The world as it should never have been.
A wasteland of mirrors. Shattered reflections jut from the earth like gravestones, glinting with moments never lived—futures aborted, loves unspoken, children unborn. Each shard pulses with a heartbeat, weak and erratic. The sky is bruised with colors that ache to be named—an oil-slick veil of violet, black, and rotted gold. And overhead, stretched across the heavens like a corpse strung on wire—
—Salivath.
Its form is no longer distant. No longer sleeping. It is awake. A mass of limbs and eyes and mouths that devour sound, hovering in the folds of space. Its voice is the groaning of tectonic plates. Its presence, a sickness under the skin of reality.
Cecilion staggers back. Zixuan steadies him, her threads curling instinctively, protective. But they both feel it: the truth of what they've released. The Fold was never a cage for them. It was a dam. And now it leaks.
