The moment Orion touched the First Sprout, light unraveled across the Vault—no longer radiant, but organic, like roots threading through the fabric of space itself. The chamber pulsed, no longer a vault but a seedbed. Reality softened.
And the weave began.
Not woven by them.
Woven through them.
Visions flickered behind their eyes—civilizations that never existed, lives they had not lived, futures not yet born. But now… they might be.
Kael knelt, palm on the ground. "It's rewriting everything."
"No," Lyra said, stepping beside the Sprout. "It's opening everything."
Above them, the ceiling of the Vault peeled back, revealing not sky, but the branching lattice of the multiverse—every strand pulsing with a heartbeat they now felt as their own.
Suddenly, the weave stuttered.
A fracture tore through one strand—and then another.
Something was unraveling them from the outside.
"They're coming," the Sprout said. "The Null-Touched."
The name echoed like a scream underwater.
Black vessels pierced the multiversal lattice, phasing in from a realm without story or soul. Shapes that did not belong—angular, eyeless, unanchored by time. They moved like parasites of narrative, devourers of potential.
"They were sealed away when the Seed first took root," the Sprout whispered. "Now the weave has made them hungry again."
Kael stood, blade gleaming. "Let them come."
Lyra stepped forward. "We need to protect the new strands."
Orion's voice was calm. "We can't fight them the way we did the Hollow. This isn't about destruction. It's about protection. Preservation."
A plan formed in their minds—not from strategy, but from instinct gifted by the Sprout.
They would split.
Kael would hold the convergence breach.
Lyra would burn new boundaries into the lattice to contain the influx.
Orion would enter the Weft—a layer of reality beneath the threads—to anchor the Sprout's influence before the Null-Touched could sever it.
They clasped hands, not as warriors, but as gardeners of something terrifyingly alive.
And then—
They moved.
Kael vanished into a rift lined with fractal fire.
Lyra soared upward, trailing glyphs that shimmered with radiant entropy.
Orion sank into the weave, the Sprout cradled in his arms, descending into the roots of the multiverse.
Above all, the Null-Touched began to feed.
But this time, the multiverse would fight back.