The light swallowed everything.
The chamber.
The portal.
The Reapers.
Even the sound of the collapsing world.
For one impossible moment, there was nothing.
Then—
TICK.
A clock sounded somewhere in the darkness.
TICK.
Rive opened his eyes.
He was standing in the middle of an empty street.
Rain floated motionlessly in the air.
Cars hung above the road, their wheels frozen inches from the ground. A flock of birds remained suspended between two buildings. Even the lightning above the distant skyline had stopped moving.
Rive looked around.
"…Okay."
He raised a hand and waved it in front of his face.
Nothing happened.
"Either I've unlocked an amazing new power…"
He glanced at a raindrop hovering beside his nose.
"…or I've finally broken reality."
A familiar voice answered from behind him.
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Rive spun around.
"Vikram!"
His mentor stood beneath a streetlight, his black coat hanging motionlessly around him.
Rive hurried toward him.
"What happened? Where are we? Where's Lysara? Where are the Reapers? And, most importantly, why does this place look like someone pressed pause on the universe?"
Vikram didn't smile.
That was the first thing Rive noticed.
The second was the faint silver crack running across Vikram's right hand.
"Vikram?"
His mentor looked at the frozen street.
"We're inside the second that never happened."
Rive stared at him.
"…I'm sorry, the what?"
"Your power activated. It interrupted the flow of the In-Between and created a gap between one moment and the next."
"So I stopped time?"
"No."
Vikram turned toward him.
"You erased a second."
Rive waited.
Vikram continued.
"Time didn't stop. For everyone outside this place, that moment simply ceased to exist. The world jumped from what happened before your awakening to what happened after it."
Rive slowly looked at the floating raindrops.
"And this is the missing second?"
"What's left of it."
"Great." Rive nodded. "I've been dead for a while, and somehow I'm still finding new ways to make things worse."
Vikram approached him.
"Listen carefully. Your Tri-Vessel Soul doesn't merely connect three realms. It can interact with the boundaries that separate them."
"The living world, the dead world, and the In-Between."
"Yes. But there's something else."
Vikram's expression became unusually serious.
"Your power can interfere with the rules themselves."
Rive glanced at the frozen cars.
"Can I make the cars fly?"
"No."
"Can I make the cars fly while they're on fire?"
"Rive."
"I'm trying to understand the limits."
"The limit is that you don't understand the power at all."
That shut him up.
For approximately two seconds.
"So… how do we get out?"
Vikram looked at the sky.
"We find the moment you erased."
"And if we don't?"
"Then this second may become permanent."
Rive looked around at the frozen city.
"Permanent as in… we live here?"
Vikram didn't answer.
Rive swallowed.
"I'm beginning to miss the giant hand."