Before the Arcanist's curse could fully escape his lips, the breach tore open. The tear, which had been a single slit in reality, exploded outward in a chaotic shockwave. Following it, in a movement too fast for the eye to track, came the black void that originated from the white-haired figure. It moved like a collapsing wave, consuming light, sound, and even air alike.

"Full Speed! Freddy!" Micah roared, though the sound didn't travel well, muffled by the distortion of the encroaching void.

Freddy along with Yvonne's shadow hawk, sped forward with blurring speed, carrying their four passengers. Finn and Althea clung tightly for dear life to Freddy's body as the ground beneath them became a rushing blur, but even that extraordinary speed seemed like a lazy pace compared to the rate at which the void expanded.

In the span of a second, it swallowed all the Arcanists close to the breach, spread beyond and devoured the trees, the earth, and the very atmosphere rapidly and noiselessly.

Finn pressed tightly to Freddy's body as the wind whipped his skin painfully, but still strained and turned his head to look back at the void. And before his eyes, a terrifyingly perfect circle of destruction extended everywhere the void touched. At this point, Finn was already very familiar with fear, but this time it was different. This was less 'fear' and more of a primal 'certainty' that he was seconds away from being erased. He strained his neck against the biting winds and glanced forward at Micah and Yvonne, who both tried to be stone-faced but yet, their eyes betrayed the deep, uneasy confusion they struggled to hide.

They were pushing their soul masses to their absolute limit, but the black edge of the void continued to gain ground on them relentlessly.

We won't make it, Finn realized with certainty. The thought was chilling, the inevitability of it, it filled Finn with a defiant unwillingness. He realized he didn't want to die. He didn't know where or when, but somewhere, at some point, he had become attached to this world. He had integrated himself beyond just a surface level observer. He still wanted to find out the truth of his arrival, he wanted to find out the truth of himself… and of his very soul…

He desperately wanted to know what his title: The Errant Heretic, meant.

There were still mysteries surrounding arrival into this world and the very nature of his soul… So he wasn't willing to die just yet.

He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, reaching deep into his soul, to the remaining nineteen soul masses whose weight he could feel latched onto him like viruses, laying dormant. They couldn't keep staying silent while he struggled for his life. It was time they paid the dues for their stay.

He was going to call them out without any care for the unknown Soul Debts he would suffer as a backlash from them.

Finn drew in shaky breaths, priming himself to take the dangerous leap.

But just as he was about to begin, just as the chilling, encroaching void should have also overtaken them, it halted, mid-expansion, leaving an impossibly straight, vertical line where existence met non-existence.

The abrupt halt of the void was so shocking that the Caretakers continued their aerial charge for a full minute, covering miles of distance just to be on the safe side before they finally slowed, circling at a spot in the air cautiously on their soul masses.

They watched the black, motionless void hanging in the air like a paused photograph of death. Micah and Yvonne exchanged wide-eyed looks. Now that the danger was static, they could finally analyze it.

The void was exactly just that… a void. It was pure blackness and just silent, devoid of the energy they would expect from a chaos breach. It simply was. From their expressions, the seasoned Ossuarists, experienced in exotic planes and soul mass, entropy-caused disturbances, had no frame of reference for this phenomenon.

"The stabilization failed, but yet the entropic overflow stopped instantly. This doesn't adhere to any known properties of a chaos breach," Yvonne murmured in confusion.

Micah seemed to have realized the same thing also, as he frowned, scanning the event horizon of the void's edge against their reality. He turned his head to Finn and Althea. "What exactly, did you two say, caused the initial—" He started to say, but cut himself off abruptly, snapping to alertness when a movement occured from the void.

Without a tremor or a sound, the void began to contract. It pulled back rapidly, starting from its newly-formed outer edge and rushing inward. The contraction this time was so fast — more than double the speed it had expanded at. The huge, circular void of nothingness shrunk to a tiny ball, right at the origin point of the chaos breach. And then, it simply vanished, taking what remained of the vertical tear with it.

It disappeared as if nothing at happened, leaving behind a complete, instantaneous silence, and a perfectly clean, circular gape in the world. An area tens of miles wide had simply been 'deleted' from existence. Within, there were no more humans, no more trees, no more debris, no soil, no wildlife, no… anything — nothing at all but a clean, perfectly smooth depression of bedrock. A part of Woodhaven town itself had been eaten clean, falling within the range of the Void's influence. Those sections had been entirely wiped of all life and matter, stilling the town into utter silence.

Micah and Yvonne descended slowly to the edges of the depression along with Finn and Althea.

For a whole minute, nothing was said. They could only look on wordlessly at the surreal and alien nature of the destruction that lay before them.

"Something big is about to happen to our world…" Micah eventually broke the silence with a grim whisper. "The world is about to change…" His words settled heavily in their minds, and they all mulled over it, unable to refute…

Until suddenly, their mulling was cut short by Micah snapping his head upward with a horrifying abruptness. His eyes widened in pure, unadulterated shock and terror. Yvonne, standing beside him, went rigid immediately, barely able to breathe.

Finn followed their gaze, as his own breath also froze in his chest without cause. High above the smooth, circular depression — so high that none of them had noticed it until this very moment — was a figure that defied comprehension. It was a dragon. Spanning the expanse of two full football fields, it was extremely massive, with scales the color of freshly shed blood, the wings that carried such a massive body spanned a distance that could eclipse a small town. It floated high above with an effortless, utterly dominant presence.

But it was not the dragon that froze him.

Perched regally upon the dragon's forehead stood a woman. From this distance, she was a tiny silhouette, yet her presence was unmistakably crushing. A natural oppression emanated from her very being, from her pure, absolute authority, multiple times more potent than the dragon's domineering aura. It filled Finn, and all three other Ossuarists with a primal, subconscious fear that rooted all four of them to the spot, Caretaker and Initiate alike.

"Don't move," Micah muttered with a voice that was barely a rasp, directed specifically at Finn and Althea, though none of them were capable of movement.

Finn's mind raced. That poise, that devastating, effortless beauty that was somehow visible even from this distance, and the terrifying, live, breathing, red-skinned dragon, twice the length of a full football field, staring down at them with vertical, menacing pupils... there was only one person who fit that description. The only Archon-ranked Arcanist in the whole of Aethelos. The absolute, divine monarch of their continental nation.

The Undying Flame. Monarch Supreme of the Aethelos Empire. The Queen herself.

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