Lord of the Foresaken

The battlefield buckled, then shattered.

Streets of broken stone, towers of smoke, rivers of blood—all of it dissolved into pale fragments that drifted upward like burning ash. The blank page beneath Lio's feet twisted and tore, birthing new lines of script that clawed into the air.

The doppelgängers came with it.

They rose from fissures in the page, crawling on all fours before standing upright, each one wearing his face. Dozens. Hundreds. Their hollow eyes glowed with fire-etched sentences:

Lio belongs to silence.

Lio is already theirs.

Lio never existed.

The whispers came not from mouths but from the lines carved across their skin. Every word cut into his bones. Every syllable throbbed in his skull like a hammer.

He lunged forward with a roar, smashing his fist into the chest of the nearest duplicate. Its body split apart—not blood, not bone, but jagged letters that spiraled into dust. The ashes clung to his skin, burning into fresh scars.

But before he could catch his breath, two more rose from the cracks, sentences forming their spines. They lunged, claws slashing across his arm.

Agony tore through him. Not pain of flesh, but pain of memory. His vision blurred. For a moment, he forgot what his father's voice had sounded like. He reached for it and found nothing.

"Damn it!" Lio staggered, punching again, shattering another.

But they kept coming. For every one destroyed, two replaced it. The battlefield became a tide of himself—a hundred hollow Li­os marching forward with mechanical inevitability.

Above him, Shia's fragmented light floated dimly, her shards like dying stars. Her fractured voice whispered across the chaos:

"You left a page blank. Don't let them finish writing it."

He clung to those words, forcing fire into his chest. He screamed against the tide:

"I am Lio. I choose to fight!"

Flame exploded across his skin. His body glowed like a torch, burning the sentences that tried to overwrite him. His duplicates staggered back, blistering in the heat. For the first time, they hesitated.

But then the ground shook. A deeper tremor cracked the page. The swarm froze mid-step, their hollow faces tilting upward in perfect unison.

The battlefield quaked.

Something else was opening.

Far across the dimensional frontier, in a void beyond human reach, space tore open.

The Second Fissure was nothing like the first. The rupture split not only air, not only matter, but continuity itself.

Stars stuttered in the sky. Constellations bent into new patterns. Time slowed, sped up, then collapsed into stillness. A comet froze mid-arc, locked between arriving and leaving.

The fissure spread—two hundred kilometers of silent wound, a black gash carved into narrative itself.

From its heart, three shadows stepped forward.

They were not bodies. Not silhouettes. They were absences given weight. Outlines drawn by the subtraction of form, each step moving in every direction at once.

When their feet touched the void, distance collapsed. Planets in distant orbit shifted course. An asteroid belt twisted itself into a spiral. Entire timelines bent like reeds in the wind.

Three Narrativeless emerged, walking without destination.

And everywhere they walked, cause and effect trembled.

In the Consensus Room, alarms detonated across the table, flooding the minds of every council member.

Dr. Okafor screamed as the Causality Analysis Engine overloaded. Screens filled with gibberish, numbers rewriting themselves mid-calculation.

"Another fissure—!" she gasped. "Not Geneva. Out on the frontier. Coordinates collapsing. It's birthing three of them!"

Chairman Voss's face drained of color. "Three?"

Her voice trembled. "Yes. They… they walk without destination."

General Morrison slammed a fist onto the table, his projection flickering with rage. "Then we don't give them time to reach one. Launch everything! Scramblers, artillery, pulse-bombs—"

"Don't you get it?!" Dr. Tanaka snapped. Her hologram shook with static. "If they move without destination, your attack never arrives. How do you strike something that ignores distance?"

Silence filled the chamber, worse than alarms.

And then Lyralei's tethered voice echoed faintly, bleeding through from Lio's battlefield.

"It is not where they walk that matters," she said. "It is that they no longer need to."

On the frontier, chaos erupted.

Evacuation transports froze in mid-air. Engines still thundered, rotors still spun, but the crafts hung like pinned insects in the sky.

Then the pilots forgot.

They unbuckled their restraints, opened the hatches, and stepped calmly into nothingness. No screams. No hesitation. Their purpose had been deleted.

Monitoring stations went dark one after another. Recordings erased themselves, leaving only blank files. Soldiers shouted, but the sound vanished before leaving their lips.

Dr. Okafor whispered in horror: "Every blank they create, they fill. Every erased memory becomes narrative fuel. They are… rewriting us."

Back in the battlefield, Lio felt it.

The fissure's second wound pressed against his prison, its weight sinking into his bones. The duplicates bowed low, their voices rising as one:

The Second Fissure opens.

Three come walking.

The page is theirs.

Lio looked upward.

The white sky cracked open, revealing the second fissure overhead. Through it, the three shadows moved—not closer, not farther, simply present. Their formless recognition pressed down on him like gravity.

His knees buckled. His flame sputtered.

The duplicates surged again, claws digging into his arms, shoulders, legs. They dragged him upward, toward the fissure.

"No!" he roared, thrashing against them. He smashed one apart with a burning punch, only for two more to clamp onto him. Their claws pierced deep, not into flesh, but into memory.

His vision blurred. He tried to recall his sister's name. It was gone.

Shia's broken shard flared faintly, her fractured eye blazing one last time.

"Lio—don't let them write you! If you go now, you are not the bridge. You are the book!"

Her light cracked, splitting into a rain of dying sparks.

Lio strained against the duplicates, fire searing his veins. He shouted into the void, voice raw with fury:

"I am Lio! I write my own page!"

The sky itself shuddered at his defiance. For an instant, the fissure faltered, its wound twitching. His duplicates screamed as some crumbled into ash.

But the three shadows leaned closer. Their weight crushed his words into silence. His declaration warped, rewritten mid-sentence:

"I am theirs."

His blood ran cold. It hadn't been his thought. It had been theirs.

The chant from his duplicates grew louder, drowning everything else:

The page is written.

The bridge is chosen.

The Second Fissure consumes.

The fissure widened, its edges burning with alien script. The three shadows reached for him—not hands, not claws, but inevitabilities dragging him upward.

Shia's last shard burst beside him, her voice a scream of fractured light:

"Lio! If they claim you now, the book ends!"

Her shard shattered.

The battlefield convulsed, the fissure tearing wider. His fire guttered. His body rose into the wound.

And just before the shadows closed around him, something stirred inside his chest.

Not Lyralei's tether. Not Shia's fragment.

A blank page.

A page he had left unwritten.

It whispered with dangerous clarity:

"What if the bridge writes back?"

The fissure screamed. The duplicates howled.

And Lio was dragged into the Second Fissure.