Chapter Nine: The Insane Calamity
(Calamitisâs POV)
The world should not creak.
Stone should break, or hold. It should not hang in the air making little complaining noises like an old gun thatâs forgotten how to fire.
Yet here we are.
I walk across the underside of an old corridorâat least, I think it was a corridor. The walls are gone, the ceiling is a jagged line of nothing, and the floor is now above my head, drifting in lazy pieces. My boots click on whatâs left of a support beam, and each click echoes too long, like sound is getting lost trying to find its way out.
âLeft turn,â I tell no one in particular. âMind theâŚmind theâŚ
âMind the gap,â I decide. That sounds right. Someone said that once. Somewhere with trains. Somewhere that still had directions.
Below meâabove meâaround meâthe void gapes.
Not the good kind.
Not the kind I can reach into and pull out a blade or a bridge or a clever little collapsing singularity to ruin someoneâs week.
This is the older stuff. The before stuff. The kind that looks at my tricks and yawns.
I stare back anyway.
âYouâre welcome,â I tell it, spreading my hands. âI fed you a goddess. You should be grateful.â
The void doesnât answer. It never does.
Voices do.
Coward.
Traitor.
Door.
They hiss along the edges of my thoughts, a thousand dead throats all trying to use my jaw at once. I dig my fingers into my own ribs until I feel bone creak.
âQuiet,â I say. âYou got what you wanted. Sheâs gone. Sheâsââ I gesture helplessly at the wound, at the place where Vorynthra used to sit coiled around this timelineâs spine. âI tore her out. I ripped our strings. I did the thing. You can all shut up now.â
They donât.
They never do.
A fragment of floor floats past, lazily spinning. Once, there were pews on it. I remember that much: a chapel, Riftborne and Luminex both, pretending for one brief, stupid moment that we could share a roof.
Now thereâs just a single, splintered bench glued to the stone by stubbornness and halfâcoded gravity.
I hop onto it as it turns under me, adjusting my weight so I donât spin off into the nothing.
From here, I can see a long way.
Shards of 14AF8 drift in the black like teeth someone forgot to swallow: a broken bridge, an upsideâdown observatory lens, a chunk of city street with lamp posts still standing at dignified angles despite the lack of ground beneath them.
It should hurt more than it does.
Maybe it did, once.
Maybe thatâs why the hole in my chest feelsâŚnumb.
I press a hand there, fingertips scraping over scorched sigils carved into my bone. Overwrite burns. She tried to erase me on the way out. Vorynthra always did hate when her toys bit back.
âNot done yet,â I tell the marks. âNo archive flag for you. Not while Iâm still walking.â
I jump.
The bench drifts on without me. I fall sideways, or up, or some direction that used to have a name, and land on the cracked spine of an old voidâforge.
Once, this place sang.
Once, the engines here chewed matter down to its letters and spat out war machines humming with my favorite flavors of disaster.
Now the forge is quiet. Its mouth gapes open on a coil of raw, disinterested darkness. No response when I reach out. No friendly thrum.
âUnderstandable,â I murmur, patting the cold metal. âEveryoneâs tired. Whole branch is tired. Run too long. Overclocked. Burned the board.â
The voices surge:
They used you.
They wore you.
They threw you away.
I laugh.
It comes out wrongâtoo high, too sharp, like a blade scraping glass.
âWelcome to the revelation, children,â I tell the air. âYes. They used us. Yes. We were doors. Yes, we opened wide when they knocked. Some of us even smiled while they climbed inside.
âAnd?â
No answer.
âToo late to be shocked,â I continue, hopping down from the forge. My boots skid for half a moment on a loose panel before gravity remembers its job. âToo late to act surprised. They told us they loved us. We believed them. Thatâs the joke.â
I turn in a slow circle.
Somewhere around here, there used to be walls. A ceiling. A floor. I remember standing in this space and telling a very small, very serious child not to touch a continuity scrambler.
If you twist that rune, Iâd said, youâll erase the whole room.
I look now.
No room.
Jobâs already done.
âYou beat them to it,â I tell the absence, unsure if Iâm addressing Eclipse, the gods, or myself. âCongratulations.â
I start walking.
I donât pick a direction. There arenât any left.
Every path is just distance between broken things.
Now and then, time hiccups.
I step through a pocket where dust is forever just beginning to fall, and I come out the other side with my armor a little more corroded, my bones a little more etched. Maybe years pass in those stutters. Maybe nothing does. Hard to say.
The only constant is the noise in my head.
I pass the place where the observatory tower used to rise.
You wouldnât know, looking at it now. Itâs just a jagged stump of stone protruding from the edge of the wound, cut off clean where my last explosion sheared through reality.
I know.
My feet remember the weight of those stairs.
My hands remember the height of that dome.
This is getting dangerous, Iâd told Chimera once, standing under a starâmirror that reflected us in a hundred cracked pieces.
All of it, Iâd said. Talking. Not killing you when Iâm supposed to. Letting you heal me. Letting youâŚlook at me like that.
I look up now.
No mirror.
No light.
Just the void, patient and unblinking.
âYouâre late,â I inform it. âThey already took them. You donât even get to eat that part.â
A flicker at the edge of my vision makes me turn.
For a heartbeat, I see two small shapes: one haloed in starâspecks and a faint void ring, the other burning with a stubborn, eclipseâbright core. Tiny hands reaching up. Tiny skulls tilting.
Father, one of them says.
Donât touch that, I answer, reflexively.
Then the image shreds.
Just another echo, spliced from a dozen cycles and stacked wrong. The real ones areâŚ
Gone.
âRan,â I correct myself aloud, because the alternative tastes too much like another godâs Overwrite. âThey ran. Or fell. Orââ
The sentence rips in half in my throat.
The voices pounce on the gap.
You failed them.
You left them.
You killed their god and not the right one.
âOdd priorities,â I mutter, scrubbing a hand over my face. âYouâd think deleting the devourer would earn me a moment of silence.â
I reach the lip of the wound.
Here, the stone ends in a crumbling edge that sheds pebbles into nothing. The pebbles donât fall. They simply stop. One instant they exist; the next, they donât.
I sit down, legs dangling over the brink.
Below me, reality is very carefully not there.
I lean forward until the empty air presses against my sternum.
âDid you enjoy it?â I ask the hole. âAll of it. The experiments. The cycles. The fights you watched on repeat. Did you like the taste of your own avatar when I shoved her down your throat?â
Silence.
Behind my sockets, the code of the branch flickers: flags flipping toward ARCHIVED, then to NULL. Lines of script being crossed out by a hand I cannot reach.
Seraphaelâs hand.
Of course he ran.
He always was tidier.
âHe left you, too,â I tell the wound. âIsnât that funny? All that talk of constellations and maps and chosen lenses. And the second the numbers tell him weâre not worth the ink, heâs gone. Leaves you to rot with me.â
A laugh bubbles up.
It doesnât stop where it should.
It keeps going, fraying at the edges, turning into a thin, high noise that doesnât sound like mine at all.
I slam my teeth together until it cuts off.
The quiet afterward feels like a bruise.
For a long timeâminutes, hours, days, whatever units still applyâI just sit there.
The branch peels away around me.
Somewhere, a chapel finishes collapsing for the hundredth, thousandth, last time. Somewhere else, a ruined battlefield finally lets go of its dust. Somewhere farther out, a child I will never see land drifts down from a broken sky onto a world that does not belong to any of us.
I donât know that part.
I only know this:
Iâm still here.
They are not.
The gods have moved on.
The dead wonât shut up.
And the voidâthis old, patient void that is not mine to commandâwaits.
I lean back from the edge before it can decide itâs done waiting for me.
âNot yet,â I tell it, pushing myself to my feet. My joints creak. My armor flakes. âYou can have the timeline. You can have the ruins. You can even have whatâs left of her, if she ever crawls back through.
âYou donât get me on their schedule.â
I turn away.
Somewhere in the drifting wreckage, a corridor segment floats by, still carrying the imprint of stairs that lead nowhere.
I start walking.
I talk as I goânonsense and memory, threat and apology, questions with no one left to answer them.
The voices follow.
The branch decays.
I keep moving.
Itâs all I know how to do.Â
