Zawish the Unseen : Spiral of Collapse
The silence was sickening. Not the calm, restful kind, but the kind that comes before something catastrophic—too quiet, like the universe itself was holding its breath.
Zawish stood among the ruins of what had once been a thriving metropolis. Skyscrapers had turned to jagged silhouettes, time-frozen in collapse. Ash drifted upward instead of down. The laws of physics were unraveling, and Vharrk—the Harbinger of Oblivion—was the reason.
Above him, the sky had fractured into layers of time, each one bleeding into the next. Zawish could see a thousand versions of Earth dancing in the atmosphere—some green and full of life, others desolate, broken, or completely erased. Worlds where he had failed. Worlds where he had never been born.
Vharrk stood like a statue among the madness, obsidian mask unreadable, hands calmly clasped behind his back. Around him, the winds of entropy howled, screaming with the voices of forgotten stars.
"I know that look," the being said softly. "It's the look of someone realizing he's too late."
Zawish didn't answer. He was trying to steady his mind. The shifting layers of unreality pressed in on his thoughts like a thousand whispers clawing at his sanity. If he let himself falter now, even for a second, he'd fall into one of those spirals of collapse and never return.
"What do you want, Vharrk?" he growled, fists clenched tight. "What's the point of this? You destroy everything—then what? You just float in the dark until the next universe is born?"
"There will be no next universe," Vharrk replied, as if explaining a basic principle. "Creation is flawed. Every reality, every timeline—it all ends in war, greed, collapse. Entropy is not destruction; it is correction. I am not a villain, Zawish. I am the cure."
"You sound like every genocidal god I've punched through a mountain."
Vharrk turned his head slightly, not offended, but amused. "You mistake me for someone with a body."
Before Zawish could reply, the ground split beneath him. A wave of inverted gravity hurled him into the sky. He twisted mid-air, flames of orange cosmic energy bursting around him, and slammed back into the earth like a meteor.
But there was no rest. Reality flickered.
Suddenly, he was back on his knees in the ruined city, but everything around him was reversed—the air moved backward, sound warped and drained. He gasped. His wounds were healing in reverse. Then, his memories rewound. For a brief moment, Zawish forgot who he was.
Then the loop snapped.
With sheer willpower, Zawish broke the backward pull and roared into the void. "ENOUGH!"
A blast of time-purging fire surged from his chest, wiping the distortion clean. The world reeled as normality tried to return. But Vharrk only tilted his head.
"Still resisting. Good. You'll make this worthwhile."
The sky groaned. Something ancient was descending.
A black tear opened above the city, wide as a continent. From within it crawled a nightmare—a titan forged from the bones of dead time, its skin plated with stars that had never been born. Six crimson eyes blinked in staggered rhythms. In its hand, it carried a weapon that looked like a clock frozen at midnight, each secondhand a blade.
Vharrk raised a hand. "Meet Nytheron, the Chrono-Ward. He exists in one second and a thousand years at once. I pulled him from the Voidless Tombs—where broken time-beasts go to rot."
Zawish looked up, heart pounding. "You're sending a god to fight me?"
"No," said Vharrk, "I'm sending a god to delay you."
Nytheron shrieked.
Zawish barely had time to brace before the titan's weapon crashed down. He raised both arms, catching the impact with a shield of burning energy. The force flattened the ruins around them, sending a shockwave across continents.
Zawish leapt forward and punched Nytheron in the throat, sending black blood spiraling into the sky. The titan responded by shifting form—becoming three versions of itself in different times, all striking at once.
One claw caught Zawish across the back. Another form kicked him into a mountain that hadn't been there seconds ago. He tasted blood and time. But he kept going.
This is just muscle, he reminded himself. Vharrk is the mind. The storm behind the storm.
Nytheron launched a barrage of time-blades, each one screaming with the memories of extinct civilizations. Zawish caught one, flipped over it, and hurled it back—embedding it deep into the creature's core.
"I don't have time to waste on you," he snarled.
With a furious roar, he summoned the Flame of First Breath—a forbidden power born from the moment existence began. The fire swirled into his hands, burning with the voice of the first scream ever heard in the universe.
Zawish drove it into Nytheron's chest.
The titan howled—louder than thunder, louder than birth—and fell backward into the sky. As its body dissolved into fragments of lost timelines, Zawish landed on one knee, breathing hard.
From below, Vharrk clapped slowly.
"Well done," he said. "Truly."
Zawish stood again, his voice hoarse. "You just lost your best distraction."
"No," Vharrk whispered. "Now you're exactly where I want you."
Suddenly, Zawish's entire body froze. Not physically—but existentially. A cold spike tore through him. Memories—his memories—began flickering like dying candles.
The battle with Thragorr… his creation by Lore Zom… even his name—
Gone. Fading.
"What… are you doing?" he gasped.
Vharrk stepped forward, mask gleaming. "I'm not attacking your body. I'm rewriting your origin."
And as darkness closed around him, Zawish realized:
The real battle had never been about fists.
It was about existence itself.