At first, Sid thought it was just his vision.
The air shimmered, like heat rising from stone. But then the ground beneath him… folded. Not cracked, not split — folded, like parchment bent by unseen hands.
He stumbled, gripping the side of a ruined wall that dissolved under his touch. The stones bled into light, scattering like fireflies.
"Lucien!" His voice broke. "Tell me you see this—"
Lucien was already there, teeth clenched, one hand raised as his Timeglass Aegis flared. The golden shield of suspended sand whirled around him, but the grains weren't falling as they should. Some grains moved forward, others backwards, some froze in place entirely.
"I see it," Lucien hissed. His blade trembled in his other hand. "The world… it's coming apart."
A scream rose from the distance. But it wasn't a human scream. It was the shriek of a whole town as its buildings, its streets, its people, folded inward and vanished into a rift of white light. One heartbeat they existed, the next they were gone, replaced by fractured glass floating in the air like broken mirrors.
Reinhardt cursed violently, his voice hoarse. He slammed his axe into the earth as though anchoring himself. "This isn't war. This isn't magic. This is—" He stopped, his breath ragged. "…this is the skin of the world tearing."
Sid clutched his right arm, the fractured limb burning with both black and gold. The demonflame pulsed in rhythm with Aureon's light. Both fires pressed against him from the inside, each demanding to break free. His knees buckled.
Nox landed beside him in a rush of wings, feathers smoking. His eyes were grim. "Do not give in. The fractures feed on imbalance. If you lose control now, they will consume you first."
"I'm… trying," Sid gasped. The void shimmered at the edge of his vision. He blinked — and for a moment he wasn't there anymore.
He stood in a field of endless white. Aureon's presence was there, calm, burning like a star. But behind it, Ravh'Zereth's roar rattled the void like a storm clawing at its cage.
Choose, the god whispered.
Submit, the daemon growled.
Their voices overlapped until his skull throbbed. He clutched his head and fell to his knees.
"Sid!" Lucien's shout pulled him back. The white vanished. He was back on the fractured battlefield... but the ground had shifted beneath his feet.
The hill where Reinhardt stood was no longer there. Instead, it floated as a shard of earth suspended in air, separated from Sid by a gulf of nothingness. Reinhardt's figure was tiny in the distance, cursing and waving his axe.
"How...?!" Sid staggered backward. The gap yawned wider, sucking in rubble, corpses, even the air itself.
Lucien swore. "Hold on!" He struck the Timeglass Aegis into the ground. The sands erupted outward, forming a path of frozen seconds across the void. Sid and Nox stumbled onto it just as the last strip of soil crumbled away.
The three of them landed hard beside Reinhardt, the Aegis shattering behind them. Lucien fell to one knee, coughing blood. "I can't… keep doing this. Time itself resists me now."
Reinhardt grabbed him by the shoulder. "Then stop trying to fix the impossible, boy. Focus on what we can kill."
"Kill?" Nox snapped, feathers bristling. "This is not a foe. This is unraveling reality."
Sid's fractured arm flared again. Heat and cold surged together, twin agonies. He gasped, the pain forcing tears from his eyes. "It's… them. Aureon. Ravh'Zereth. They're...fighting...inside me. And the world feels it."
Lucien's eyes widened. "…you mean this is because of you?"
The words stabbed deeper than any blade. Sid flinched. His chest heaved. "I didn't ask for this!" His voice cracked, raw with guilt and fury. "I never wanted their chains, their fire...any of it!"
Silence hung heavy. The only sound was the groan of the world fracturing further.
Reinhardt finally broke it, his tone softer than Sid expected. "Boy… no soldier chooses the weapon put in his hands. He only chooses how to wield it."
Before Sid could reply, the sky itself shattered.
The sun split into three shards of light, each rotating in a different direction. The clouds twisted into spirals, then inverted, pulling rain upward into the void. From the fissures in the sky, shapes began to crawl through — vast silhouettes, too distant to see clearly, but each step they took made the air scream.
Nox's feathers flared with fire. "Avatars. Both sides are sending them through the cracks. Gods and demons alike."
Reinhardt spat. "Let them come. At least those, I can swing at."
But Sid's knees gave out. He dropped to the ground, clutching his burning arm. The pain no longer felt physical. It was in his blood, in his soul. He could feel Aureon's calm starfire and Ravh'Zereth's abyssal hunger pulling him apart.
You are mine, the demon's voice thundered.
You are chosen, the god's whisper followed.
Sid screamed, the sound ripping from his throat. The fractured arm blazed, light and darkness colliding.
The land around him cracked like glass. Whole mountains folded in half and collapsed into nothingness. The battlefield — once scarred but solid — was now an ocean of floating shards and collapsing fragments, each reflecting Sid's burning form at its center.
Lucien grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. "Sid! Look at me!"
"I...I can't..."
"Yes, you can!" Lucien's voice was fierce. "You think you're alone? You're not! Fight them, damn it, or we're all dead!"
Nox stepped closer, his voice cold but steady. "Balance. Do not choose now. Do not surrender to either fire. Hold both... until the moment comes."
Reinhardt lifted his axe, standing guard as one of the descending avatars drew closer, its wings blotting out the shattered suns. "No pressure, boy. Just hold reality together while we keep you alive."
Sid's vision swam. He tried to breathe, to focus, to pull the fires back into himself. The world screamed louder, threatening to tear completely apart.
And in the heart of that chaos, Sid realized something terrifying.
This wasn't the world breaking around him.
It was himself breaking — and reality was only mirroring his fracture.