"Theresa, this reality is crumbling. It's nearing its end. What's your next move?"
The voice slithered out from the shadows, a ghostly whisper reverberating in the emptiness of what used to be my world. Shadows danced around the remnants of a city I once dared to call home—now shattered, hollow, and devoured.
"I'll fix it." My voice quivered under its own weight, a soft murmur that barely reached the abyss. "I just need another chance. One more loop. One more shot."
But my strings—my puppets—had been cut. I could no longer pull the strings from afar. I was lost in a realm where nothing was meant to come back.
The figure—neither deity nor specter—grinned with a cruelty that only those who have transcended life could possess. "Who told you eighteen was your final number?"
My breath hitched. "Then why... why am I here? In this realm of no return?" My eyes fell on the bizarre timepiece embedded in his chest—a grotesque clock, ticking in a chaotic rhythm.
"Issac thought you were gone. He panicked. Rewrote a thread of time to save you—but forgot to bring you back. You'll be reborn there soon enough," he said, licking his lips as if relishing the chaos. "But don't expect a happy ending. That would ruin the fun."
The world tilted. My mind spun. He had revealed too much. But it was Issac's oversight—his blunder—that had sealed my fate.
"Why must I endure this? Just to entertain some divine sadist?"
But the darkness swallowed my scream. And then I fell.
When I opened my eyes, I was back. The air was still, suffocating. Reality throbbed like a raw nerve.
"It's been years," the tall man said, a silhouette standing at the edge of the underworld's core. He loomed unnaturally, an elongated shadow against the fading light.
Two men stood beside him, both dressed in sharp suits that made them look like mourners at a funeral for truth. The one on the left had something metallic tucked away in his pocket—small, menacing, and cruel.
"Are you sure this is the right branch?" he asked, his voice cutting through the air like shattered glass.
"Theresa Illinois is here. The script is with her," the man in the suit responded. "But the real question is... where is she?"
"Is she a threat?" the tall man whispered, almost begging.
"She's more than a threat." his grin was all teeth and malice. "She's a soldier in God's forgotten theater. But it's the script we're after. With it, we can become gods across different realities."
I stood frozen, a ghost in my own life, the cursed script gripped tightly in my hands. Its final line haunted me: "The End"—in quotes, like a cruel joke only I could grasp.
God was pulling the strings again. And now they were coming for me. "Well, damn."
I could hear them—two sets of footsteps approaching in eerie silence.
With my blade in hand, I waited. The katana shimmered unnaturally, vibrating with the promise of blood. I could sense their breath hitching at the bottom of the stairs.
The door creaked open.
In one swift motion, I struck. Steel sliced through flesh. A scream gurgled from the man's throat as blood sprayed across the walls in grotesque arcs. I glanced at the script—his name was crossed out. He was gone.
The second man lunged forward, either oblivious or insane. I pulled the blade free—still pristine, untouched by the gore. But the reaction was immediate. Blood erupted like a geyser, splattering my door in arterial red.
So much blood. I sighed.
But something about the second man felt familiar, softer. I hesitated, unsure.
I opened the door.
Issac.
He stood there, a mix of brokenness and beauty. "I remember." His eyes—worn yet resolute. "I killed them all before they could reach you."
I glanced at the script. It was true. So, who had I just impaled?
I turned to look outside and saw the lifeless body. Edward. I crumpled to the ground. The darkness within me surged like a wave of black bile.
"It's okay. I'm here," Issac murmured.
But there was no solace left for me. I had taken my comrade's life. My friend's.
"It's my fault," I breathed. "I never should've pulled you into this. It all spiraled out of control when I said 'Deliver—'"
And then, darkness again. The world twisted, screamed, shattered—and then reformed.
I opened my eyes.
And there they were.
Edward and Issac. Alive. Watching. Waiting.
"I don't understand you," I said.
Edward smiled.
"No one ever does. Not until the script finishes rewriting you.
I let out a slow breath, trying to steady the quiver in my voice. The air felt thick—heavier than it should have been, as if the atmosphere was grieving something it couldn't quite articulate.
"Issac," I whispered, my voice barely above a breath, "I take it Edward thinks we're out of our minds. Or... does he know about the script?"
Issac's eyes sparkled with a disconcerting calm. He nodded slowly, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, though it never quite reached his eyes.
"He knows. Every timeline. Every ending. Every version of you. Of me. Of this." He glanced over at Edward, tilting his head with a mix of reverence and malice. "It's been three years, Theresa Illinois. Isn't it amazing? A world where nothing has happened—"
And then reality shattered his optimism.
Two thunderous explosions shattered the silence like nails ripping through flesh. The walls shook, lights flickered, and the floor groaned beneath us, as if the building itself was in pain.
"Damn you," I spat, shooting him a furious look. "You had to say it."
Issac didn't respond.
He was pointing—his arm stretched out like a child reaching for a nightmare that had stepped out of the shadows and boldly into the light.
Hovering just beyond the fractured seams of the sky was a figure of molten gold, suspended above the collapsing chasm between space and reality. It didn't move like a creature—it seeped into existence, like light refracted through oil.
"I've seen it before," I murmured, my throat parched. "In a dream. No, a memory… folded into the dream. It didn't look exactly like this... but it smiled just the same."
The entity turned slowly in the air, its grin widening as if it had heard me, as if my recognition was the invitation it had been waiting for. I slammed the window shut, but the cold—the knowing—had already seeped in.
"Edward," I said, turning to him, desperately clinging to the last shred of logic I had. "Do you still have your powers?"
He averted his gaze, his face a mask of mystery.
"Yes," he finally replied. "But there's a price to pay."
"There always is," I whispered.
"Manipulating space isn't just about bending the rules of physics," Edward went on, his voice dropping to a hush, as if the golden figure might still be eavesdropping. "You're ripping apart the very fabric of reality. Creating gaps. Awakening the entity that lurks between those gaps. Every time I tap into it, it stirs. It becomes aware. Eventually... it remembers me."
I sank into a chair, my heart racing in my chest. My hands shook as I reached for the script again, but the paper felt warm now—alive, pulsing gently as if it had its own heartbeat.
"It smiled," I murmured again, this time more to myself. "Not because it's coming… but because it's already here."
A low rumble responded to my words.
From the far end of the bunker, a red light flickered to life—one of the old systems, long forgotten. No one had touched it in years. Issac was already moving toward it when the console sputtered back to life.
Smoke spiraled from the wires. Sparks crackled.
And from the charred wreckage, a hand emerged. Pale. Human. Disturbing.
I recoiled. Issac did too. Edward unsheathed a blade made of light and fractured coordinates.
The figure pulled itself from the console like a newborn emerging from the womb—wet, howling, mechanical. Its eyes blazed with a chaotic static, and its mouth opened into a vortex of teeth and radio static.
It pointed directly at me.
"You are the contradiction," it declared in Edward's voice. "You are the incomplete page. The misplaced sentence. The scribble that tore the binding. You must be erased."
"You're not real," I breathed, but even I could hear the doubt in my own voice.
Edward stepped forward, his voice calm and steady. "Theresa, you need to hear me out. This thing—it's not just a result of the script. It's a reader. A malfunctioning one. A system that's gone off the rails trying to grasp who you are. You broke it."
"Then fix it."
"I can't." He gazed at me, his expression tinged with a hint of sorrow. "But maybe you can... if you allow it to finish reading you."
The entity took a step closer.
"You can't escape me."
The voice didn't just speak; it seeped into the air around me, a corrosive wave of thought. "I know your past. Your present. Your future."
It was shifting again.
The figure—no longer confined to a single shape—flickered wildly, a distortion of light and logic. It was like a pixelated echo, corrupted data struggling to manifest a forgotten deity.
It loomed tall, flickering in and out of existence, and spoke with something that wasn't quite a voice—more like a memory trying to scream through a speaker drowning in static.
"I am not Gateborne. Not yet."
There was a strange sorrow in that confession, like envy tainted with obsession.
"I haven't stirred enough chaos to earn that title. I haven't rewritten the rules of reality... like you have."
Its form twitched—no, glitched—as if the very laws of this world couldn't contain it.
"You twist timelines like they're paper. You cheat fate and call it redemption. But trying to escape a fate older and crueler than yourself… it won't save you."
It paused. I could feel it scrutinizing me—though it had no eyes, just a jagged mess of light and static that vaguely resembled a face.
"It will destroy you."
The room darkened as the creature moved closer. The shadows didn't just follow; they were drawn to it, dragged like memories into a void that consumed meaning.
And then, a sudden jolt—a voice buried in its chaos. Hissing, desperate, triumphant.
"There is something you don't know."
I froze. A chill ran through me.
"But I do."
It leaned in, its body crackling with fragmented sounds. A grin—sharp, digital, and hungry—spread across its broken face.
"I. Cannot. Be. Erased."
There was something in the way it said it… something in the way the walls pulsed in response… that made my blood run cold.
This thing—it was aware. It knew about the original timeline, the one I had only glimpsed in dreams. The one I had never shared with anyone. The one I had even tried to push out of my mind.
And now, it had emerged from the forgotten drafts of reality, stitched together from failed loops and unfinished endings. It wasn't meant to be. But then again, neither was I.
It had no name. No true shape.
Just one singular goal:
To outlast the writer.
"Is that enough, Edward?" I asked, my voice shaking a bit. The cold air clung to my skin like ice. He just gave me a casual thumbs-up.
"It's over. For now," he replied. "I'll be back."
When I finally glanced out the window, the sky had darkened—sunset bleeding into night. The creature had turned away, slipping into the shadows, but not before I caught a glimpse of something etched into its back. Words. I couldn't quite make them out. At first, I didn't think much of it…
It never attacked me, which was unsettling in its own right. Was it only active during the day? What was it after?
Then it struck me: this wasn't the same entity from my dream.
That one had been far worse. Monstrous. Its presence had twisted the dream into a waking nightmare. It came and went without reason, like a glitch in the universe. But this new one? It lingered. It watched.
It let me live.
Why?
A sick thought bloomed in my mind: It needs me. It wasn't hunting me—it was circling. Waiting.
"It's trying to mess with fate," I muttered to myself. "If it can do that, maybe… it's trying to become a Gateborne."
"Didn't it have something engraved on its back?" I asked, turning to Issac and Edward.
They exchanged a glance. "Yeah," Issac replied. "I think it did."
A chill wrapped around my spine again. My legs felt weak, and suddenly, I wasn't in my body anymore. I was watching myself from the outside—as if I'd slipped through a mirror.
The world around me faded away. I was floating. Space—silent, endless.
Then a voice, smooth and alien, echoed in my mind. "They said it was impossible to create a being who could defy fate, didn't they?"
Those words weren't mine.
"I conjured reality from thin air. No thoughts. No mind. Just silence, and then… you."
I was frozen. Unable to move or speak. All I could do was listen.
"You were the anomaly. The error that turned into a miracle. I never imagined that divinity could seep into the human world, but here you are—imperfect, bewildered, yet divine."
Then she appeared. Towering, tranquil, and terrifying. Her smile didn't quite reach her eyes.
"I've waited long enough. Now, I will merge with you. And you… will craft the next reality."
Her hands—massive and icy—wrapped around me like I was a mere insect trapped under glass. No matter how much I struggled, I sank deeper into her hold. Then, it struck me.
A surge. A violent, blinding wave of something immense and unfathomable. Power. Not borrowed. Not bestowed. Awakened.
And for the first time, I understood:
This was just the beginning.
I crashed back into reality like a body hitting the pavement. My chest was heaving, and my thoughts were all jumbled. Again? This cycle was driving me insane. Endless resets, endless distortions.
"What the hell is going on now?" I muttered, stumbling backward. My eyes darted around the room—no, not the room. The air. It was all twisted, laced with glowing lines and jittery scribbles that had no right being in a three-dimensional space. They crawled like bugs at the edges of my vision.
"It's called Godsense," a voice whispered—not out loud, but deep inside me. It was feminine, cold, and smug. The goddess. She was like a parasite living in my mind.
I turned to Issac, ready to ask if he could see it too, but her voice cut in before he could respond. "Godsense is a divine birthright. It lets you perceive the threads of space, time, and the hidden structure of reality. With enough control, you can dodge death, twist fate, and reshape the world without anyone noticing. Isn't it beautiful?"
Beautiful? No way. It was terrifying. Those threads felt like arteries—alive, pulsing, and coming apart.
"How much have I… ripped apart?" I asked, even though I already sensed the answer in my gut.
"Most of it," she replied sweetly. "You've unraveled enough space to blur the lines between dimensions. Other realities are bleeding into yours now. Congratulations."
A chill ran through me. Was that what happened when I killed myself? Or when I was crushed—only to be mysteriously fine the next moment? Were those glitches… just tears in the fabric of reality?
"Likely both. Space and time manipulation," she confirmed, reading my thoughts like an open book.
I stood there, dazed, oblivious to the two figures watching me.
"You two are really having a staring contest," the goddess remarked, clearly amused.
I snapped back to reality. Edward and Issac were looking at me like I had sprouted a second head.
"Sorry. Just… lost in my own chaos." I forced a laugh.
"Godsense, huh?"
Issac narrowed his eyes. "Funny you mention that, Theresa. You've never brought it up before."
He stepped in closer. "You've got a strange mind. What the hell is this Godsense?"
My expression went blank. I hesitated for a moment—but the goddess urged, "Tell them."
"It's an ability… to see cracks in time. And future events. It's like foresight but—more intense. More real." I blurted it out too quickly, too honestly.
Issac's grip tightened on my collar. My heart raced.
Then I saw it.
The next five seconds unfolded before me like a script: rage. Misunderstanding. Blood.
"Issac, stop!" I gasped. "I know you love me—but she's just a voice! She's not trying to come between us!"
His eyes darkened. "Weird way to describe someone who's right next to you."
My mouth went dry. I slowly turned to my left.
And there she was.
A woman. Too perfect to be real. Skin like obsidian marble, eyes swirling with starlight and smoke, a halo of threads behind her like a web. The goddess.
"What the hell…" I whispered.
"Is it so strange," she said, tilting her head with a smile, "for a goddess to wear flesh in your little world?"
She was relishing this—every crack, every slip into madness.
"You're manipulating everything," I accused. "Trying to tear us apart."
Before she could respond, Issac collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.
His head hit the tile with a sickening crack. A river of blood pooled beneath him.
"No!" I rushed forward, grabbing his shoulders. "What did you do!?"
"Not me," she said, raising one pale hand. "Him."
I looked up.
Clinging to the ceiling was a grotesque creature—limbs twisted, bones bending in unnatural ways, muscle sliding wetly over itself. Its face was a mass of holes, leaking shadows.
Edward stepped forward.
The creature lunged. So did Edward.
The impact sent blood spraying across my face.
He'd shielded me.
"No… not again…"
He collapsed in my arms. Breathless. Gone.
Another one. Another death weighing on my conscience.
"I'll take it down," I whispered fiercely. "I'll battle it over and over—no matter how many times I fall. No matter how many times I rise again."
"Godsense has recognized your determination," the goddess replied, her tone surprisingly gentle. "It's yours to wield."
The beast lunged once more. I lifted my katana—
It shattered. Completely useless.
I let out a scream. "Can I create a weapon? Something that can slay a god!?"
"Yes. Ritheum. Three seconds. Can you hold out that long?"
"No. Not by myself."
"Lucky for you, I'm here."
She flashed a grin and sprang into action. One moment she was right next to me—the next, she was intercepting the blow with her bare hand. The impact cracked the ground beneath us.
My hands felt like they were on fire.
A sword made of light and chaos materialized in my grip. It hummed with energy.
I swung.
The blade cleaved the creature from its skull to its spine. Guts splattered against the walls—golden, throbbing, alive. From its ruined form, hair began to grow. Divine hair. Regrowth.
Resurrection.
I didn't hesitate. I severed the roots before they could take hold.
"Let's start over," I murmured, blood trickling down my chin. "Let's wipe this thing from existence."
I had no idea how.
But the instant I uttered those words—
The air quivered.
And something ancient began to awaken.