The Shatterling lunged, and time dilated into crystalline fragments.
Invia saw his death in exquisite detail—the trajectory of claws that would open his throat, the angle that would spray his blood across his mother's face, the way his body would crumple like the Harmonics he'd watched die earlier. The math was perfect, inevitable.
But inevitability was just another word for the absence of choice.
He dove left, not away but toward the creature, inside the arc of its claws. A desperate, stupid choice that bought him half a second as the beast's momentum carried it past. His shoulder clipped the overturned table, sending a cascade of glass shards across the floor.
The Shatterling recovered with inhuman grace, multiple limbs compensating for angles that would cripple anything designed by evolution rather than entropy. Its luminous eyes tracked him with patient malice—it had time, after all. He didn't.
Invia's hand found a shard of glass, long and wickedly sharp. Blood welled immediately as it bit into his palm, but pain was just information, and he had more pressing concerns. The makeshift weapon was pathetic against a creature that shrugged off bullets, but it was his choice to wield it.
"Mom, stay down!" The words came out steadier than he felt.
The Shatterling circled, learning. These lowest Entropy beasts were barely more than appetite given form, but even appetite could be cunning when it needed to be. It feinted left, testing his reactions.
He didn't take the bait. Three years of watching Harmonics die had taught him that lesson—never react to the first movement. Wait for the commitment. Wait for the choice.
When it came, it was almost too fast to follow. The creature flowed across the debris-strewn floor like liquid shadow, claws extended in a killing spread. Invia threw himself backward, felt talons whisper past his chest, close enough to part the fabric of his shirt.
His back hit the wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. The Shatterling pressed its advantage, lunging again before he could recover. This time he had nowhere to go.
Choose.
He dropped straight down, glass shard held high. The creature's momentum carried it over him, claws scraping sparks from the wall where his head had been. He drove the shard up with both hands, found something that might have been a joint, and twisted.
Blue ichor sprayed, hissing where it touched his skin. The Shatterling shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and backhanded him across the room.
The world went white. He hit something hard, bounced, and came to rest in a puddle of his own blood. His left arm hung wrong, broken somewhere between shoulder and elbow. Fire traced paths down his back where claws had found flesh despite his dodge.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Rose calling his name. The fear in her voice cut through the pain, gave him something to focus on besides the very reasonable desire to just lie there and bleed.
The Shatterling wasn't done. One of its eyes had gone dark, leaking luminescent fluid, and its movements were less fluid now, favoring one side. But wounded animals were the most dangerous, and this was no animal—it was hunger given form and set loose in the world.
Invia pushed himself up with his good arm, the glass shard still somehow in his grip. The world tilted alarmingly, but he'd made his choice. He'd stepped onto the stage. Now he had to play his part to the end.
"Come on then," he rasped, blood in his mouth making the words thick. "Let's finish this."
The creature obliged. It came at him in a rush of too many limbs and luminous eyes, wounded but still lethal. He had one chance, one moment to make his choice matter.
He waited. Waited as death approached. Waited until he could smell the copper-ozone scent of Entropy made flesh. Then he moved—not away, but forward, inside its reach again, driving the shard deep into what might have been its throat.
Claws found his back, drew lines of agony from shoulder to hip. But he'd found something vital. Blue ichor gushed over his hands, his arms, his face. The Shatterling's shriek cut off mid-note.
They fell together, predator and prey locked in a final embrace. The creature's weight drove him to the floor, claws still scrabbling for purchase even as its form began to dissolve. He twisted the shard deeper, using his body weight to drive it home.
The Shatterling shuddered and went still. But not dead—not yet. These things clung to existence with a tenacity that defied reason. Even blind, even dying, it oriented on the sound of Rose's terrified breathing.
No.
Invia tried to move, but his body had reached its limits. He watched in horror as the creature gathered itself for one last spring, one final act of spite against a world that dared to resist entropy.
"Mom!"
Time stopped.
Not slowed—stopped. The Shatterling hung frozen mid-leap, claws extended toward Rose's throat. Dust motes hung like stars in the light from the broken window. Even the flames consuming the city beyond seemed painted on the night.
In that impossible stillness, Invia felt something fundamental crack inside him. The craving that had haunted him for nineteen years suddenly sharpened into focus, like a lens finally finding its focal length.
He wasn't powerless. He had never been powerless. He had simply been looking in all the wrong places, asking all the wrong questions.
What do you choose?
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, his own and not his own. The silver pendant at his throat burned like a star, but beneath that heat was something else—something vast and terrible and utterly undefined.
His hand moved without conscious thought, tracing an arc through the frozen air. He wasn't following any trained form or remembered technique. He was following something deeper—an instinct that predated language, predated thought, predated the very concept of limitation.
His father's movements echoed in muscle memory, that perfect upward slash he'd witnessed a thousand times. But this wasn't mimicry. This was choice made manifest, will given edge.
Where his hand passed, reality bore a scar.
Time lurched back into motion. The Shatterling hit the impossible line he'd drawn and came apart like a puzzle solved in reverse. No violence to it—simply a division between what was and what wasn't, clean as mathematics.
Both halves hit the floor and dissolved into ash before Rose's scream could finish forming.
Invia knelt there, arm still extended, staring at his empty hand. The pendant cooled against his chest, its brief fire fading to familiar warmth. But something else remained—a terrible certainty that he had just touched something that had always been there, waiting for him to choose it.
"Invia!" Rose was beside him, hands fluttering over his injuries, afraid to touch and cause more pain. "Your arm—oh God, there's so much blood—what did you just—how did you—"
"I don't know." The words came out hollow, automatic. Already, the moment was fading, like trying to hold smoke. All that remained was the phantom sensation of something vast responding to his call, and the terrifying thought that it had been there all along.
He'd wanted choice. He'd gotten it. So why did it feel like he'd just signed a contract he couldn't read?
The city convulsed one final time—the Tyrant's death rattle shaking foundations for miles. Through their shattered wall, he could see the Rift beginning to close, reality stitching itself back together like a wound finally allowed to heal.
"We need to get you to a healer," Rose said, her practical nature asserting itself even through the shock. "Can you stand?"
"I..." He tried to rise, felt the world tilt dangerously. His body had paid the price for his choices—broken arm, shredded back, enough blood loss to make his vision swim. "Maybe not."
She caught him as he swayed, surprising strength in her small frame. "My stubborn boy. Always watching, never asking for help. And now look at you."
There was pride in her voice, mixed with fear. He'd made a choice. Stepped onto the stage. It had nearly killed him, but he'd chosen.
They made it three steps before his knees buckled. The world was going soft around the edges, darkness creeping in from the periphery. But through the growing haze, he saw something impossible.
A figure materialized in their ruined apartment—or had she always been there? Wreathed in blue light that seemed more like morning mist than any Resonance he'd seen. Her presence felt different, like looking at the source code beneath reality's surface.
"Found you," she said, her voice carrying harmonics that made his bones ache. "Took you long enough to become visible, but no matter."
"Who—" Invia tried to ask, but the words dissolved on his tongue. The world was fading fast.
The girl knelt beside him, her fingers ghost-light on his forehead. Where she touched, the pain receded, replaced by a strange floating sensation.
"Poor thing," she said, and he couldn't tell if she meant him or Rose or the whole broken world. "This is just the beginning, you know. The first note in a symphony no one asked to hear. But you—you're the one who gets to choose the key."
Her sad smile held too much knowledge for her apparent age. "Be brave," she whispered, her voice layering with itself until it sounded like a chorus. "Be curious. Be free. The pieces are scattered across two worlds, but you're the only one who can choose how they fit together."
"What pieces?" he managed to croak. "What are you talking about?"
"The ones that were paid for in blood and madness and love." Her form was already fading, becoming translucent. "Three years late to the dance, but perhaps that's what was needed. Perhaps you needed to choose it yourself, without anyone forcing your hand."
The world tilted. Colors bled together like watercolors in rain.
"Good luck," she said, and then there was nothing but the long fall into somewhere else.
Thousands of miles away, atop a mountain where winter reigned eternal, Renald stood against the dark.
The Rift before him dwarfed anything the cities had seen—a wound in the world that bled nightmares. From its depths rose something that made Tyrants look like shadows of fear. The kind of thing that erased civilizations by existing.
It should have been winning. By every metric of power, the man before him should have been a paste.
Instead, the creature knelt in terror. One of its continental arms was simply gone, the stump weeping ichor that froze before it hit the ground.
"Impossible," it said in a voice like grinding tectonic plates. "The seal holds. You are diminished. You are wounded. You are less."
Renald just stood, his ordinary blade resting casual in his grip. No lightning wreathed him, no visible Resonance made the air dance. Just a man with a sword, standing in defiance of cosmic horror.
He moved. A single step forward, sword rising in the first position every student learned. Nothing special about it—the kind of cut performed a million times in practice halls across the world. His form was perfect but unadorned, without flourish or waste.
The blade came down.
The being's expression had just enough time to shift from arrogance to recognition to something beyond fear. Then it came apart, not in pieces but in concept, unraveling like a story being untold. The Rift behind it shuddered and began to close, reality reasserting itself with visible relief.
"I am." He replied, his voice calm, his face a mask of stone.
He stood alone in the snow, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction mixed with concern. The seal had cracked, yes, but not broken. The pendant would maintain its deception for now.
But for how long? And what would happen when his son discovered the truth—that his father had chosen his path for him?
"The girl found him," he murmured to the wind. "Three years she waited, patient as stone. I wonder what she told him."
He turned his face toward the distant horizon where his younger son was taking his first steps into a larger world.
"Show them why even chaos fears the undefined. And perhaps... perhaps forgive an old man who thought he could choose your choices for you."
The mountain stood silent witness as he walked away, leaving no footprints in snow that had never known spring. Behind him, the space where the being had died bore a single perfect cut, as if the world itself had been marked by his passage.