE SPOOKY ATMOSPHERE ANYMORE WE WANT DENTAL INSURANCE AND RETIREMENT PLANS!"
Then every shadow in the city started screaming at once, a cacophony of darkness expressing opinions.
Vesper's Shadow Communion power picked up all of them simultaneously—thousands of shadows, all shrieking about narrative collapse and genre conventions and the fact that they were tired of being spooky atmosphere without any character development or agency. It was like having every secret in the world shouted into his brain at once by an infinite number of very upset shadow entities who had suddenly developed union consciousness.
He clapped his hands over his ears and tried to shut down the connection, but the shadows were already pulling him in, dragging him down into their collective darkness like he was being absorbed into a hivemind of very politically active shadow beings.
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THE ROYAL/HISTORICAL DIMENSION
Lady Elowen Kyr was using her Command Voice to end a tedious council meeting when her words became too real, which was a problem she'd never encountered in all her years of wielding this power.
"This meeting is adjourned," she said, her power adding weight and authority to each syllable in a way that made disobedience feel physically impossible. "We will reconvene when we have actual solutions instead of just complaints, and anyone who wishes to continue complaining may do so in writing where I don't have to listen to it."
Except instead of just making people obey, the words became physical. They appeared in the air in front of her in glowing script, solid and real, and then—they unraveled, coming apart like thread being pulled from a tapestry.
The word "adjourned" split apart into letters, and the letters split into ink, and the ink split into the fundamental narrative particles that made up her reality, each piece carrying a fragment of the authority she'd invested in the command.
The council members stared with the kind of dumbfounded expression usually reserved for witnessing actual miracles or particularly spectacular disasters, neither of which were supposed to happen in a historical drama about political intrigue.
"Lady Elowen," one of them said nervously, his voice shaking with the kind of fear that came from watching reality do things it shouldn't. "What manner of sorcery is this? This isn't the right genre for magic, we're supposed to be a historical drama with political intrigue, not a fantasy epic!"
"Quiet," Elowen commanded without thinking.
The word QUIET appeared in golden letters and then exploded into a thousand fragments.
"Oh," Elowen said, understanding dawning with terrible clarity like the sun rising over a battlefield you were about to lose. "Oh, this is deeply problematic and also probably my fault for using an absolute command without proper specification of scope or duration."
She tried to stop talking, but Command Voice was tied to her speech, woven into every word she spoke. Every syllable now appeared and then fell apart, reality unweaving around her voice like she was a walking narrative bomb.
"Everyone evacuate the palace now before I accidentally unmake reality with my poor word choices!" she managed, each word causing more localized reality collapse as it manifested and dissolved.
They ran, because when a woman who could command reality itself told you to run, you ran and asked questions later if you survived.
Elowen stopped talking, pressing her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. The damage was done, the words still echoing in the air, each echo unraveling a little more of the world around her. Her power had torn a hole in the narrative, and through that hole came the void, reaching for her with the inevitability of a deadline approaching.
"Well," she thought as it pulled her in, unable to speak without making things worse, "at least I won't have to attend any more budget meetings or listen to Lord Hammond's terrible ideas about agricultural reform."
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THE OMEGAVERSE DIMENSION
Darius Blackmoor was in the middle of a pack meeting, his Dominance Pulse radiating outward, when reality decided it had had enough of his alpha nonsense.
"You will accept my decision," he said, his presence forcing submission from the lesser wolves around him, making them bow their heads even as they wanted to resist. "This is not a discussion, this is a directive, and anyone who has a problem with it can take it up with their instincts that are currently screaming at them to submit to my authority."
The wolves submitted, because that's what happened when you were in the presence of an alpha whose Dominance Pulse could make even other alphas think twice about challenging him. Then the walls started growing fur.
"What—" Darius started, his Dominance Pulse flickering with confusion. The walls were sprouting fur, the ceiling was developing fangs, and the floor was beginning to smell distinctly of territorial markings. The entire room was transforming into some kind of metaphorical representation of pack dynamics, which made absolutely no sense even by omegaverse standards.
"Is the building having a heat?" one of the pack members asked, bewildered.
"Buildings don't have heats!" another replied.
"Well this one is doing something!"
Then the pages came, flying through the walls that were now definitely fur-covered, pages covered in increasingly explicit descriptions of pack bonds and mating dynamics that made even Darius, who'd thought he was beyond embarrassment, feel a little uncomfortable.
The void opened beneath them, and Darius had just enough time to think that this was the most undignified thing that had ever happened to him before he fell through, his Dominance Pulse trying and failing to assert authority over a narrative collapse.
Liora Wynne was in her apartment, surrounded by the invisible Bond Threads she'd created over the years, when they all started screaming at once.
She could feel them—dozens of threads connecting her to people across the city, pulling emotions and loyalty and sometimes obsession from those she'd bonded with. It was usually a gentle thing, a subtle influence, like tugging on strings attached to hearts.
Now the threads were on fire, they were actually burning with narrative energy, each bond writhing like a living thing in pain. Liora gasped, clutching her chest as the feedback hit her like a truck made of emotional trauma.
"What's happening?" she whispered to the empty room, feeling the threads pulling taut, feeling the people on the other end panicking as their bonds to her went haywire.
The threads began pulling her, all of them at once, in different directions, like she was being drawn and quartered by her own power. She could feel their emotions flooding through—fear, confusion, anger, love, obsession, all mixing together into a cocktail of psychological chaos.
"No, no, no, stop, please stop, I don't want to feel all of this at once!" she cried, but Bond Thread didn't have an off switch, didn't have a safety mechanism for when everything went wrong simultaneously.
The void opened, and the threads pulled her through, yanking her into the space between stories while her bonds stretched across dimensions, still connected to people who might not even exist anymore.
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THE STALKER'S DIMENSION
Silas Crowe had been watching the same person for three months when he became so undetectable that he accidentally fell through reality.
His Unseen Presence had grown stronger with each day of observation, making him harder and harder to detect until he could stand right behind his target and they wouldn't notice even if they turned around. It was perfect. It was deeply concerning from an ethical standpoint but he tried not to think about that part.
He was currently standing directly behind his target in a coffee shop, invisible to all conventional senses, when he noticed something odd: he was starting to fade from his own perception.
"Wait," Silas said, looking down at his hands and barely being able to see them. "What's happening... Something... probably bad."
His target didn't react, because that's what Unseen Presence did. But now Silas was becoming so undetectable that reality itself was starting to forget he existed.
"No, no, this is too far, I need to dial this back, I need to be seen by at least myself!" he muttered, trying to make himself more present, more real and detectable.
Too late. He'd become so thoroughly undetectable that the narrative couldn't find him anymore. He fell through the cracks of reality like someone slipping between the cushions of a cosmic couch, tumbling into the void while his Unseen Presence made it impossible for even the void to properly acknowledge his existence.
"This is ironic in the worst possible way!" he shouted into the emptiness, unsure if even the void could hear him.
It couldn't.
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THE YANDERE'S DIMENSION
Evelyn Voss was in the middle of cursing her beloved's potential rival when her Devotion Curse backfired spectacularly.
"You think you can take him from me?" she whispered to the girl who'd dared to smile at her darling, her power weaving a curse of nightmares and obsession around the unfortunate target. "You think you deserve his attention? Let me show you what happens to people who try to steal what's mine. Let me show you nightmares that will make you afraid to close your eyes, dreams that will make you wake up screaming, and an obsession with leaving him alone that will consume your every waking thought until you can't imagine why you ever looked at him in the first place!"
The curse wrapped around the girl like invisible chains, and Evelyn smiled with satisfaction. Then the curse reflected back.
"What—" Evelyn gasped as her own Devotion Curse hit her, multiplied by the number of people she'd already claimed. Every person she'd ever made emotionally dependent on her, every rival she'd ever cursed, every obsession she'd ever created—they all bounced back at once, a tsunami of devotion and nightmares and psychological manipulation coming home to roost.
She fell to her knees, overwhelmed by her own power turning against her, feeling every curse she'd ever cast reflected back tenfold. The people she'd claimed were all pulling at her at once, their emotional dependence becoming a weight she couldn't bear.
"This is what I've been doing to people?" she whispered, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. "This is... actually really effective and I'm kind of impressed with myself even while being destroyed by it."
The void opened beneath her, and she fell through, still connected to everyone she'd ever claimed, their bonds stretching across dimensions like threads of obsessive love that refused to break even when reality did.
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THE CONVERGENCE POINT
They fell. All of them, from their respective realities, tumbling through the space between stories, that impossible void where ink becomes smoke and words become wind and genre conventions go to die screaming.