The change was too sudden, catching both Seraphine and the three Abyssal Gods off guard as they found themselves frozen in place, same as the rest of the dimension.
Even the external influence of the Abyss, which had been trying to breach this dimension, was forced to stop, the force that had just appeared was too powerful for a few simple blows to disperse it.
Lirien and Selena too, who had watched with troubled eyes as this place became more and more of a catastrophe by the second, found themselves frozen.
The sudden shift in the situation had already terrified them enough, but now finding themselves inexplicably paralyzed made everything even more unsettling.
They felt their movements go still in an instant, their thoughts beginning to slow as well, while a darkness at the edges of their vision grew more and more present.
It wasn’t reality that was going dark, it was their consciousness. They were losing their senses.
At that exact moment, both of them felt an unfamiliar grip, something non-physical, more like the fabric of space itself had decided to pull them in, something very similar to what they’d experienced when they were first thrown into this place.
Their vision dimmed further and further, and as it did, they had just enough time to watch reality in front of them blend together in a strange way, their bodies suddenly falling as though the floor beneath their feet had simply ceased to exist.
They had been pulled out of the dimension.
Such a phenomenon didn’t go unnoticed. The three Abyss Gods perceived the shift in space and understood that someone or something was manipulating the spatiotemporal fabric of this place.
The realization caught them off guard, but what terrified them more was that they had already experienced something like this before, and how could they not, after all, this was exactly what had happened when they first arrived in this world, only to end up, after some time, imprisoned here for an unknown span.
They had only recently been freed, and now it seemed they were about to end up in that same situation all over again, a thought that enraged all three of them.
They tried to move, to unleash part of their power to break free from the spatial grip, but they failed, powerless, just as they had been back then.
While the three of them raged, Seraphine also felt space beginning to shift, but unlike them, she didn’t struggle, if anything, she was caught by surprise as her senses picked up an energy that felt deeply familiar, one she had sensed recently, yet also one she hadn’t felt in what seemed like an eternity.
For some reason her heart began to race, a certain kind of anticipation surfacing in her eyes.
’Could it be...’ a thought crossed her mind.
An absurd one, one she was afraid to even give voice to inside her own head, because doing so would mean risking the disappointment of being wrong. Something she’d rather not have to face, not in this case.
But regardless of what she thought, or of the desperate struggling of the three gods, space continued its work.
It didn’t limit itself to freezing everyone and everything in the dimension, it went further, sending a wave of terror through every living being present, the three Abyssal Gods and Seraphine included.
’Oh no’, it wasn’t clear exactly who thought it. Perhaps it was a single person, perhaps a collective thought, a reaction to what happened in the instant that followed.
CRACK!
A thin but clear sound rang out, tearing through the air like a rip in the very fabric of reality, and what followed was something that would have plunged into utter terror any being capable of perceiving it with full awareness.
Before them, space began to warp.
It wasn’t a slow process. The gray sky, already fractured by the first cracks, split further in an instant, like glass struck by an invisible hammer.
The ground below, what little remained of the devastated forest, rose up in pieces, stones and trunks and dust suspended in midair for a fraction of a second before crumbling into ever finer fragments.
And those fragments, in turn, disintegrated further still, until they became nothing more than particles of floating light, particles that, instead of scattering into nothing, began to move.
All in the same direction. All toward the same point.
A point suspended in the sky, not far from where the three gods and Seraphine remained frozen, prisoners of stopped time.
There, at that exact point, something was being born.
A sphere. Black, a black so absolute it seemed to swallow even the surrounding light rather than reflect it, as if it weren’t so much an object as an absence, a perfectly spherical void carved out of the very fabric of reality.
Around it pulsed a golden halo, but a dark gold, almost scorched, the color of molten metal pushed to the very edge of its limits.
The particles of disintegrated reality kept flowing toward that sphere, caught in its invisible orbit, spiraling around the core tighter and faster, before vanishing inside it without a trace. And as this happened, the area all around kept crumbling further, feeding that silent vortex with more matter, more space, more reality.
At the sight of it, the three Abyss Gods felt their souls tremble.
Because what that sphere represented wasn’t simply a physical phenomenon. It was a concept. The crushing weight of the Laws of Space and Time, fused together, embodied in a single point of pure power.
And it was exactly that, the conceptual pressure, even more than the physical destruction it caused, that terrified the three Abyss Gods the instant they perceived it.
They, who had watched entire civilizations burn. They, who had fed on the terror of countless worlds. Now, for the first time in centuries, they felt something that resembled true fear.
Seraphine, for her part, wasn’t immune to that feeling either. A cold shiver ran down her spine, an echo of ancestral terror that seemed to awaken from some forgotten corner of her soul.
She had a vague idea of what it was, as well as an almost imperceptible sense of who, or what, had caused it.
But she had no time to voice her doubts.
In the very next moment, she felt space itself close in around her, an invisible yet absolute grip. Before she could resist, or even comprehend what was happening, she was torn away.