From the wound in space, the eyes receded like breath held in reverence. Then, in their place, tentacles emerged—not in the way flesh moves, but how influence swarm unfazed.
Each one slithered silently, weaving into the air with impossible grace. Their surfaces shimmered like rivers of starlight, threaded with runes that pulsed with alien rhythm.
They didn't reach toward Kivas. They reached around her—anchoring themselves to the empty space, stitching themselves to the seams of time, pulling on the reality that held her.
With each movement, the world around her folded, pressed, shivered.
The living soil beneath her disintegrated into cascading glyphs. The void stretched thin, warped, and then unraveled like fabric pulled from every corner at once.
Gravity spun. Space buckled. The planar axis tilted and melted.
Kivas felt her soul lurch. Her breath fled her lungs.
There was no sound.
Then everything cracked.
She fell through the breach.
When sensation returned, she found herself standing at the heart of a ritual circle traced in burning celestial threads.
Glyphs rotated above her, vast and alive, flickering in perfect synchronicity like the ticking gears of a divine machine.
The plane around her shimmered like oil on water.
"Ah... ah..."
Above her stretched an astral sky, veined with auroras that danced and fractured like glass under pressure. The ground pulsed with shifting geometries, as though it too were breathing in tandem with some unknowable rhythm.
And then, she saw them.
Three titanic entities.
Each one towered over the horizon, so immense that their features couldn't be understood at once. They stood at the edges of the world, forming a perfect triangle around the ritual site.
Their wings spanned the breadth of galaxies—pulsating, iridescent, and densely packed with eyes. Countless, unfading, moving independently, blinking in irregular harmony. Each eye carried the weight of a sun and the silence of a dying star, all watched her without motive or expression.
The wings shimmered as if stitched from fragments of fate itself.
"Haaa..."
The titans chanted.
Voices older than meaning spilled from their unformed mouths. The words clashed with the rules of language, overlapping, slipping, reversing, pulling apart comprehension and sewing it back together with crooked threads.
The sound reached into her bones.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't even in the form of noise.
It was a pressure that could erase existence.
Like the weight of all lost time pressed into a single condensed syllable—repeating, repeating, repeating.
Kivas dropped to her knees.
Her vision fractured into spirals. She tried to scream, but the pain outpaced her lungs. Her thoughts crumbled. Every heartbeat echoed like a hammer against glass.
Her soul thrashed, not out of intentional rebellion, but instinct.
The ritual was burning her and staking her to the ground
It was never made for something small. Something human.
"Stop—!"
She screamed into the sky, or at least she thought she did. The words didn't leave her lips. They left her essence, vibrating through the formation like a pulse of raw emotion.
"Stop it! It hurts—!"
There were no tears. Only the unraveling of self. Her soul, already brittle, cracked wide. Memories surged outward—screaming neon, silent laughter, warmth in arms that never existed. Regret bloomed like fire.
A pain so abstract yet familiar.
"I never asked for this—!"
The ritual's light flickered to her plea.
The chanting staggered in response.
The three titans paused.
Kivas fell to her side, gasping, her body spasming with leftover convulsions.
The pressure lifted—not completely, but enough for her to breathe without drowning in it.
And then.
A sound.
Soft. Gentle.
The same voices. But this time, they spoke her language.
"You are heard."
The words rippled across the plane like silk.
"You are felt."
Kivas breath hitched.
"You are acknowledged."
The words reached not her ears, but her soul. For the first time in the eternity since her death, she felt real.
One of the titans leaned forward—if it could be called that. It was like a planet bowing.
The eyes on its wings blinked in perfect sequence.
"Where… where am I?" Kivas whispered.
"World Forgery," the voice replied.
Kivas tried to sit up, clutching her sides, her skin still raw with aftershock, melting and trying to form back a comprehensive shape. "What… is that?"
"A plane for sculpting the unborn," the voices answered as one. "Where all that has never existed is dreamed into shape."
Her fingers trembled. "And… you three? Who are you?"
A moment of silence passed. The eyes blinked in overlapping cascades.
"To know us personally," said the nearest, "is to unmake your soul. It is not wise of us to reveal, when the result will be catastrophic to you."
"Then what is the safest image that I can have for the three of you?" she asked instead, her voice trembling. "What do you want from me?"
"We are forgers of what lies beyond origin," they spoke. "We have retrieved your essence to study its singularity. Creation seeks a mother to mirror, with greed. Your echo has been shaped many folds, shaped many folds, and possess unfiltered purity.
"We seek to understand… and to reflect."
Kivas stared, barely blinking. "So I'm a… reference. To this whole, forgery thing?"
"You are a resonance," they answered. "An anomaly that endures. A splinter of mortal cognition that has retained cohesion where countless others have failed."
She laughed weakly, bitterly. "So I'm finally useful for something."
"There is no greater truth than the act of reflection," they replied. "From your memory, we have already constructed ten thousand iterations of silence. From your sorrow, the blue of the void has gained new shades."
"Does this… matter?" she asked. "Does my existence hold any meaning now?"
They pulsed with a low hum—something close to affirmation.
"More than you understand," one of them said. "We have gained much from the mere act of gazing upon you."
She wanted to feel pride. She really did.
But all she felt was the faint echo of fatigue still clinging to her heart.
"Then is there anything here… for me?" she asked.
A silence fell.
No metaphors. No riddles.
"Nothing."
Her heart didn't sink. It had already sunken long ago. The answer didn't even sting.
But then.
One of the titans moved, just slightly, folding its wings in a spiral. A moment of weightless pause.
"You remained intact," it said. "You remembered when no others could. Most dissolve. You did not."
The voices hummed again.
"Would you like something in return?"