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The hyaline—it was doing the work. She’d been right all along.

Not dead, not inert.

She could feel that strange power working around her to bend space while she pulled the thread of time.

Comets arced through the shifting black, their tails bending unnaturally as the distance collapsed. Nebulas unfurled like delicate veils, their vibrant colors spiraling together in a chaotic dance.

But something was wrong.

The streaks of light didn’t just converge—they were dimming. One by one, the stars winked out.

At first, she thought it was a trick of perception, an anomaly in the Weave. But no—this was real. Horribly, terrifyingly real.

Matter accelerated. Orbits distorted. Warping, as if pulled toward some unseen center.

Galaxies stretched and contorted as they spiraled inward.

The fabric of space—it wasn’t folding. It wascollapsing.

All of it, drawn toward a singularity with her at its center.

Taly understood then—Aneirin’s true power. It was never about aether, never about space. Not just bending or breaking the rules of magic.

His power was destruction at the most fundamental level.

They’d seen it with the collar. Seen it with the people he possessed.

They’d seen it with the riftways—one malfunction had erased a mile of stone in every direction.

Not broken. Not displaced.Gone.

He was a force that could swallow reality whole. She could feel it—space unraveling, time fraying, everything she thought immutable, dissolving into his grasp.

A cold horror bloomed within her, an awe at the terrifying scale of him.

“The absence of life isn’t death.” Aneirin’s voice echoed all around. “That’s something my siblings never understood. Death is a transition, a change—a final chapter, but still a chapter, nonetheless.”

Stars continued to blink out of existence.

“What I create is nothing.”

Entire constellations twisted, then shattered.

“Not the end of a story. I am the absence of the fairytale itself.”

A broken world circled the void, its remnants spiraling toward doom.

“I am the darkness that waits patiently at the end of all things. I am both the beginning and the end. I devour everything—light, time, and space. Yet I am never satisfied. For I am the void. My power, my curse, is to unmake, to consume, to be the final breath of worlds and stars.”

Two distant points of light were being drawn closer—two blue planets locked on a collision course. They blurred as they accelerated, stretching the fabric of space and time between them like a fraying thread.

Each second brought them nearer, the distance collapsing in on itself.

“Form the bridge,” Aneirin commanded.

All she needed to do was tie the final knot, and he would be unleashed onto the human world.

He would be unstoppable. She could see it so clearly through the lens of infinite, all-knowing power.