The air above the Gate screamed. Not a sound born of wind or fire, but a visceral, otherworldly wail that clawed at the edges of sanity. Captain Alastair Reid felt it in his molars first—a vibration that spread through his bones like a tuning fork struck against the spine of the universe. Above the battlefield, the sky split like overripe fruit, bleeding tendrils of black-green energy that twisted into shapes no human eye should comprehend.
"Well," Williams shouted over the din, reloading his rifle with hands steady as a surgeon's, "looks like someone left the dimensional oven on. Smells like burnt cosmos and regret!"
Reid didn't laugh. He couldn't. The Gate's maw yawned wider, vomiting a corona of sickly light that made the undead hordes falter mid-lunge. Even Seraphine's corrupted knights staggered, their necromantic armor sizzling under the Weaver's nascent gaze.
"Whitaker!" Reid barked into his comms. "Status on Excalibur!"
Dr. Eleanor Whitaker crouched behind a shattered menhir, her fingers dancing across the reforged blade as if playing a theremin made of pure dread. "Stabilizing the sword is like trying to lasso a supernova! The ley-lines are—oh god—"
The ground beneath her feet liquified, swallowing a dwarf engineer whole before Reid could shout a warning.
"—are becoming sentient," Whitaker finished, scrambling backward. "The Weaver's not just awakening—it's digesting reality!"
Across the battlefield, Maeve stood like a candle in a hurricane, the Forgotten Flame clutched to her chest. Its light carved a fragile halo around her, pushing back against the Weaver's creeping shadow. But the druidess's arms trembled, her ley-line markings pulsing in time with the Gate's arrhythmic heartbeat.
Let me in, the Weaver crooned, its voice bypassing ears to nestle directly into the brainstem. I'll make you more than a pawn. More than a martyr.
Maeve's lips peeled back in a snarl. "I've had enough gods."
The Flame flared, incinerating a wave of skeletal archers mid-draw. But the effort cost her—blood trickled from her nostrils, blackened by corrupted ley-line residue.
Reid saw it all through his scope: the faltering Flame, Whitaker's desperate tinkering, Seraphine's silhouette atop a mound of rubble, arms raised in triumph.
"Singh!" he called. "Hold the line! Williams—flanking maneuver!"
"Flanking what, exactly?" Williams gestured to the roiling mass of undead, corrupted elementals, and whatever the hell those twelve-legged things with too many teeth were. "The menu says 'apocalypse,' and we're fresh out of napkins!"
Reid didn't answer. He was already moving, Gareth's dagger in one hand and a dwarven fragmentation grenade in the other. The blade—still etched with the dead knight's initials—hummed as it sliced through Seraphine's wards like a scalpel through cobwebs.
"Reckless," Seraphine purred as he reached her, her voice layered with a thousand whispers. "But predictable."
Her sword met his dagger in a shower of emerald sparks. Up close, Reid saw cracks in her armor—fissures leaking a substance too thick to be blood. The Weaver's influence, gnawing at her from within.
"You're dying," Reid spat, ducking a swipe that would've decapitated a lesser man.
"Transcending," she corrected. Her blade morphed mid-swing into a whip of molten chain, scoring a line of fire across his ribs. "The Weaver's gift is… liberating."
Behind them, the Gate convulsed. A tendril of pure void lashed out, vaporizing a Valkyrie transport. Screams echoed—human, Aeltherian, and things that were neither.
Maeve's voice cut through the chaos. "Reid! The Flame—it's not enough!"
He risked a glance. The druidess was knee-deep in quicksand-thick shadow, the Forgotten Flame's light shrinking like a dying star. Whitaker knelt beside her, Excalibur jammed into the earth like a lightning rod, her glasses cracked and smoldering.
"Stabilization at 12%!" Whitaker shouted. "We need—"
The ground erupted. Reid's world became a collage of screams and static as the Gate inhaled.
When his vision cleared, Seraphine stood at the epicenter of a swirling vortex of energy, her laughter harmonizing with the Weaver's drone.
"Behold!" she cried, arms spread as her body began to unravel at the edges. "The dawn of a new—"
The rest was lost as the Gate birthed its nightmare.
The Weaver emerged not as a creature, but as an absence—a silhouette carved from the fabric of reality itself. It stood twelve stories tall, its form flickering between a thousand impossible shapes: a forest of screaming faces, a nest of burning gears, a galaxy compressed into a humanoid outline. The air around it warped, bending light and sanity alike.
"Ah," Williams muttered, staring up at the abomination. "So that's why my therapist said I had existential dread."
Reid's comms crackled. Whitaker's voice was barely audible over the Weaver's drone.
"Captain… the ritual… completed. It's here."
He didn't need the warning. The battlefield told the story. Undead crumbled to ash. Ley-line storms congealed into weeping portals. And Seraphine—
She floated at the Weaver's chest level, her body half-consumed by its shadow.
"Join me, Captain," she crooned, her voice now three octaves too deep. "Or burn with the rest."
Reid hefted Gareth's dagger. The blade glowed faintly, still loyal to the dead knight's cause.
"You first."
The Weaver stirred.