Reality tore like cloth.
A jagged line of pure brilliance slashed across the sky, widening, crackling, spilling mory-light into the world like a broken sun. Buildings warped. Asphalt curled upward. Street signs flickered through older versions of themselves—rusted, new, shattered—cycling between decades in seconds.
The air humd with collapsing ti.
The creature lunged.
Lira planted her palms forward, unleashing a shockwave of raw mory-force. The blast hit the doppelganger square in the chest, halting it mid-air for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Long enough.
“Damon, GO!” she scread.
But Damon didn’t run.
He sprinted toward her.
Shadow threw himself between them and the creature’s snapping, twisting jaws. Ember limped to Lira’s side, growling through the pain.
The doppelganger slid back several feet across the broken street, claws gouging molten grooves into the asphalt. Damon could see its inner core flickering violently—too many identities battling under its unstable skin.
Faces—hundreds—pressed from beneath its surface. So human. So not. All screaming to be real.
“Lira! Whatever you’re doing—keep doing it!” Damon shouted.
“I’m not doing anything!” she yelled over the rising screeching sky. “It’s splitting us off from it!”
The fracture in the sky widened enough for a gust of impossible wind to roar downward. Damon staggered, shielding Lira as she hunched over, clutching her head.
“It’s trying to create a separate space,” she gasped. “A pocket—a mirror world—to finish stabilizing!”
Damon’s heart sank.
“So it can beco sothing permanent.”
Lira nodded, trembling. “And if it succeeds, that thing will rewrite everything. Not just here—everywhere.”
The doppelganger rose slowly, its spine lengthening, its mouth distorting into a jagged mockery of Damon’s voice as it spoke:
“Co... with ... and I will be whole.”
It extended a clawed, shaking hand.
Damon stepped forward, jaw tight. “I’m not giving you anything.”
The creature’s many eyes dilated.
“Wrong.”
The fracture above shuddered, and suddenly gravity twisted—pulling up. Cars, rubble, ash all lifted toward the widening split in the sky.
Shadow dug his claws into the ground. Ember leaned against Lira to keep her anchored. Damon grabbed Lira’s wrist just as her feet began to slide off the ground.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
The creature didn’t resist the pull.
It embraced it.
Its skin peeled away into strands of mory-light, wrapping upward like ribbons into the fracture. It was trying to drag them with it.
Lira’s glow flickered dangerously. “Damon—if it gets into that rift, it’ll absorb everything I am. Everything I was. Everything I could be. It’ll beco unstoppable.”
Damon gritted his teeth. “Not happening.”
He pulled her close, bracing them against a piece of uprooted concrete.
The creature lunged again—this ti propelled by the upward pull of the fracture, streaking toward them like a teor of writhing identities.
Shadow jumped.
Ember followed.
Both slamd into the creature mid-air, spinning it before it could reach Damon and Lira.
The wolves tumbled with it, all three being lifted toward the sky.
“SHADOW! EMBER!” Damon scread.
The creature twisted, slashing wildly, trying to throw them off.
Lira reached out with a trembling, glowing hand.
“I can save them— but Damon... if I do, you’ll have to face it alone.”
Damon looked from the wolves... to the creature... to the shattering sky above.
He made his choice.
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